This week, World Aquatics – the governing body for competitive swimming – made a major change to its policy regarding transgender athletes, but not everybody is happy with the move.
World Aquatics announced on Friday that it will be introducing a new open category for transgender athletes at a World Cup event in Berlin. The new category will be open for “all sex and gender identities” and will include 50m and 100m races across all strokes, providing a dedicated space for transgender athletes to compete.
The problem is, transgender athletes were not fighting for their own category, they were fighting for inclusion within the existing categories.
Athlete Ally, an advocacy group that works to end homophobia and transphobia in sports, was not happy about the announcement, comparing it to the United States’ now-illegal “separate but equal” policies.
“As a society, we decided long ago that ‘separate but equal’ is dangerous and damaging. This policy does nothing to provide the kind of protections to women athletes that they have been calling for for decades — an end to sexual harassment and abuse, parity in pay and leadership, equal opportunities, and a lack of resources for women athletes,” Athlete Ally said in a statement to CNN.
“Instead, this only increases hostile gender norms and invasive testing that hurt all women athletes.”
World Aquatics likely hoped that this would solve the debate, but it seems it just created more controversy.
