Australian Olympic gold medallist Emily Seebohm has voiced concerns about the lack of fairness in competitive sports where transgender athletes are allowed to play against female-born athletes, saying that she “wouldn’t even place” if she competed in the male’s category.
The 29-year-old revealed on Thursday that she shared the same opinion as swimmer Emma McKeon, Australia’s most decorated Olympian, who declared on Tuesday that she “wouldn’t want to be racing against someone who is biologically a male.”
Seebohm, who won three Olympic gold medals and five world championship gold medals, noted that she wants to compete on the “same field” where “everyone has that same ability of strength, has that same ability of speed, has that same ability of power.”
In fact, a “level playing field” needs to be a priority, the 29-year-old argued, explaining that swimmers “want to be able to swim and the races be neck and neck because we are even.”
“We don’t want people winning by 10, eight seconds,” she added.
“If I was swimming in a male event I wouldn’t even place, I wouldn’t have got a medal in Tokyo, and a male who came eighth in Tokyo in the same event as me would have won the event by about five or six seconds, so there’s the difference we’re talking about.”
While everyone should be able to be involved in swimming, “we need to keep this sport as fair as possible,” she said.
“The sport has to think about how to handle it and how to deal with it because you do want to be inclusive, but you don’t want to have females racing against swimmers who are biologically male because it’s just not fair,” she told Griffith University’s A Better Future For All forum on Tuesday.
While an increasing number of large sporting organisations inside and outside Australia have permitted trans-identified male-born athletes to compete in women’s categories, pushbacks against the move have also been growing.
With Australia’s federal election being one month away, the transgender debate is becoming a prominent election issue as both leaders from two major parties were pressed on the topic.
“That’s covered by the Sex Discrimination Act,” he said. According to section 42 of the Act, sporting organisations are allowed to exclude people from any competitive sporting activity on the basis of “sex, gender identity or intersex status in which the strength, stamina or physique of competitors was relevant.”
Later, Albanese added he believed “girls should be able to play sport against girls and boys should be able to play sport against boys.”
