Australian Olympic champion Ian Thorpe has criticised the international swimming body FINA’s decision to bar male-to-female transgender athletes from elite female competitions.
The athlete, who previously advocated for same-sex marriage in Australia, said it was a “very complicated issue” and that he was “personally opposed to the position FINA has taken on this.”
“I am for fairness in sport, but I’m also for equality in sport. And in this instance, they’ve actually got it wrong,” he told reporters.
Thorpe, who won five gold medals at the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Olympic Games, argued that it’s “highly unlikely” that someone who’s gone through gender-reassignment surgeries would “ever be able to win an Olympic gold medal.”“When it comes to the elite level, there needs to be a sensible conversation which includes endocrinologists, psychologists, physiologists—everyone that actually may have an opinion in this space.”
Physical Differences Between Males And Females ‘Substantial’
Under a new ruling issued on June 19, FINA said only biological male swimmers who have not experienced puberty or had it suppressed before age 12 were eligible to participate in women’s events.They were also required to continuously maintain their “testosterone levels in serum (or plasma) below 2.5 mol/L.”
About 71 percent of FINA’s 152 members voted in favour of the new rule.
“By 14 years or older, the difference between boys and girls is substantial. That’s due to the advantages experienced due to the physiological adaptations in testosterone and the possession of the Y chromosome,” said Wisconsin-based physiologist expert Sandra Hunter.
“Some of these physical advantages are structural in origin such as height, limb length, heart size, lung size, and they will be retained, even with the suppression or reduction of testosterone that occurs in the transition from male to female.”
FINA’s ruling was welcomed by some Australian Olympic stars, including Tokyo gold medallists Cate Campbell and Emily Seebohm, who previously said transgender athletes’ participation would result in unfairness on the playing field.
“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,” Seebohm, a longtime backstroke star, told the Today show in April.The FINA policy came after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who identified as female, became the first trans-NCAA champion in the history of the women’s Division 1 event after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle.
The FINA rule for trans swimmers would prevent Thomas from joining the U.S. national swimming team.
AAP and Jack Phillips contributed to this article.
