The decision on Sunday by FINA, swimming’s world governing body, to bar those who have experienced male puberty from elite female competition, is good news for fairness in sport, and for women’s rights. It is also, though this may seem less obvious, good news for trans people.
The backdrop to FINA’s ruling, based on consultation with scientists and medical experts, is one of bitter controversy — a controversy dramatised by the sight of US trans woman swimmer Lia Thomas towering over the biologically female competitors she beat in women’s college events.
The decision will prohibit such unfairness in future elite swimming competitions. It also sets a potential precedent for other sporting governing bodies: especially important now, given the International Olympic Committee’s (somewhat craven) decision in November to ditch its existing policy on trans inclusion, mostly based on testosterone levels, and to delegate the matter to the global organisations responsible for individual sports.
Last week, a survey of 5,000 people by More in Common suggested that FINA’s decision is closely in line with UK public opinion. The poll found only 19 percent of respondents agreed that “trans women should be able to participate in women-only sporting events”: a common-sense position, given the advantages that post-puberty trans women athletes retain, even after hormone treatment, such as greater breathing capacity, muscle density, larger heart and lungs, and skeletal differences.
On the hotly-contested question of single-sex spaces: the More in Common survey found support for trans women using female changing rooms doubled when it was specified that they had undergone gender reassignment surgery, from 24 per cent to 48 per cent; and from 29 per cent to 53 per cent in the case of toilets.
Crucially, the poll does not support the notion that Britons are rampantly transphobic, indicating instead that the weight of public opinion on gender and sex is much more relaxed and nuanced than the polarised debate on campuses and on social media would suggest.
In recent years, much of the discussion about trans rights and same-sex spaces has barely been worthy of the name. Women who do not capitulate to every detail of the trans activist agenda are hounded — witness the absurd vilification of J.K. Rowling — deplatformed, or, as in the case of the former Sussex University academic Kathleen Stock, driven from their jobs. In Manchester city centre last month, we saw male-bodied bullies dressed in Squid Game balaclavas, intimidating women near a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, around which they charmingly placed a noose in trans colours. The notion that the interests of trans people are in any way advanced by such actions is risible.
The FINA decision and the More in Common poll indicate a potential way forward. Clearly, the dignity and wellbeing of trans people should be respected — and backed up by resources so that young people questioning their gender identity have access to the compassionate exploratory therapy they require; and adults who proceed with medical interventions do not have to wait for years to receive the treatment they choose.
On the vexed question of preferred pronouns: appealing to common courtesy — the respectful practice of referring to people as they wish to be referred — is much likelier to succeed as a civic strategy than puritanical speech codes.
The militant trans activist agenda was doomed before it started, because it has always failed to recognise the core reality of a pluralist society: namely, that there will always be values that require arbitration, and conflicts of rights that need to be addressed. The foot-stamping use of words such as “genocidal” to describe society’s failure to comply with every detail of this agenda is an insult to those groups that have actually undergone such murderous treatment.
In any case, the 2010 Equality Act makes clear provision for single-sex spaces. A plan for compassionate co-existence would include: open categories in elite sports for trans athletes; unisex facilities in addition to male and female changing-rooms and toilets; special provision for trans survivors of domestic violence and rape; and so on.
Rancour, ideology and Twitter-driven polarisation have got us nowhere. The rights of trans people have not been advanced by this nonsense. The last week has shown us there is another way.
