Swimmer Lia Thomas has sued swimming’s governing body for discrimination because it has barred her from competing as a trans woman in elite women’s swimming events.
Thomas made national headlines as a college student when she began to compete in NCAA women’s swimming events, eventually winning a national title in 500-yard freestyle.
The question of trans girls and women in sports is one that has divided even progressive people who generally support trans rights because of the supposed advantage trans girls and women bring to competition. We don’t really have much research-based evidence to say definitively that trans women have a disproportionate advantage in sports. Right now, we’re mostly working out of our deeply-held and rather largely unexamined assumptions about biology and gender.
The problem for Thomas and other trans women athletes is not trans bodies but rather the way we gender-segregate sports (For more about gender-segregation and sports history, see the piece I wrote for Ms. magazine).
Gender-Segregated Sports Help Maintain Men’s Dominance
As someone who went through male puberty, Thomas has developed height and muscular advantage in her sport. All elite athletes, however, have physical advantages that they develop to their fullest to compete at the highest levels. Try though I might, at 5’ 4” I could never play power forward in the WNBA. I don’t have the musculature to high jump or run fast. In fact, the vast majority of us don’t have the physical attributes that would allow us to be elite athletes no matter how much we practiced or how hard we tried.
The question, though, is why ideas about biological sex are the dividing line for sports. The truth is we can’t even define biological sex all that well. Just ask Caster Semenya, the intersex South African runner who was banned from her race because the IAAF deemed her testosterone levels too high.
We don’t gender-segregate because women can’t compete with men. Rather, we create sports that play to men’s typical strengths (football, for example) and value them over sports in which women are more likely to excel (balance beam). We then use this as proof that men are better at sports, and so men and women couldn’t possibly compete together.
In other words, we use sports to maintain the illusion that men and women are more different than they are alike. This reinforces a whole world outside of sport that values men over women and questions women’s abilities to lead and succeed.
We do a lot of things to maintain the illusion of difference. Think about it for a minute. If women cut their hair the same way as men, wore “men’s” clothes, and didn’t shave their legs and underarms, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows, they wouldn’t look nearly as different from men as they do.
We have to tell ourselves that gender makes us fundamentally so very different that we can justify entire social structures that give men dominance over women. Otherwise, why would we have gender-segregated bowling?
I’m not saying there are no biological differences generally speaking between men and women. I’m saying that societies elevate these differences, build institutions like sports on them, and then use them to justify men’s dominance over women.
So the gender-segregation of sports is not only about bodies; it’s also about the money, and, as we know, money is power. The current gender-segregation of sports ensures men athletes, on the whole, earn more money than women. Just compare NBA and WNBA salaries, or notice how only seven women are in the top 100 NIL valuations.
Transgender and non-binary people also disrupt these notions of inherent, biological, irreconcilable gender differences because they don’t fit in these distinct categories of women and men.
What does all of this have to do with Lia Thomas?
Right now, the sports world (and a lot of the rest of society) has made Thomas’ body the problem for her to compete in women’s swimming. That prevents us from having to ask the more fundamental question about how we’ve created sports as separate domains for women and men and reinforced that division to the point we assume there’s something inherent and unchangeable about gender-segregated sports.
What if we imagined sports in other ways? What if instead of focusing on gender as the dividing line we used other physical traits? Wrestling already does this. People who weigh 120 pounds don’t wrestle against people who weigh 200 pounds. What if we imagined dividing competition along lines of body size?
What if we rethought team sports so women and men play together? We already have mixed doubles in tennis and pickleball.
What if we created new sports that started with all kinds of bodies playing together, drawing on various kinds of strengths diverse athletic bodies could bring to some new game?
These, of course, are long term questions that don’t address the issue of Lia Thomas’ place in competition right now. The courts will decide that
Thomas, however, should give us pause to think about the nature of sports themselves, how they’re constructed, why, and to whose advantage.
