Swim England updates transgender and non-binary competition policy (2024)

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Swim England updates transgender and non-binary competition policy? ›

All of Swim England's disciplines – swimming, artistic swimming, diving and water polo – will see a new 'open' category introduced, which will be for athletes with a birth sex of male, trans or non-binary competitors. Only athletes who have declared a birth sex of female will compete in the 'female' category.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS, says transgender women can compete in World Aquatic events under two conditions: they did not experience male puberty or their male puberty was suppressed before age 12, and their testosterone levels are consistently below 2.5nmol/L.

The Equality Act 2010 officially adds "gender reassignment" as a "protected characteristic", stating: "A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex ...

With Wednesday's ruling in place, she will be unable to participate in this month's qualifying trials to compete in the Olympics. Under rules established in 2022, World Aquatics banned transgender women who have been through male puberty from competing in women's races.

The new category will be open for “all sex and gender identities” and will include 50m and 100m races across all strokes. “ “This pioneering pilot project highlights the organisation's unwavering commitment to inclusivity,” a statement from World Aquatics read.

The vote by FINA, which administers international competitions in water sports, prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later.

As a swimmer on the women's team, Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022.

The word cisgender (often shortened to cis; sometimes cissexual) describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not transgender.

Hilary Cass, a consultant pediatrician and former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, led the independent review and said that there was insufficient long-term evidence of what happens to youth who are prescribed puberty blockers.

If a trans employee has been diagnosed with a condition such as gender dysphoria, then they may also be protected by the disability discrimination provisions of the Act, as long as the other criteria for a disability have been met. Please see our specific page on disability discrimination for more information.

Which sports are gender neutral in Olympics? ›

For the first time in Olympic history, women athletes will have as many places in the Games as male athletes. This 50:50 allocation means the Paris 2024 Olympic Games this summer will be the first Olympics ever to achieve full gender parity – equal representation for both women and men – on the field of play.

To be eligible for participation in girls' sports, a transgender girl must have completed one year of hormone therapy or provide medical evidence that she does not possess physical (bone structure, muscle mass, testosterone, hormonal, etc.) or physiological advantages.

There have been 16 modern Olympic athletes widely known to have an intersex (disorders/differences of sex development) condition. The 1932 Summer Olympics was the first instance of an athlete now known to be intersex competing, also winning a medal.

It lays out two requirements for trans women who are members of USA Swimming: The concentration of testosterone in their blood must be less than 5 nanomoles per liter continuously for at least 36 months before they apply to compete, and they must provide evidence that going through puberty as their sex assigned at ...

But, in early December, at the Zippy Invitational, in Akron, Ohio, Thomas dropped another second off her time in the five-hundred-yard freestyle, and nearly a second and a half off her time in the two-hundred-yard race. She won the sixteen-hundred-and-fifty-yard freestyle by thirty-eight seconds.

FINA's decision – which is the strictest ruling from an Olympic sports body – states that male-to-female transgender athletes are eligible to compete, only if “they can establish to FINA's comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 [which marks the start of ...

In June 2023, World Aquatics announced it would start an “Open” category that includes all transgender athletes. Several sporting governing bodies - including in cycling and athletics - have also banned transgender athletes from elite female competition over the past two years.