Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has lost her legal case against World Aquatics and any hopes of making next month’s Paris Olympics

The US swimmer Lia Thomas, who rose to global prominence after becoming the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA college title in March 2022, has lost a legal case against World Aquatics at the court of arbitration for sport – and with it any hopes of making next month’s Paris Olympics.

The 25-year-old also remains barred from swimming in the female category after failing to overturn rules introduced by swimming’s governing body in the summer of 2022, which prohibit anyone who has undergone “any part of male puberty” from the female category.

Thomas had argued that those rules should be declared “invalid and unlawful” as they were contrary to the Olympic charter and the World Aquatics constitution.

However, in a 24-page decision, the court concluded that Thomas was “simply not entitled to engage with eligibility to compete in WA competitions” as someone who was no longer a member of US swimming.

The news was welcomed by World Aquatics, who hailed it as “a major step forward in our efforts to protect women’s sport”.

  • @SchmidtGenetics
    4•6 months ago

    Please read the entire thing. You would see how it was on topic if you did, that’s how I know you haven’t.

    Sometime in the early 2000’s Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini conducted a very intriguing field study in an elementary school in Israel [1]. The participants were prepuberty140 children, 75 boys and 65 girls, all in the fourth grade between 9–10 years of age. The researchers studied the performance of the children in a race alone over a short distance of 40 meters (~131 feet) with the teacher measuring their speed. Girls and boys ran on average at the same speed. Then the majority of the children ran a second time with the teacher matching the children in pairs, starting with the two fastest children in the race going down the list independent of gender. Each pair ran on the same track, with the two children running alongside this time. Now, the boys improved while the girls ran slower. In eight mixed-pair races of 11 observations (73%) in which boys were slower than the girls initially, they beat the competition in the head-on second stage. In the remaining 18 mixed-pair races, where the girls had a worse time in the first round, only three girls won the competition (17%). To combat experimental threats, the researchers wisely kept a separate group of children as controls who ran alone in round two as well. This group, yet again showed no gender differences in speed and thus dispelled alternative explanations such as girls getting tired faster than boys. Based on the results, Gneezy and Rustichini concluded “Overall, we find support for the claim that competition increases the performance of males relative to females…This indicates that some strong, robust, and general factors are involved.” They then raised further: “The puzzle that remains concerns the more subtle effects of competition in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups.” (p. 380).