The Swimming World Cup has decided to scrap its plans to host an open-category event for transgender swimmers after no one signed up for it.
The event was to serve as a compromise after World Aquatice voted to ban male swimmers from competing in elite female events in 2022. The plan was to offer trans competitors the ability to compete against other trans swimmers in the 50m and 100m events across all strokes.
However, with the Swimming World Cup only three days away, it appears there are no takers.
Trans athletes began infiltrating the world of sports in general and the world of swimming in particular, on a national scale when former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas began identifying as a female and competed on the UPenn women’s team as Lia Thomas. A thoroughly mediocre swimmer on the men’s side who never rose above the rank of 472 among Division I male collegiate swimmers, Thomas immediately began winning Ivy League swimming races and titles after joining the women’s team.
Eventually, Thomas won an NCAA championship.
Transgender woman Lia Thomas (L) of the University of Pennsylvania stands on the podium after winning the 500-yard freestyle as other medalists (L-R) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan, and Brooke Forde pose for a photo at the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship on March 17, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)
The meteoric rise of an average male swimmer who defeated female Olympic and Olympic-caliber swimmers with ease sparked national outrage and an international movement to prevent males from dominating female athletes in their respective sports.
In addition to World Aquatics, both the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world’s cycling governing body, and World Athletics, the world’s track & field governing body, have banned trans competitors from women’s events this year.
Undeterred by the lack of entries, World Aquatics plans to continue with the open-category solution and look for other ways to accommodate trans athletes.
“The World Aquatics open category working group will continue its work and engagement with the aquatics community on open category events,” the organization said in a statement.
“Even if there is no current demand at the elite level, the working group is planning to look at the possibility of including open category races at Masters events in the future.”
View from an Olympic sport diving board at an indoor swimming pool with clear transparent blue water. (Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Such a move is unlikely to provide a different result.
Trans athletes bent on making a political statement will likely fail to see an open category as the type of political validation they seek for their cause. As for the trans athletes who want to compete in the women’s category because they want to win, well, they’re not going to be doing nearly as much winning when they’re swimming against people of their own gender.
Due to those factors, the no-show by trans athletes at the Swimming World Cup – even after a specific category was opened for them – is revealing because it shows the trans athlete movement has nothing to do with access to sporting events and everything to do with political agendas and/or giving male-born athletes a chance to reach heights of athletic achievement they would otherwise have not attained.
The Swimming World Cup is set to take place in Berlin, Germany, on October 6-8.