Swimming's world governing body's decision to effectively ban transgender athletes from women's competitions sets a worrying precedent for other sports groups to follow, advocates and researchers say.
FINA's decision, the strictest by any Olympic sports body, was made during its extraordinary general congress after members heard a report from a transgender taskforce comprising leading medical, legal and sports figures.
Under , only male-to-female athletes who transitioned before age 12 may compete in women's swimming events.
FINA also proposed an "open competition category" with a task force to examine in the next six months just how to create such a category, despite it acknowledging that there were currently no transgender women competing at elite levels of swimming.
Christine Granger, the CEO of Proud2Play which promotes inclusion in sports, labelled it a "disappointing" move that "sets a precedent for other sports to follow in creating exclusionary practices".
"The impact of this decision on the health, wellbeing and dignity of these athletes is extensive and the wider impact that this decision will have on the trans community is substantial," Ms Granger said in a statement.
She warned that while the policy only applies to elite-level competitions, there could be a trickle-down effect.
"Whilst this is an elite policy, the impact trickles down to community level where we as an organisation, we work on a daily basis to support members of the community to participate in sport as their true selves, and to enjoy the benefits that being involved in community sport brings," she said.
"Whilst there are many people who want to be inclusive, we all too often see community clubs and leagues implementing elite policy at a community level which causes a high level of trauma to those involved."
Equality Australia called on FINA to review the policy, saying it sets a "dangerous precedent" for other sporting bodies to follow.
“The fact is that women’s bodies – like all human bodies – are diverse. For a powerful international sporting body such as FINA to determine that only a particular type of woman can compete against other women sets a dangerous precedent," Trans Equality Advocate at Equality Australia, Jackie Turner, said in a statement.
She said FINA should be fully transparent about the evidence it relied upon and who was involved in the decision-making process.
Swimming Australia was among the 152 national swimming federations with FINA voting rights to support the restriction. The mandate was passed with 71.5 per cent support.
Australian Olympic gold medallist and former 100 metres freestyle world record holder, Cate Campbell, addressed the FINA congress before the vote.
Campbell said the policy "pays attention to inclusion, but prioritises fairness." "Ultimately this is not about winners and losers," she said.
"It is about investigating and developing a policy which accurately represents the science and draws a line to protect the fairness of the female category distinction in elite sport."
But advocates for transgender inclusion argue that not enough studies have yet been done on the impact of transition on physical performance, and that elite athletes are often physical outliers in any case.
Principal research fellow in endocrinology at the University of Melbourne and lead of the trans health research group, Associate Professor Ada Cheung — who said the decision sets a "concerning" precedent — also holds this view.
"Transgender health research has been taboo for so many years ... there's very little research in transgender health overall and pretty much zero research into trans athletes," she said.
She said there was "no doubt" biological males were different from biological females, which is why many sporting competitions are segregated competition. But it wasn't fair to say with certainty that trans women have the same advantage, especially against the backdrop of limited research.
"We're not talking about biological males, we're talking about trans women who've been on feminising hormone therapy. And what we don't know is how does the typical performance differ between trans women who have been on feminising hormone therapy compared to cisgender women," she said.
"It's possible that there may be an advantage for some sports; it's possible there may be a disadvantage for some sports."
She said with so few trans athletes competing at an elite level, and indeed none in swimming, that they could be assessed on merit rather than subjected to a blanket ban.
This is an approach Catherine Ordway, a senior fellow and sports law expert at The University of Melbourne, supports.
"Because there are so few transgender athletes, why wouldn't they have just taken it as an individual case-by-case approach?," she said.
"To me, that seems the most obvious way of dealing with it, because what they're trying to do is establish whether or not there's an unfair competitive advantage."
She described it as the "worst possible way" FINA could have handled the issue and labelled it a "fear-driven policy".
"Transgender women are not even winning yet, and they're already being excluded when they're not on the Olympic podium or winning world championships," she said.
"And yet this fear-driven policy of let's exclude them in case they might knock someone out, or once win, or influence a selection outcome is, I think, disproportionate to the issue."
Instead, these policies should be "driven by love", she said.
"Because these are the most marginalised, vulnerable people in the community ... we should be including them unless there's a reason not to, or to alter it."
FINA President Husain Al-Musallam said: “We have to protect the rights of our athletes to compete, but we also have to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions.
“FINA will always welcome every athlete. The creation of an open category will mean that everybody has the opportunity to compete at an elite level. This has not been done before, so FINA will need to lead the way. I want all athletes to feel included in being able to develop ideas during this process.”
- With AAP and Reuters.
