This week, the World Aquatics organization, the international body governing swimming sports, scrapped their "Open" category intended to encompass transgender athletes. The organization cited a lack of entries as the reason, which begs the question, "Why would anyone sign up for an 'Open' category when you're still allowing boys claiming to be transgender to compete in the Girls' category?"
On Tuesday, World Aquatics, the governing body for swimming, announced that its first “open category” to accommodate transgender athletes has been scrapped because it received “no entries.” The category was to be offered at a World Cup starting in Berlin this week.
“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,” World Aquatics said, according to multiple reports.
Update on the Open Category competitions at the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup – Berlin 2023https://t.co/Swb49Uqkpq
— World Aquatics (@WorldAquatics) October 3, 2023
Why are they receiving no entries? Presumably, this is because they are still offering boys—"transgender girls," as they are calling them—to compete against actual girls. In other words, they had no intention of actually using this "open" category or even keeping it on the books. There is absolutely no incentive, without an actual ban on boys competing in the girls' category, for anyone signing up for fair competition in an open division. And incentives matter.
Here's the real kicker:
In July, Townhall reported how World Aquatics announced that its “open” category would be created to include transgender athletes. The organization’s president, Husain Al-Musallam, called it a “very complex topic.”
This statement by Husain Al-Musallam is the purest form of the substance frequently found behind the south end of a northbound horse. There's nothing complex at all about this topic. Boys are boys and girls are girls; as Plato would put it, "for all values of A, A=A." These are objective realities grounded in biology.
World Aquatics is allowing boys to compete against girls in the girls category, and it's hideously unfair. In another example of just how unjust this is, another example comes to us this Thursday morning from Maine.
Parents and students were outraged over a transgender runner competing with the girls in the Maine XC Festival of Champions on Saturday.
Maine Coast Waldorf School high school sophomore Soren Stark-Chessa previously competed in the boys’ category for the school one year prior. In the 5k division, Stark-Chessa ranked approximately 172nd among males in the state. After transitioning, however, the runner shot up to 4th place in the girls’ division.
Cheater boy from Freeport, ME Soren Stark-Chessa displaces the 11th placed girl from a medal, as expected.
— Shawn McBreairty 🇺🇸 (@ShawnMcBreairty) September 30, 2023
He finishes the girls race 5th.
Pathetic.
The #MainePrincipalsAssociation are woke morons. pic.twitter.com/DxbIFBgdzl
Watch the video above, and look at the faces of parents and other spectators in the crowd. Those expressions speak volumes. This boy is cheating, and those spectators know it. This problem is becoming endemic in school systems, especially those where a number of teachers and staff are actually advocates for transgenderism to the point where they are hiding the "gender identity" of kids from their parents. (If you read that as "school staff lying to parents about their children," you would be correct.)
Back to sports: Speaking as a biologist, I think I'm on pretty firm ground when I say boys and girls are structurally different, even pre-puberty. I need to look no further than my own family for an example; our two youngest grandsons, "Bubba" and "Moose" (obviously not their real names, but we do call them that), when compared to their classmates, are very clearly boys. Both of them are heavier, stockier, with bigger hands and feet than any of the girls that are their contemporaries; they have visibly greater muscle mass and heavier bones and are faster and stronger, even compared with their older sister. That's a very small sample size, but look around any elementary school and you'll see that pattern over and over.
Oh, Bubba is four, and Moose is three.
This isn't unique to humans. The development of male and female mammals in general begins very early in gestation, and those differences can never be completely reversed. There are differences in degree, and those differences are described in biology as sexual dimorphism; for example, wolves show rather less sexual dimorphism than moose, in that it can take a closer examination to differentiate between a dog wolf and a bitch, where the difference between bull and cow moose is much more obvious. But the differences are still there; they are only differences in degree, not in kind, and they are still visible to an even half-way careful examination. They are also there from before birth, and these differences can never be completely reversed. That, too, is an objective reality.
This entire issue is well past the point of absurdity. Fortunately, we have advocates for sanity in people like Riley Gaines who are advocating tirelessly for fairness in girl's sports. Sooner or later this ridiculous situation has to end, and we can hope that it will be sooner.
