Simone Biles Has a Proposal for Solving the Debate Over Trans Inclusion in Sports. But It Definitely Won't Help.
On Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania caved in to pressure from President Donald Trump, ending a Department of Education–led civil rights investigation into the school's rostering of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas on the women's team back in the 2021–22 season. At the time, Thomas was eligible to compete under NCAA policy, though that body has since banned trans women from the women's category. As an act of appeasement to the administration, Penn has wiped Thomas' competitive records and will issue apologies to his athletes “disadvantaged” by her participation.
Given the vanishingly few avenues in which trans athletes can compete, you, like none other than Simone Biles, may be thinking offering them their own third gender category is the best way out of this mess. In June, the gymnastics great called out conservative activist and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines—a teammate of Thomas'—on That affirmation was big, and it was heartening to see. The post continued: “Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!!” (A few days later, Biles followed up to apologize to Gaines for the personal-attack element of her post and also to seemingly soften some of her wording on trans-athlete inclusion.)
It can indeed sound like an appealing way to end this one front of the anti-trans culture war, to create a separate category for trans athletes in sports. At first glance, the concept of instituting a third box meant for trans and/or intersex athletes—beyond girls' and women's or boys' and men's sports—may not seem so bad. It offers a clear alternative to banning people altogether from competing in the sports they love. It also sidesteps the question of competitive advantage and other concerns that cisgender athletes, coaches, and fans may have.
But relegating trans athletes to a third category is not the answer to our bad-faith political “debate” over transgender athletes. And it is typically carried out in bad faith: Many people who raise concerns about whether trans athletes belong in mainstream recreation are doing so as part of larger efforts to keep trans people out of other areas of public life, including locker rooms, bathrooms, and even prisons aligned with their gender identities. In the face of escalating attacks on trans people, including in sports , from Trump, along with conservative lawmakers and activists, it's more important than ever to stand up for trans athletes fully—not with any half measures.
Trans and intersex athletes—and discussions about where they fit in a mostly binary sports landscape—are not new. The writer Michael Waters chronicled as much in his 2024 book The Other Olympians , which focused on the 1930s. Discussion of a third category isn't new either; Biles is just the latest, most highly visible person to suggest it. In 2020, a year after banning trans athletes from competing in the gender categories they identify with, USA Powerlifting created the group MX to silo off trans and nonbinary athletes the organization had previously banned altogether from male and female categories.
“Forcing trans athletes into a separate, third category is harmful 'othering' that only furthers the isolation and discrimination trans athletes face,” said Danne Diamond , then of the LGBTQ+ sports advocacy group Athlete Ally, in response to USAPL's announcement. “It lumps trans athletes and nonbinary athletes together, when they should have the opportunity to choose the category in which they'd like to compete.”
Diamond's words, then and now, cut through the inclusive-seeming rhetoric cisgender supporters of third categories tend to espouse. Yet since the USAPL move, the third-category idea has only spread. Thomas' success in the pool apparently prompted World Aquatics in 2023 to ban trans women from the women's category in elite events. The international swimming governing body also announced an open category in certain race distances for a World Cup swim meet in Berlin. A couple of months later, the group proceeded to cancel the category shortly before the event. It did not receive any entries for what it had touted as a “ pioneering pilot project .”
This shouldn't have come as a surprise. Only a tiny number of transgender athletes compete in K–12, college, Olympic, and professional sports. That's not exactly a recipe for populating a robust and exciting third category in any one, sport-specific event, like the Berlin swim meet. But the stats are not the point, anyway: Even if, hypothetically, trans athletes were as prevalent as cis ones, the idea of siphoning them off into a trans-only category in the name of fairness would still be wrong in the way “Separate but Equal” is always wrong. It's a structure designed to dismiss trans athletes who identify as women or men and who feel most at home competing with and against cisgender women and men. (Where nonbinary athletes fit into sex-segregated sports is a whole other worthwhile question .)
That's not to say that there aren't some genderqueer athletes who prefer separate categories. In running, for instance, nonbinary activist Jake Fedorowski has in recent years successfully pushed for more race organizers to implement nonbinary divisions. But shirking binary gender categories, for as long as they remain the dominant way of organizing sports, should be an individual choice, not a group mandate.
The limited research is mixed at best on whether trans women in particular—these discussions are almost always focused on trans women in the name of “protecting” cis women—may hold any proven advantages in elite sports. ESPN journalist Katie Barnes' 2023 bookFair Play outlines what is and isn't known in painstaking detail, along with how society has gotten to this point with escalating attacks on trans athletes.
And from a fan perspective, what tends to captivate us about watching sports, generally speaking, is not the sameness but difference—and how each athlete leverages and showcases what makes them unique. At the risk of overusing a well-worn example, if everyone who dived into a pool was built exactly like Michael Phelps, his efforts never would've demanded our attention over the course of five Olympic Games.
Fairness and inclusion are not actually at odds with each other in male and female categories. Athletes, whether cis or trans, and from the Phelpsian level on down, have all sorts of advantages and disadvantages over one another. It's all part of the game. So what's fair, therefore, is not to police and isolate a marginalized group of people; rather, it's to embrace trans athletes by including them wherever they see themselves competing.
