Once every week or two, I swim molasses-slow laps at the YMCA. I’ve been on something of a fitness journey this year, testing out different forms of exercise to see what sticks—what feels the least torturous and humiliating as a fat person. Swimming appeals more than most activities I’ve tried. I like the quiet of being submerged in the water, where no one can talk to me as I try to remember to breathe.
I change as quickly as possible in the family locker room beforehand, because I’m not wanted in the women’s locker room. I learned this by experiencing several hostile interactions there with fellow members. Some of the cisgender women see me as a man invading their territory. They’ve told me so, and I’ve overheard them telling one another. “He said he’s a she,” one once loudly reported to her friend about me. (Wrong twice! I’m a they.) The Y staff has told me to both ignore the instigators and report their names, as if my harassers have stopped to properly introduce themselves.
I’ve learned to time my trips to the pool so that kids and their parents are unlikely to be in the family locker room—the last thing I need is to be perceived as preying on children. I typically have the whole space to myself. Never am I more aware of my transness, my genderqueerness, as I tear off my street clothes, hoping no one will walk in and tell me there’s yet another spot I don’t belong. So far, so good.
Now shirtless with exposed top-surgery scars, I kick off my sandals, put my goggles in place, and lower myself into the pool they consistently keep too warm. Slowly, I start to churn through those shitty laps for 30 minutes, breathing hard and pausing frequently. During my struggle, I always end up thinking about another swimmer—a GOAT swimmer—Katie Ledecky, and while doing this I get the 1999 song “Smooth” stuck in my head.
In a 2016 viral video the International Olympic Committee wasn’t quick enough to purge from the internet, Ledecky touches the wall in the 800-meter freestyle final in Rio, topping her own world record. The video creator puts on “Smooth” in the background as she finishes, and it takes so long for the silver medalist to touch the wall that Santana is able to croon all of “Man, it’s a hot one” in the interim. It cracks me up and leaves me in awe. Ledecky, competing that day with a sore throat, later wrote in the memoir Just Add Water that in the back half of the 800, she has to push through pain throughout her body and “the overall sense that I’m stuffed with glue.” Man, did she ever.
An 11-second gap is an eternity in an eight-minute race among elite athletes, but it’s symbolic of Ledecky’s dominance. She owns 14 Olympic medals (nine of them gold) and has broken 17 world records. In the 1500 free, she owns 25 of the top 26 times. “I love this race,” she said at swimming worlds in June. We as fans marvel at statistics like hers and cool confidence like hers. Headlines routinely laud her generational talent. In a just world, she wouldn’t be so laughably far ahead of her peers in these events—she’d be neck-and-neck with them. But races are not synchronized swimming, and sports are not meant to be fair.
When I think about Ledecky, I also inevitably think about Lia Thomas, the trans woman who swam at Penn. During her senior season on the women’s team, in 2021–22, she was told by teammates, opponents, and the press that she didn’t belong. Sports Illustrated called the shy economics major “the most controversial athlete in America.” Olympian Nancy Hogshead-Makar argued in the New Yorker that Thomas should compete against cis women in a segregated lane, with her own podium at the end of the event. World Aquatics changed its rules, certainly to bar her from attempting to qualify for the Olympics. Donald Trump, upon regaining the presidency, used the grievances against Thomas as an excuse to withhold funding from Penn, extracting an apology from the school. And right-wing social media grifter Riley Gaines has, in a pivot we’re already seeing replicated, attempted to build a career off the injustice that she once tied with Thomas for fifth place in an NCAA race.
It’s that “fifth place” fact that makes all the fearmongering about Thomas’s strength and cis women’s weakness look ridiculous on its face. Lia Thomas didn’t fulfill the right-wing prophecy by stomping out Ledecky’s records. She never even got remotely close. And in some ways, this is wielded as a point in favor of trans athletes. In liberal circles, it’s acceptable, even noble, to argue that trans people should be allowed to compete because they categorically aren’t threats to sports’ elite. Even Joanna Harper, a trans woman athlete who has dedicated her career to researching other trans athletes, said this about Thomas: “Ten years after the NCAA put in rules to allow trans women to compete based on hormone therapy, trans women are not taking over the NCAA and are still hugely underrepresented in this very large population.” In 2022, she told Inside Higher Ed she doesn’t see a future where women like Thomas dominate sports.
But so what if Thomas had swum near the Santana barrier? So what if she had obliterated those records? Would that have been fair? Why would it matter? Politicians and pundits consistently asked about fairness with regard to Thomas but not with regard to Ledecky, despite the latter’s world-wrecking reputation.
Personally, I don’t care about fairness in sports. More importantly, society—be it players, coaches, or fans—doesn’t care about fairness in sports. Just look at the worshipful coverage of men like LeBron James and Shohei Ohtani, and the iconic status of women like Simone Biles. That’s because sports aren’t actually about fairness. In fact, they’re about celebrating the absence of fairness. So we must dispense with the refrain that there’s a need to balance fairness and inclusion when it comes to transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports.
The scientific studies in this vein are lacking, and what information we do see suggests that trans women like Thomas are even at a disadvantage in certain ways compared with their cis peers. But say, for a moment, the existing research were showing something very different—perhaps even overwhelming evidence that trans women are unfairly more physically gifted in most ways than their cis peers. I don’t know why that’d be grounds to keep them out of women’s sports, where they so clearly belong. To be thrilled by Ledecky’s spectacular feats but repulsed by Thomas’s more modest ones is to reveal a lack of appreciation for the fun of dominant athleticism. Moreover, it reveals a lack of faith in Ledecky’s appetite for healthy competition and sportsmanship. “The hard is kind of what makes swimming great,” she wrote. “Trying hard is the whole point. It’s what makes something as simple as swimming laps meaningful.”
The most soul-crushing athletes should—and almost always do—want to compete against the best, regardless of which genitals and chromosomes those competitors happen to have. There are not two values here worth weighing. Leave the balancing act to Ledecky and her glass of chocolate milk.
My dreams for myself in the pool aren’t about winning. I want to eventually lay claim to the fast lanes each night, rather than the slow or medium ones. I also want to look fluid in the water, swimming without so many pauses to catch my breath. Relearning flip turns, which I did as a kid, would be fun too. Altogether, I aspire to both look and feel like I belong in the water.
Unlike fairness, inclusion in sports matters immensely. Participating in recreational activities makes a meaningful difference in trans kids’ lives. Over the course of a year, nearly 44 percent of trans kids will have considered suicide, compared with 16 percent of cis kids. The rate is higher among those who say they have been discriminated against due to their gender identity. Additionally, 83 percent of transgender and nonbinary kids worry about trans people being denied access to sports at the state or local level. Cis people are not, in fact, assigned athletic scholarships at birth. Therefore, trans people have not snatched away any slots; rather, they have earned them outright when they excelled, just as the best cis athletes have. Or, rather, they did until early 2025, when the NCAA caved to Trump and banned trans athletes.
A 21-year-old transgender student at Middlebury College was found dead in Vermont in October, days after going missing. Before the NCAA ban, Lia Smith had been a member of the Division III school’s women’s swimming and diving team. She died by suicide, authorities said.
The stakes for including trans athletes are real and high. Meanwhile, the idea of keeping sports “fair” is transparently a wedge designed to justify the exclusion of people from enriching—even lifesaving—activities.
There will never be a Santana-scored viral video dedicated to my own performance in the pool. And as an adult swimming only recreationally, I likely won’t ever face a formal ban from exercising under the guise of fairness. Here’s what would be fair, though: welcoming trans people of my skill level through Ledecky’s to change and swim our laps alongside everyone else.
