4 September 2023
In recent years all elite sports are confronted with issues related to gender and gender transition. Aquatic sports is taken into consideration as a case study. The link between (gender) theory and practice is far from obvious in the case of sports. It is concluded that defining a policy on gender in sports does not depend on the choice of any particular answer on the famous questions “what is a woman” and “what is a man”. Instead answers are implicitly presumed on the questions: “what is a prototypical adult female” and “what is a prototypical adult male”, where prototypical means something like ‘biological beyond reasonable doubt’. Gender theory as yet is ill-prepared for responding to these particular questions, if these questions are considered legitimate one’s at all. For team sports and for individual sports the issues related to gender may differ. The focus of this paper is on individual sports, a case which we expect to be simpler than sports conducted in pairs or in groups. From the 2022 World Aquatics eligibility policy a particular version of gender theory is derived. That version of gender theory may be considered fully transinclusive, and at the same time it qualifies as an MotR (middle of the road) approach to gender theory.