Even the trans lobby can’t override biology in sport (by Suzanne Moore)

No amount of magical thinking from the baying mob can alter biological facts, no matter how much they try to shut women up

Sports was always going to be the sector where fashionable gender ideology came undone. If males can be females and vice versa, then there is no need to have separate sports categories for men and women. But men and women have different bodies and one doesn’t have to be an endocrinologist to know this.

Many people who are completely relaxed about trans people living their best lives cannot or do not want to answer the obvious questions about the handful of mediocre male athletes who transition via hormone treatment only and then choose to compete in women’s sports. Psychologically this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do as they know having gone through male puberty gives them an advantage in terms of building muscle mass. Politically, far from furthering the case of trans people, it provokes hostility because of the obvious lack of fairness. Proving they can beat natal women does what, exactly?

When the trans swimmer Lia Thomas was competing for the University of Pennsylvania, it was an uncomfortable thing to watch. The stadium was silent when she won and broke a record but went crazy when fellow Penn teammate Anna Sofia Kalandadze finished second. In many of the photos, Thomas towers over teammates and they hang back while she holds the trophy. It is clear they could not say what they really thought. Thomas won the National Collegiate Athletics Association First Division swimming championship last March, having started HRT in 2019. 18 sec

Since then, many sporting bodies have decided womanhood is not merely a lowered level of testosterone, and that athletes who have been through male puberty cannot compete against women. This is not a ban. They can still compete, just not in that category. Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies have been vocal about this. Davies knows all about unfairness: the former competitive swimmer lost out on an Olympic gold medal in 1980 to Petra Schneider who, like so many East German athletes, was doped by the state.

Progress is being made with World Athletics president Seb Coe’s decision to exclude trans women from female competition, but what is going on in the States? Riley Gaines, who competed against Thomas, is also trying to stand up for the integrity of women’s sports and gave a talk at San Francisco State University. She spoke about feeling uncomfortable getting undressed when Thomas’s male genitalia were on display in the changing room. Really, does anyone think this is OK?

Though we are now habituated to watching mobs chase women who won’t accept the dogma, what happened afterwards was shocking: a crowd of aggressive students cornered her. Gaines claims she was hit and locked in a room for three hours. The police seemed to hang back. It is all on tape.

Once more, however, we are asked not to believe the evidence of our eyes. The university’s vice-president for student affairs emailed the student body to say that she was proud of the students, who “participated peacefully”. But this protest was not peaceful. Gaines says she is going to sue the school.

Inevitably the issue has become politically polarised to an insane level. Gaines has shared a stage with Trump. The Republicans are seen to be those protecting women’s sport; Biden’s Democrats are all over the shop. While Biden welcomed the parody of womanhood that is trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, many Democrat voters simply want their daughters to get a fair chance.

No amount of magical thinking can alter biological facts. We cannot pretend bodies are all the same just because a few want to maintain that delusion. Gaines was talking about her experience as a woman and an athlete and yet a baying mob wants to shut her up, because to challenge the idea that a transgender athlete may have an advantage is verboten.

We, though, are not America and may come to a more measured position. The Government has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to clarify that when we talk of sex in the Equality Act we mean biological sex.

The blurring of sex and gender is what causes problems and this may help stop this confusion. Women who say biological sex matters have been demonised and I am one of them. I recognised the silence when Thomas swam because many are scared and stay quiet rather than speaking up.

Any woman who tells the truth is met by an unthinking mob, online or in real life. And yet it has not stopped us saying it any more than it has stopped sports fans seeing it. For here we do have the advantage: being on the side of reality.

Even the trans lobby can’t override biology in sport (telegraph.co.uk)