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)
