The International Olympic Committee (IOC) needs to find some far better answers to the transgender question if it is to restore its credibility in eyes of those who care about women’s sport. We might not have the spectacle of Laurel Hubbard – the transgender weightlifter who displaced a woman from the last games in Tokyo – but the debate is far from settled.
The Parkrun saga over times for transgender runners staggers on, but the organisation has only itself to blame. For want of a clear policy on sex and gender, Parkrun seems to have upset everyone. Last week, at least one event director quit as the company erased its run records wholesale in what looked like a knee-jerk reaction to a campaign against Parkrun’s view that competitors could self-declare their gender.
Danielle McGahey is set to become the first transgender cricketer to play an official Twenty20 international. The 29-year old Australian-born opening batsman has been named in the Canadian women’s squad that will take on Brazil, Argentina and the USA next week* in Los Angeles. The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Americas Region Qualifier is hardly the Ashes, but at stake is a possible place in the 2024 Women’s T20 World Cup in Bangladesh.
Vogue magazine’s recent ‘powerhouse’ of 25 ‘women [who are] defining – and redefining – Britain in 2023’ includes one person who is not like the others. Emily Bridges is no more a woman than I am, but the transgender cyclist is the only sporting figure to have made the cut. What a kick in the teeth to the Lionesses recently returned from Australia.
The organisation has followed swimming’s lead on female competition.
Who can compete in women’s sports? This week’s* decision by the European Court of Human Rights further complicates the debate. Judges in Strasbourg upheld Caster Semenya’s appeal against World Athletics regulations that requited athletes like Semenya to lower their testosterone levels to be allowed to compete with women. The court ruled that those regulations were ‘a source of discrimination’ for Semenya ‘by the manner in which they were exercised and by their effects’, and the regulations were ‘incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights’.
Siân Longthorpe’s record breaking time of 18 minutes and 53 seconds in the Porthcawl Parkrun highlights all that is wrong with a policy that allows runners to self-declare their sex and then pick up records and awards.
When will sporting governing bodies see the reality that we all know to be true – that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies? Granted, many organisations have seen the light and taken action, but others remain in some sort of cloud cuckoo land where transwomen – biological males – are allowed to compete against biological females.
Debbie Hayton