February 21, 2024 - 10:00am
Reality matters. No one is trying to ban trans women from sport at any level, from the Olympics to school sports days. All they’ve been told to do by some governing bodies is compete in the correct category for their sex. Yet trans athletes keep saying they’ve been excluded, claiming they’ve been banned from their chosen sport.
In the US, the male-bodied swimmer Lia Thomas is taking legal action in an attempt to be allowed to compete against women. In the UK, the cyclist Emily Bridges is threatening to do the same after British Cycling restricted entry to the female category to women.
“Elite sport is over for me” is the headline ITV News has used for an interview with Bridges. “If we were allowed to compete, if I was allowed to compete, it would be a different conversation,” he claims, “but I can’t compete […] I can’t do something I used to love.’
Bridges is 6’2”, was born male and went through male puberty. Like Thomas, he towers over female athletes and his voice in interviews is that of a young man. He could go on racing for years if he were willing to compete in the male or “open” category, a point made by ITV’s sports editor, Steve Scott.
Scott’s challenge goes to the heart of the matter, exposing the fact that there is no ban on trans athletes. But they want validation of their claimed gender identity, and they won’t get that in the “open” category.
Unsurprisingly, Bridges has no answer to Scott’s question, appearing lost for words. “Would it be safe for me to compete in an open category?” he asks after a long pause. The answer is obviously yes, but trans athletes are not used to having their hyperbolic claims called out like this.
The people who are at risk are girls and women who find themselves competing against individuals who are bigger, stronger and have greater muscle mass. Injuries have been reported in football and basketball after women found themselves playing against teams which included male-bodied trans women. Female athletes are also losing medals to trans-identified males.
Bridges is now making even more absurd statements, however, such as the notion that protecting the female category in sport “has normalised the exclusion of trans people from public life”. He claims it’s made it “easier to ban us from toilets, easier to ban our healthcare […] and our ability to go out in public’.
None of this is happening. Trans people are simply expected to observe boundaries put in place to protect women from men’s greater physical strength and male violence. These expectations are so reasonable that they weren’t even questioned until some men decided they were women, and started trying to take over single-sex spaces and categories.
Obviously they don’t want to admit this, so they’ve played the victim card instead. “You leave the house and you’re thinking, am I going to come home?” Bridges suggests at the end of his latest interview.
It’s a thought most women have had at some point in their lives, with much greater justification. But women’s safety is the last thing on the minds of activists who think they should be able to do exactly what they like.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
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SubscribeBridges talks about ‘anti-trans activists’. I can’t say I’ve ever encountered one.
I would guess he is referring to people who reject gender ideology, aka gender critical, which is a protected belief, so tough.
It seems bizarre that mainstream beliefs which are backed by science are the ones that need protection against lunatic ideologues who believe trans women literally are women and therefore must be treated the same as real women in every respect including male bodied rapist being sent to women’s prisons. Ie what the person most likely to become our next PM claims to believe!
Histrionic hyperbole from Bridges.
All identity politics has been partly or wholly based on victimhood, often with a lot of historic evidential justification.
But victimhood is a very difficult habit to kick as it gives you a leg up and a free pass; so people never want to give it up, even as society changes.
Furthermore, as our society has become increasingly me-centric, feelings based and narcissistic, the claims of victimhood have become ever more tenuous (trans ‘genocide’) the demands more outrageous (men ‘chestfeeding’) and the total disregard for anyone else’s rights jaw-dropping (‘Emily’ Bridges).
So basically now, the whole edifice needs to be jettisoned. But who will clean out the Augean stables?
A standard rule of life is that you get more of what allow, encourage, or reward. This applies to victimhood, too. When it’s treated as something heroic, more people will engage in it.
“But who will clean out the Augean stables”
Medical negligence lawyers.
Maybe the lawyers will ‘clean up’ in the Augean Stables.
I have seen that been of the interview. That pause seemed to go on forever.
Then the answer is that it wouldn’t be safe for some trans women in case they “pass” because they would have to out themselves.
I wonder how many trans women would “pass”… And anyway, why should that be a problem for women?
Interestingly, I wonder where are the throngs of transmen or “non binary” (whatever that means) athletes trying to enter male competitions…
None of them pass. It’s always obviously in real life when they don’t have the benefit of filters and air brushed photos.
Yes, I always wonder why no-one seems to raise the point made in your last paragraph. Women who identify as men seem very reluctant to compete against biological males. People like Bridges should be asked to explain why that is the case. It torpedoes the whole trans sport nonsense.
Trans-identified women are vastly outnumbered by trans-identified males. (The reason why is a topic for another article or conversation.) Whatever their illusions or delusions about their gender identity, those women are aware of the superiority in power/ strength/ speed of males; it is no secret that a football team of teenage boys can easily beat a top women’s team (for one example, see https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/sports/uswnt-star-carli-lloyd-admits-to-losing-to-u-15-boys-team/). Those women also know it is highly unlikely that when competing against men they could take the top podium or win any other prize in the way Bridges and Thomas have done. And they know of the dangers of colliding with male bodies.
The officials of sporting organisations, e.g. the cycling and swimming federations, should never have allowed males into competitions.
Charley Paddock set the men’s 100 metres world record at 10.4 seconds in 1921.
103 years later no woman has beaten that time, despite exponential improvements in training, conditioning and equipment over the last century. Only one woman, Florence Griffith Joyner has even recorded a time below 10.5 and that was highly suspect for a number of reasons.
Of all the bad faith arguments employed by trans rights activists, the laughable claim that there is no proven performance advantage for men over women may be the worst.
The evidence is in more than a century worth of recorded performance data.
The more people like Bridges and Thomas push this nonsense, the more it hardens attitudes against trans people in general.
The campaign should be about promoting greater understanding and tolerance towards people who don’t fit the norms of society and not railing against the entirely reasonable restrictions society places on us all for good reasons. It is obvious why it is unreasonable for people like Bridges and Thomas to compete in the women’s category and they should accept that and go back to competing as they did before suddenly deciding they were women. Their issue is not that they can’t join in the competition, but that they were only ever going to be mediocre as men so would never win any medals.
Women’s sport has enough problems attracting spectators and that drives the money professional female athletes can expect to earn. Having mediocre men filling the podium is not going to enhance the mass appeal of women’s sport. Indeed, once it has been completely taken over, nobody will bother to watch it at all.
South Park did a brilliant episode on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=URz-RYEOaig
Hahahahahaha, I had never seen that.
It is so true!!
Go heather!
Bridges problem is that as a man he wasn’t even in the top 500 male college swimmers. Becomes a woman and bingo – the podium! The male advantage in swimming is one of the biggest in any sport, for obvious reasons. I feel deeply for the young women he was allowed to beat.
Growing your hair long and usually wearing a frock and jewellery doesn’t seem to be a major impediment to taking part in elite sport. Has Emily Bridges done anything else that might impair performance in competition? If so it would seem self inflicted.
Get back on the bicycle and show us what you can do in your appropriate sex category. Be a proud exemplar of “trans” athletes being happy to fit in with social norms instead of trying to scam an advantage over fellow competitors. That would be the route to increased “trans” acceptance rather than giving the impression that “trans” is about gaining an unfair advantage.
The only people more contemptible than these manipulating autogynephilic drama queens are the gormless fools who are so easily manipulated into believing them.
AGP’s tend to be more in touch with who and what they really are – see Debbie Hayton for example who makes no bones about still being a man despite having had the full op (why trans activist really hate him and AGPs in general).
https://staging.unherd.com/2022/05/the-truth-about-autogynephilia/
Drama queen without any doubt, but I doubt Bridges is AGP.
Hayton says one thing but does the other. He says he knows he is a man but still uses the title Mrs. He says there should be single sex spaces yet he helped draft guidance papers that recommend mixed sex toilets for schools . He accepts he is a man but still uses the female toilet facilities when he is at speaking events.
Don’t want to turn this into a debate about an unrelated individual. My point is not all trans women are AGPs.
This is worth a watch on all sorts of sexuality related topics starting with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xakINkmU1c0
About 30 mins in is the bit explaining AGP
Yes, I’m afraid Hayton simply has a different line of attack. Bridges = battering ram. Hayton = wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Wait so are we just accepting the premise that men are inherently (sexually) violent and so should have liberties curtailed to protected women?
That argument only ever seems to be applied in the scintilla occupied by trans women.
#MeToo, for example, is woke hysteria aimed at driving the white man down. So is much of modern feminism. Films like Barbie in which men are portrayed as oppressors are dangerous and incorrect.
Oh but yeah when it comes to trans stuff there is a systemic power imbalance enjoyed by men which needs to be addressed and which should limit male activities for women’s comfort.
And this is supposed to be a news source embodying rational liberal values!
As a man who still, outdatedly, believes it is part of a man’s role to protect women and children and most definitely not to harm them, I hate, but do not deny, the fact that a small, but not small enough, minority of men get a kick out of harming women and children.
About 50% of trans women in jail are their because they have committed sexually violent acts against women. Making it easier for men to be considered women and for those men to gain access to women’s spaces has very obvious consequences. These are not hypothetical.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42221629
“A government survey has counted 125 transgender prisoners in England and Wales, but the Ministry of Justice says these figures are not yet a reliable reflection of the true numbers. The MoJ says 60 of them have been convicted of one or more sexual offences”
When it comes to sport all you need to do is compare male world records to their female counter parts to see that men have a very significant biological advantage and women don’t stand a chance when competing against them.
Well said. I’m also proud to be one of those outdated men albeit a gay one, who does not think that bullying women and children is ever acceptable.
The vast majority of men don’t think that bullying women and children is acceptable. (And you know, children aren’t only bullied by men.)
Then perhaps they should give these thoughts voice more often.
No, all that is required is that all men stay out of women’s spaces. Of course not all men are violent but if you allow 1 man access to women’s spaces there will be predatory males who will take advantage of that. 90% of violent crime is committed by males and 80% of the victims of sexual crimes are female. It’s a safety issue, and in the case of sport safety and fairness.
Its not the most bizarre thing about this whole issue, but its still a bizarre thing that this needs to be explained so often. Because its exactly the same precautionary principle as we apply as a matter of course to so many jobs, voluntary positions etc.
We don’t make teachers, social workers, scout leaders, child minders etc submit to a DBS check because we believe all adults are a danger to children. We do it because if we didn’t then adults who are a danger to children would take advantage to gain access. This precaution imposes a restriction on the liberty of the rest of us, but the legitimate purpose of protecting children justifies that.
What on earth are you talking about?
Women have single sex spaces because, yes, a significant enough minority of men are sexually violent towards them. And women had had single sex spaces in some form since the year dot. See nunneries, etc, in the past.
No men have had their liberties curtailed because such spaces exist at any point in history. Whether man or boy my liberties have been unaffected by not going into the girls locker room or not playing rugby against girls.
The reason the “scintilla” of trans-identifying males have got recent focus is because activists have tried to assert that they have special magical inner feelings that mean the usual rules that apply to males to stay out of single-sex spaces for females should not apply to them.
Surely the argument being put forward is that it is women and not men who, in this situation have the advantage of power imbalance – that is it is women who have exercised power to be ‘trans-exclusionary’ from a women sport category.
More generally, sport, gymnasia and the like are one of the few obvious places in society I can think of where there should be segregation. It’s exactly what the article says – a boundary. Liberal values can mean many things, but I don’t think that they can reasonably be equated to a total free-for-all.
Of course what woke and DEI and the like have done is diminish our capacity to act as a coherent civil society and it has been thoroughly insidious. It is precisely the idea of shared boundaries and, moreover, our capacity to police those boundaries as a civil society that has been eroded to the detriment of us all.
What increasingly happens is that the managerial techno-state does not barge in and impinge on the space between state and society that is central to civil society – rather they are actively beckoned in to ever-more get in our faces in the name of, for example, DEI. The likes of trans athletes (and their social media handmaidens) do not appeal to civil society or their peers, rather they demand that the managerial classes and the state obliterates it. Sport as an activity between peers is one of the finest examples of a true civil society that I can think of and we, all of us, should absolutely protect it as such.
If women feel that there is a powerful interest in having women-only sport as an intrinsic part of a thriving civil society, and that interest is above making women’s sport a performative forum of DEI and trans validation then I say more power to their elbow.
A potentially unintended consequence of the attempted erosion of shared boundaries, is that a civil society will begin to define, cherish and protect the boundaries that were previously largely unabused by those who’d not share the goodwill on which said boundaries are predicated.
My anticipation is that the accusations of bias — conscious or otherwise — won’t find legitimacy amongst a new generation, who’d’ve been draped in modern dogma from birth. Should it be the case that societal norms trend towards the traditional, the case for discrimination finds less plausibility as a differentiator of the sanctimonious liberal class.
Men are much more likely to be predisposed to violence.
Women do not believe that all men are violent, but a significant number are, and guess what, they don’t have 666 tattooed on their foreheads. Transwomen are natal men no matter what they look like on the outside. How do women know which are “kind” and which are “Isla Bryson”? Decent men do the decent thing and stay out of women’s spaces, sports, etc, and that includes decent trans folks. Anything else is abuse…
98% of sexual offences are committed by men. This is not the same as saying 98% of men commit sexual offences. It’s quite easy to understand the difference.
And even if no men were ever violent towards women, if women still wanted single sex spaces, why shouldn’t they have them? In Australia, women are no longer allowed to organise social events for lesbians unless they include men who think they’re lesbians, too. Women are organising a legal appeal about this, but the Australian equality act has been invoked against them. Why should lesbians let men into their events, just because those men want to be there?
The same applies to gay men, of course, but for them, the presence of tiny fake men presents no danger at all, but is still unwelcome.
Bullshit!
Certain groups who (understandably) are upset at transwomen playing the victim card, and obtaining unfair advantages thereby, were happy enough to play the same card themselves back in the day. To a certain extent, their own political-cultural weapons have been turned against them.
But you won’t be thanked for pointing that out on this forum. (And of course, two wrongs don’t make a right.)
Bridges is concerned about his safety competing against other men but shows no concern for women, the biological kind, facing similar challenges. The self obsession of his kind is staggering.
Boo hoo.
Can we please stop with nonsense like this: the male-bodied swimmer Lia Thomas.
Thomas, William Thomas, is not “male-bodied.” He’s male. Period. Numerous female swimmers against whom he competed have testified to that. This Orwellian mangling of the language helps no one.
“If we were allowed to compete, if I was allowed to compete, it would be a different conversation,” he claims, Except he is allowed to compete. As a guy. Because he’s a guy. To this day, I have yet to wrap my head around the reality that there are women who support this man’s cause.
“wrap my head around the reality that there are women who support this man’s cause.”
I can just about wrap my head around it, given the more compassionate nature of most women. It is understandable that they get sucked in by #bekind. What I cannot get my head around is how those supposedly compassionate women can turn round and be so ghastly to other women, who point out the really rather obvious problems with pretending men really are women.
It’s because they’re hypocritical midwits.
Well said. Unherd also needs to start quarantining phrases like “trans woman” inside quote marks.
“Elite sport is over for me”
Promise?
If your only experience of ‘elite sport’ means avoiding pitting yourself against the other competitors in your sex class, then – whisper it – you were never an elite sportsperson in the first place.
Bridges isn’t an elite sportsperson. Bridges was a cuckoo in the wrong sex category for that person’s ability and innate advantages.
I guess it depends how you define elite. Bridges was certainly an elite male junior who got to the very precipice of progressing to the ranks of joining the elite men. He was released from the elite pathway programme around age 20, which is the point where a lot of outstanding juniors fall away in many sports.
He has already raced as “Emily” in the men’s categories, winning several medals as part of a team. His fellow male cyclists had no issue with it – they just want to win races. He was subsequently injured and did not make it back to the GB team level required, so they dropped him.
I do hope he brings a case. When he loses, he might just shut up and compete at the standard he’s at in the category for which he’s eligible (Open/Male) or get on with doing something else with his life.
His sporting disappointment is not rare, nor is it women’s burden to bear or be constantly nagged about.
Oh, so do I. I always do. Not so much that it might shut him up specifically, more that every such case is a test case, and every time such a case is lost alerts women in sport to the fact that fighting back is not only a valid action, but one that can be successful.
These people violating the English sense of fair play truly is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back of the trans movement. It was sheer idiocy for them to die on this hill as anyone can see a 6’2 hulking man towering over a group of young women and see there is something fundamentally wrong about it.
He’s right, his career in elite sports is over – because in the open class he would come absolutely nowhere, it’s only by competing in a different class can he achieve success.
If they wouldn’t be safe in an open category how do they justify competing against women-clearly their safety doesn’t matter to them at all. Male bodied people competing in female categories are narcissist cheats who think only they matter.
The existence of separate, protected female categories in most sports is one of the most impactful acts of inclusion yet devised by human society.
Without it there would be no women champions in most Olympic sports, including all athletic events, swimming races, cycling disciplines, and many others. No female Wimbledon champions. No women world cup winners in football, rugby, cricket etc.
The outcome of allowing men to identify into women’s competitive sports won’t be more inclusion. It will be more exclusion of women from their own category.
I’m fairly certain that the top male performance outclasses the top female performance in every single Olympic event.
A few Olympic events are open, meaning men and women compete together on equal basis. Mainly horse-based but also some sailing classes.
There’s also the question of what counts as better in some of the more artistic based events like figure skating, where women’s pelvic angle helps them be better at moves requiring extreme flexibility, but men’s greater quad strength helps them jump with more rotations.
And? What is your point?
Do they still do sex education in schools, or indeed mammalian anatomy or simple genetics?
On the light side, I’m afraid choosing to identify as female would be unlikely to gain me a winning position in any competitive field. I’m more inclined to identify as a tortoise – I might (but only win) a race.
No; schools only offer gender ideology education these days. Biology is transphobic.
Biology is NOT transphobic. How could it be? Gender identification issues have no relevance at all in biological science. Anything non-binary is covered by the concept of hermaphroditism as that is a valid reproductive method for some organisms and has evolutionary significance.
Watch this to see what is really being taught:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Mhyc4d7M4
This young man needs therapy to help him regain a sense of reality. He seems very fragile, mentally. Why aren’t his parents involved with his healthcare needs I wonder?
“Reality matters.” <– Not to you.
” No one is trying to ban trans women from sport at any level, from the Olympics to school sports days.” <– Yes, you are — you are claiming they are men, and should compete with men — even though history and science prove they are at a net disadvantage to cisgender women, not even on par with them.
The rules which are fair are simple, and have been in place in the Olympics for almost 20 years — that MtF athletes competing in women’s categories must have cisgender female normal levels of testosterone for 2 years prior to competing. In all that time to today, because MtF athletes who underwent a masculine puberty are actually at a net disadvantage under such rules, they have never medaled even once. If they were so little as on oar, there should be around 70 of them.
There are not.
And according your nonsense claims, there should be far more of them than 70, because supposedly they have an advantage.
Measured reality, history — these show no such thing is true.
No one will have any substantive reply, nothing invalidating that history.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331831/
“There is increasing debate as to whether transwoman athletes should be included in the elite female competition. Most elite sports are divided into male and female divisions because of the greater athletic performance displayed by males. Without the sex division, females would have little chance of winning because males are faster, stronger, and have greater endurance capacity. Male physiology underpins their better athletic performance including increased muscle mass and strength, stronger bones, different skeletal structure, better adapted cardiorespiratory systems, and early developmental effects on brain networks that wires males to be inherently more competitive and aggressive. Testosterone secreted before birth, postnatally, and then after puberty is the major factor that drives these physiological sex differences, and as adults, testosterone levels are ten to fifteen times higher in males than females. The non-overlapping ranges of testosterone between the sexes has led sports regulators, such as the International Olympic Committee, to use 10 nmol/L testosterone as a sole physiological parameter to divide the male and female sporting divisions. Using testosterone levels as a basis for separating female and male elite athletes is arguably flawed. Male physiology cannot be reformatted by estrogen therapy in transwoman athletes because testosterone has driven permanent effects through early life exposure. This descriptive critical review discusses the inherent male physiological advantages that lead to superior athletic performance and then addresses how estrogen therapy fails to create a female-like physiology in the male. Ultimately, the former male physiology of transwoman athletes provides them with a physiological advantage over the cis-female athlete.”
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577
Summary The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events.
Yes, the testosterone thing is now seen as inadequate and I suppose that’s one reason for the open category.
Bridges can compete in an elite open or male category.
So her claim is, not to put too fine a point on it, balls.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/
“Males enjoy physical performance advantages over females within competitive sport. The sex-based segregation into male and female sporting categories does not account for transgender persons who experience incongruence between their biological sex and their experienced gender identity. Accordingly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.
You haven’t the slightest foggy clue about the history. Easy Google yields:
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/international-olympic-committee-issues-new-guidelines-transgender-athl-rcna5775
You’ll note the article even gives you further backstory:
“Tuesday’s framework replaces guidelines the IOC released in 2015, which put a limit on athletes’ testosterone levels that required some of them to undergo treatments the IOC now describes as “medically unnecessary.” Before 2016, the IOC required athletes to undergo genital surgery.”
So this statement you make: “The rules which are fair are simple, and have been in place in the Olympics for almost 20 years” is utter pablum.
There are two options: (1) you are a liar; (2) you are so ignorant of the facts that your opinions are without merit. Either way, try to make more of an effort at accuracy in future.
To add on the subject of testosterone levels:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-do-trans-athletes-have-an-advantage-in-elite-sport/a-58583988
“The “normal” healthy range for cis women is between 0.3 and 2 nmol/L, according to Mayo Clinic estimates — though they vary among labs. Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome tend to have higher testosterone levels, which can reach 5.2 nmol/L. “Healthy” male testosterone ranges from 8.3 mnol/L to 32.9 nmol/L.
The IOC’s regulations say trans women can compete if their testosterone levels in serum are at 10 nanomoles per liter for a year for at least 12 months prior to their first competition.”
Indeed under the revised IOC rules trans women can compete with levels of testosterone which would have real women banned for life for cheating. Fortunately many professional sporting associations at national and international level are finally waking up to the need to preserve women’s sport for real women. The travesty is that many still have not yet woken up. Perhaps Thomas and Bridges need to lose their law suits to wise up the rest of them.
Just to add, this other statement by you: “that MtF athletes competing in women’s categories must have cisgender female normal levels of testosterone for 2 years prior to competing” is also total rubbish.
The standard they introduced when they no longer required genital surgery after 2016 was below 10nmol/L, which is still within the bottom end of the male range for males over 40.
Again, easy Google gives, for example:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bjsm/2018/04/11/time-to-dispense-with-the-male-female-binary-in-sport-analysis-of-the-cases-of-laurel-hubbard-and-mack-beggs/
“The IOC requires those competing in the female division to have testosterone levels < 10nmol/L. This is below the younger male range (less than forty years old) of 10.4-41.6 nmol/L (Boyce et. al., 2004). However, the levels for acceptable testosterone to compete in the female division are perhaps set too high, especially given the standard testosterone range for cis-women is between 0.3-2.1 nmol/L (Braunstein et. al., 2011).”
You will, of course, note that Laurel Hubbard was over 40 when going to the Olympics in *checks notes* 2021.
Here’s another one for you:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-do-trans-athletes-have-an-advantage-in-elite-sport/a-58583988
“The “normal” healthy range for cis women is between 0.3 and 2 nmol/L, according to Mayo Clinic estimates — though they vary among labs. Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome tend to have higher testosterone levels, which can reach 5.2 nmol/L. “Healthy” male testosterone ranges from 8.3 mnol/L to 32.9 nmol/L”
Oh, dear, you really have been talking out of your arse, haven’t you?
The substantive replies are below, and they blow you out of the water.
Rebel News in Canada reported on a women’s volleyball game between two Ontario Colleges where 5 (out of 10) players on the court were men. Not small men either. Rebels News is a bit over the top – but they cover things the MSM won’t – and the video footage is compelling. They also routinely report on a 55 year old man who claims he is a 13 year old girl and competes in girls swim competitions – and hangs out in their change rooms. The response of officials to this reporting was to ban Rebel News from the facility and ban parents from the change room. This issue will not resolve itself without political pressure.
Gays obtained respect when it was shown that their brain had been damaged by too much estrogen in the womb. It was biology that made them gay, not sinful perverted choice. Today male trans types want to use the women’s restroom and compete against women half their size. They may have female brains but male bodies. They must compete based on body type not brain type. Girls’ division requires a girl body for fair competition. As for restrooms, we only have their word that they are trans, many non-trans perverts are using woke trans rules to get into the girl’s restroom. Female to male trans is one of those female fads that women are susceptible to. They grow up and want their breasts back, but surgery is not reversable.
That estrogen theory can’t be true since if it were, twin or identical twin boys ought both be gay, and yet many times, one is, and one is not.
No it’s not. Compete with your own sex or in an open category. Every group in society finds their “lane”. The female lane is taken … by adult human females. We haven’t spent the last 100 years fighting for the vote, applying for mortgages without the support of male relatives, smashing through professional glass ceilings and much else, only to end up with men cheating in female sports.
One’s freedom ends when the freedom of others begins.
How hard is it to understand ?
The only reason this Article exists is to give folks a chance to rant and spout.
Of course she’s deluded. But why does this marginal issue get so much time is the more interesting question. Because it helps ‘sells’ the product whilst also distracting from much more important things.
I’m going to guess you are not a woman.
Emily Bridges cycling career may in itself be a marginal issue, but women’s sex-based rights are not.
It is biological sex – not gender feelings – which is the key factor in why women are on average smaller and less powerful than men. This of course impacts directly on performance in most sports and therefore allowing men-who-identify-as-women to enter women’s sports puts at risk women’s access to fair and safe competition, with all the benefits and opportunities that brings.
It is also biological sex – not gender feelings – which is the primary driver of the fight for women’s rights in many other areas. For example, the medical risks associated with childbirth. These are not marginal issues and allowing the proposition that how someone feels about their gender should take priority over biological sex puts women’s associated rights at increased risk.
Emily Bridges: Boo hoo hoo!
Good!
He can still participate in ‘elite sport’ if he chooses to do so in the company of his own sex (male, in case there’s any doubt). But he probably wouldn’t last long.
I keep asking myself why women go along with this farce. I keep telling myself that, put in their shoes, I would refuse to participate. Why women keep turning up for Parkrun, for instance?