Seems sensible enough to be honest about it:
World Athletics has made the landmark decision to ban transgender women from competing in female international events.
The move was hailed by Sharron Davies, the Olympic medallist and BBC presenter, who has campaigned for five years on the issue and says she has been subjected to horrific online abuse.
The World Athletics Council has voted to follow swimming and rugby rather than cycling and rowing in ruling that there can be no fair inclusion criteria for transgender athletes in elite women’s sport.
The entire idea of wimmins’ sport is to protect the wimmins from competition with the male physique. Where this doesn’t matter – say equestrianism – then the distinction isn’t made. Shrug.
A global ruling body showing a modicum of common sense; has anyone spotted any porcine aviators overhead?
I remember seeing a pic on the front of a Sunday paper magazine (No, not the Sport) of Ms. Davies wearing a rubber dress back in the 1980’s /early ’90’s’s. Corrrrr.
Bloody Hell!!!! I just googled it and there’s loads of ’em. Better stock up on the Kleenex.
Fine pair of shoulders, Ms Davies.
Given Athletics’ struggle to deal with Caster Semenya, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to ban post-ops
Being the vilest sexist imaginable, I also believe that women should be banned from competing in men’s sports.
But I suppose the blokes’d really prefer some of those cute kids stripping off in the men’s dressing room.
With apologies to Niemöller, “first they came” is actually a good strategy. First they came for transgenders in rugby, because it’s obvious that rugby men are much bigger and stronger, and arguably pose a physical danger to the feebler women.
By the time they came for athletics, the argument was already lost.
I wonder if they had been waiting to see what the pushback was on previous decisions and decided it was small enough to risk. If that’s the case hopefully we are last peak trans and some sensibility will set back in.
Well done by world rugby on playing the safety card as a strategy though
Yup. Motorsport too. These gals beat their male Iron Lynx stablemates at Le Mans last year. (And, although they were the only all-female team, they weren’t the only women driving. Lilou Wadoux is a star of the future, I think.) Yet the FIA, for some unfathomable reason, is trying to introduce a distinction. I don’t get it.
These days F1 needs lots of stamina, though not out & out strength. Gone are the days of Hunt the Shunt. It’s been decades since there was a lady F1 driver. More recently Susie Wolff only got to be a Williams test driver, and I wonder just how much of Toto’s influence led to that.
It’ll be interesting to see in future years if the W Series becomes a route to F1.
Fair point, TG. Maybe the “route to F1” is the rationale for it. Which, as you say, may be a fool’s errand. I much prefer the endurance racing approach, where it’s quite clear women can compete at the same level.
Female truck drivers are pretty common nowadays. In the late seventies I worked for a company that serviced and repaired trucks. Sometimes trucks would break down while out on the road and would need to be towed in. For these occasions the company had a Scammel recovery vehicle. I never drove this thing out on the road but sometimes I had to move it around the yard because it was in the way. I was a pretty fit and strong nineteen year old but I barely possessed the super human strength needed to operate the thing. Many years later I worked with an ex army sergeant who told me that they had trucks similar to this and also had women who drove them. He also said that these girls were bloody terrifying.