Transgender People in Sport: An Unnecessary Controversy
The nomination of Transgender woman and swimmer Lia Thomas for the NCCA “Woman of the Year” award has solicited the predictable criticism.
If you accept the traditionally prevailing view of sport then the reaction of feminists does seem not just reasonable but unchallengeable; it is a fact that biological men go through two bursts of muscle growth at puberty whilst women get only one.
However the accusations of unfair treatment are coming from people who benefit from and defend a system designed to institutionalise inequality. Elite athletes, the people at the forefront of the campaign against transgender women in competitive sport, enjoy their privileged position precisely because they are unfairly gifted. These people have no opposition to or sympathy for transgender men in sport of course; they’re not likely to be a threat.
Of course the term unfairly gifted is never used. Pundits, fans and athletes like to talk about innate talent, unique gift and shining aptitude but still expect us to believe that the competition is fair.
Could anyone win this event if they trained hard enough ? No ! She’s a star, uniquely gifted, one of the greats, she has something others don’t ! Right. So not really a contest at all then.
This unnecessary, divisive and damaging controversy highlights the myopic liberal gallop past the facts to collect as many virtue-signalling awards as possible in the shortest possible time.
If instead of arguing about the precise way in which sport should be unfair, sport was reorganised to make it fairer for all, there would be no issue about transgender involvement.
Some sport has already ditched the clumsy male/female categorization. In motor racing, for example, it makes no sense.
Paralympic athletics goes a long way to recognising that people are not competing equally just because they share a sex and have categories created using modern sports science to group together people with similar innate capacity. Disappointingly, despite demonstrating how it isn’t needed, the Paralympic authorities still succumb to the lure of that crude male/female division.
All sport could be organized along the same lines as the Paralympics. Every event would group together people with similar innate ability in terms of scientifically determined physiology; it would then matter not a jot whether you were male, female, old, young or preferred not to say. I wonder how many elite (biological) women athletes would actually welcome such an advancement of fairness.
Why stop there though ? Why maintain a competitive framework for sport that inevitable makes 99% of people failures ? Why not simply encourage everyone to take part, in a suitable category and take no notice of whoever happens to win ? Because sport is primarily a business concerned with profits for shareholders and not an enterprise concerned with the physical and mental health of all people.
