The Olympics are considering dropping the requirement for testosterone testing which may open the floodgates to a deluge of males competing in women’s sports. While transgender women should be entitled to equality under the law, there is one area where transgender women (i.e., men) should not have equality and that is in competing against women in sports. Being a man offers an advantage, even if that man has undergone hormone treatment to reduce the male sex hormone testosterone in his blood. He still has a skeletomuscular physical advantage afforded him by possibly two decades of testosterone.
It is strange that testosterone should be a candidate for being taken off the list of proscribed drugs. The performance enhancing capacity of most allegedly performance enhancing drugs is marginal at best as evidenced by the outcomes. Not so for testosterone. Witness the case of the South African athlete Caster Semanya, who is a woman with abnormally high levels of testosterone. She was ahead of her fellow female runners by a country mile in the early days of competing. Semanya was forced to take testosterone reducing drugs and when she did, she stopped winning races. The case for the remarkable performance enhancing properties of testosterone rests.
Most recently we have had a male swimming competitor, Lia Thomas, from being around 500th in his field when competing against other men move to first place when competing against women. According to Olympic swimmer Sharon Davies MBE, he was not even using the correct stroke for the distance. I have rarely seen such a pitiful sight as Mr Thomas alone on one side of the podium with the female competitors bunched up well away from him. Clearly, nobody really thinks he won that race except him. Even transgender athlete Caitlin Jenner believes he did not win and transgender activist Debbie Hayton thinks likewise.
As Sharon Davies pointed out, Thomas not only knocked the person who came second, declared the real winner of the race by Ron DeSantis, off her rightful perch. The person who came third among the women lost a podium place and another three females at Penn State University were prevented from competing having been beaten in the qualifying rounds by Thomas.
Female competitors are being unfairly disadvantaged by the presence of trans women competitors. At the Tokyo Olympics, it is known that at least nine male athletes competed as women in both the Olympics and Paralympics. At the next Olympics, female cyclists may lose their places in the British team to a male cyclist called Emily Bridges who has already competed and won against male competitors. Bridges has been barred from some forthcoming UK cycling contests but on technical grounds related to his transition process. This may prevent qualification for the Olympics; but there is always the next one. And all this is still under the requirement for trans female athletes to be tested for testosterone levels. If testosterone testing is dropped and that spreads out from the Olympics as it is likely to do, then it is unlikely that there will be any female competitors left.
It has been suggested that a transgender Olympics be developed. However, that raises a problem. First, notwithstanding that a transgender Olympics would be composed entirely of male competitors (the waiting list for sportswomen who claim to be men seems to be non-existent) few would enter as those who did would have to compete on an even footing. Overall, we would simply witness a bunch of mainly second rate male athletes competing against each other and few people would want to watch it.
Lead Correspondent | David Clews is the Lead Correspondent for UNN, with over 20 years of political/campaigning experience and a wealth of social media and communication skills David gets to the heart of what is really important to the real people of the UK.
Keep up to date with all of David & UN’s work by linking up with us on our Social Media Channels by Clicking Here Now: https://unitynewsnetwork.co.uk/our-social-media-links/
