Nic Williams on Woman's Hour (Tuesday) talking about sport and gender identity

Can you imagine being a poor tutor that is sitting listening to some of the nonsense that is being spouted on the radio and twitter, then realising that it’s one of your former students that’s doing it. I’m sure there’s a few GC tutors out there, just cringing and wondering what the hell they’ve unleashed on the world. 😁

But at the same time we don't know that, and it may, and that's what I'm saying, that you know, there is a bit of an argument academically that perhaps women kind of cap their capability, psychologically, because they're competing against other women, if they feel that they're then competing against other men, who - we take it in society that men perform better than women, then perhaps they would up their performance and be competing on more of that level

Batshit - can't see why an academic would go on a national radio programme to say this if they had any sense.

Pencils
You are the Ultimate Transcriber

There is so much more on this topic WH really need to cover, I can’t believe that’s it!

That’s brilliant PencilsInSpace Thank you.

Thanks so much Pencils

that MNHQ are still trying to police the criticism of the absurd, is truly a horrifying and incredible phenonmenon
I agree, is there some 5th column at MNHQ or are they all of this persuasion?

Nice one on the transcript @PencilsInSpace :o

Transcript part 2:

JG: Well that is the view of Dr Beth Jones. Dr Nicola Williams runs the campaign organisation I mentioned, Fair Play For Women, and has a professional background in biology and biochemistry. And just to emphasise again, Beth and Nicola were quite happy to talk to each other, we just couldn't make it work logistically, so no problem there. Nicola, can we just agree on Beth's final point, that actually sport is a positive, and when it's inclusive it's rather brilliant?

Nicola Williams: Yes, and women and girls are underrepresented in sport, and we certainly need to increase participation for women and girls, and that's another reason why there's a threat to that when transwomen are potentially competing against women.

JG: Is it a given that someone with lots of testosterone will out-perform somebody who lacks huge amounts of testosterone?

NW: Well, Beth's analysis is correct, in that there are very few good, robust studies looking at the performance of transwomen before and after transition. So she's correct there, but unfortunately her conclusions are badly wrong here, and, I mean, I think Beth's missing the elephant in the room really, which is that transwomen have a male body. And so the question needs to be - do transwomen bring male physical advantage to female competitive sports? And in the absence of the evidence to the contrary, we have to presume - yes.

JG: Why do we have to presume yes?

NW: Because they are male bodies and we don't need science to tell us that male bodies are ... have an advantage in sport, you know, common sense. Just looking at some of the facts, like ... the fastest woman sprinter ever has never reached under ten seconds. Now, that means that no woman would ever qualify for a men's sprint race at the Olympics, for example. Serena Williams would be expected to be at, say, 700th in the male seeds. Paula Radcliffe, marathon runner - 500th in the male rankings. So, you know, there's not - it's not that Paula Radcliffe just doesn't push herself far enough. Her body is female and there's a limit there, and male people have the benefit of not just testosterone at the time, they have the benefit of having developed since puberty with testosterone, so that their bodies are bigger, their skeletons are a different size ...

JG: Yes, OK ...

NW: ... all sorts of advantages.

JG: ... right, but as Beth, and who isn't here, and I keep - need to emphasise this, Beth was not unwilling to talk directly to Nicola, we just couldn't make that happen. Beth isn't here to defend herself, I suppose - one way of putting it. The fact that you say, quite categorically, that the fact that testosterone has existed means that its impact will continue to be felt ... how can we be certain that you're right there? Where's the research into that?

NW: Well, the issue is, is that there isn't research either way, so we have to take the most sensible conclusion, which is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we have to presume that a male body is still advantageous.

JG: Even you say we have to presume, you don't - as you freely admit the research isn't quite there.

NW: Yep, and I would love there to be resea - I mean we really need - I mean I would recommend that we put a moratorium on the use of - the participation of transwomen in sports until we get that evidence, because as soon as we can tell what the levels of testosterone need to be, perhaps, for a transwoman to be able to compete fairly, until we know that, it's not fair to put that onto women.

JG: I guess also, and you mentioned right at the very beginning, and it's something we've often talked about on this programme, the relatively low participation rate of women and girls won't exactly - it won't go up if women and girls are going to be beaten all the time. That's one of the possibilities, isn't it?

NW: It is, it's a major possibility, and you know, we've got to ask ourselves why do male and female sports exist anyway? You know, why don't we have mixed sports? And the reason we have females competing separately is to give them a sporting chance, you know, to give them meaningful competition. So female sport showcases and celebrates, really, the best of what a female body, you know, can do. So if we allow basically a subset of male people to participate in female sports, that completely undermines the purpose and motivation behind female sports and women and girls will simply miss out on places, and they will leave the - leave sports in their droves, you know, at both the professional level and in the recreational level, because there will be no fun or fairness in women's sport anymore, if girls are having to compete, essentially against male bodied people.

JG: The truth is that most of us are nowhere near being brilliant athletes. We're built one way, and actually the successful sports people, regardless of their gender, are ... I was going to say anomalies - they're strange, aren't they? They have physical capabilities the rest of us couldn't get close to. They have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of us, surely?

NW: Well there's still a major difference between the best female and the best male. You know, there is a well known performance gap between males and females at elite sports, so you know, they don't actually have that much in common. That's why we have male and female sports. I mean, just going back to this unfairness issue with people that are maybe training, you know, or just recreational, you know, I had a conversation with a mother that contacted me, worried because her daughter, teenage daughter's really involved in sports and training and she wants to be the best, she wants to get to the Olympics. But her mother knows that, you know, those hopes could just be dashed if a transwoman was to compete in her category and that, you know, that's the dreams of the girl being smashed. So we really do have to weigh up the ...

JG: Yeah, I mean that's a slightly verging on apocalyptic vision of the female sporting future in which every competition is naturally won by a transwoman. We're not actually talking about that as a possibility, seriously, are we?

NW: Well, I actually think we are. Let's look at some examples. So we've got Rachel McKinnon ...

JG: A cyclist who you referred to earlier, yep ...

NW: ... a cyclist who is a - who is now a world champion in her category on track cycling. Now, Rachel McKinnon transitioned when she was 29 and, within two years, went from newbie to world champion. We've got Hannah Mouncey - Hannah, when she was a man, played in handball at Olympic level, in handball for Australia. Hannah is now - has transitioned to a woman and plays in the women's team. Now, Hannah is still very large and very muscley and it's clear that that's dangerous. In fact, Hannah has actually broken the leg of a female competitor for example.

JG: Right, OK, I get - I mean that is one example, and I guess it won't be that difficult to find examples of that nature, but we'll have to leave it there Nicola because there are many other people of course who feel passionately on the other side. We have tried to be as fair as we possibly can in this series of conversations, all of which you can find on the various Woman's Hour podcasts, going back now for the last three weeks, all available of course on the BBC Sounds app. Nicola, good to see you, thank you very much, and our thanks too to Dr Beth Jones who we heard from earlier.

Transcript part 1:

Jane Garvey: So then to the final in our many conversations, it seems like, over the last couple of weeks, about sex and gender, which as I've said previously is something that really interests some of you, though not all of you. But nevertheless, it's a conversation we feel is extremely important and we are happy to return to it for one final time today. Yesterday we discussed lesbians and transwomen and you can find all our other discussions, of course, from the programme via the BBC Sounds app.

Today, we've moved on to sport, and transwomen, obviously want to play alongside and compete against other women and many would say, why ever not? Trans athletes can compete against women at international level but are they inevitably at a natural physical advantage? We'll get the views of Dr Nicola Williams, who runs a campaign group called Fair Play For Women and has a professional background in biology and biochemistry. First, you're going to hear from Dr Beth Jones, who's based at Nottingham Trent University, and Beth has conducted research into sport and transgender health. Now, I talked to her yesterday, not because she wasn't willing to join in a discussion, but just because she didn't have the time, she just wasn't available this morning.

So I asked Beth about the rules set down by the International Olympic Committee ...

Beth Jones: So, for transwomen there's a requirement that they've been taking cross sex hormone treatment, so oestrogen treatment, to enable their levels to be what we see within the cisgender population, so among cisgender women.

JG: Just to be clear about what you mean by cisgender ...

BJ: So cisgender are people who are non-transgender, so that's people who are kind of satisfied, or don't question the gender that they were assigned at birth.

JG: So yup, without putting words into your mouth and for the benefit of our listeners, you're talking essentially about 99% of women.

BJ: I wouldn't know the exact percentage

JG: Well, it would be about that, wouldn't it? Most of us think of ourselves as women, rather than ciswomen.

BJ: I think there are a significant proportion of women who might identify as a woman, who may have been assigned a different gender and I wouldn't want to assign kind of a percentage to that, but at least the majority of our society, yes, would consider themselves as a cis woman.

JG: The impact then of that oestrogen treatment you mentioned on athletic performance, what do you think it's likely to be?

BJ: I'm not sure that there is any scientific evidence that shows that, you know, oestrogen or testosterone has an impact in transgender people on their athletic performance. You know, certainly women report that once they've been on oestrogen therapy they feel weaker, they run slower than perhaps they did before, but there's no kind of robust scientific evidence to say that either testosterone or oestrogen impacts directly on athletic performance.

JG: Let's talk about Rachel McKinnon. She's interesting, in October she won the first world title by a trans athlete in track cycling. So, there was some controversy about this. Rachel did say that actually she had an unhelpfully low level of testosterone, something that the rules had actually insisted upon, and she pointed to that, so what do you make of that?

BJ: I think it's difficult to say, as I've said, you know, there's no evidence, and what we do know is that every person's body makes and responds to testosterone very differently, so that might just be her personal experience of having her testosterone levels reduced, but objectively, we don't know if that is the case or not.

JG: If we accept then that we are all different as individuals, is it time just to get rid of female and male sports and classes?

BJ: In an ideal world I think, you know, that would be great, it would overcome a lot of these issues around gender and sport, but at the current time it's probably not feasible to do so, I mean, you know, in years to come that might be the case, but at least for here and now, that's not going to be something that we can implement straight away. But we have started to see, at lower level sport and physical activity, you know, that people do at the weekend for fun etc., we have started to see more mixed gendered sports teams and so on, and you can see the positive impacts that that does have, not only on trans people, but also on, you know, cis people as well, the general population.

JG: But at the much more sophisticated, professional level of sport, if that happened it would mean that, in team games for example, no woman would ever play hockey for Great Britain or England again.

BJ: Uhhhhm ... they may ...

JG: Well, they may not!

BJ: They may not, that is all in the future to be determined.

JG: But that's not ... that's not an ideal, is it? Certainly for feminists who believe very strongly in female sport and the importance of it. That would be a horrifying prospect.

BJ: I don't think just because we have mixed gendered hockey teams, for example, that would mean that women wouldn't play. It might mean actually, if women feel that they are in a mixed team, they may push themselves even more to achieve even more, to be on more of a comparative level to males. I don't think it necessarily means that women wouldn't be able to play ... at a competitive ...

JG: No, I mean they'd never be picked. I mean obviously it would be the duty of whoever picks the team to pick the best team and, to be brutal about it, that probably wouldn't feature any women.

BJ: But at the same time we don't know that, and it may, and that's what I'm saying, that you know, there is a bit of an argument academically that perhaps women kind of cap their capability, psychologically, because they're competing against other women, if they feel that they're then competing against other men, who - we take it in society that men perform better than women, then perhaps they would up their performance and be competing on more of that level. So we may see women picked for those teams.

JG: What about the fact that at the moment, I mean you may know more, I don't think - I can't think of any transmen competing in sports who would out-perform their, let's call them cis male counterparts? Are there any?

BJ: I'm not personally aware, but you have to be mindful that we see trans people every day, they're not kind of invisible people, but we don't always necessarily realise that, or people don't want to disclose that. So of course there may be high profile athletes who are trans but we are just not publicly aware of it, just as there may be trans people, you know, working in the same office that you work in and you may not realise that because that person may not choose to disclose that information.

JG: Yep, I suppose what I'm getting at is the fact that there is no doubt that some people very firmly would believe that transwomen pose a threat to women competing in sport, in terms of success. To put it bluntly, do you believe that trans male athletes, let's say, pose a threat to male athletes?

BJ: I don't think any trans person, regardless of whether they identify as male or female, pose a threat to their competitors ...

JG: But we know, based purely on fact, it is highly unlikely that a transman would go faster, or lift something heavier, than a man in a competitive arena.

BJ: You say as a fact, but the same applies as it does to transgender females, there is no evidence that has explored you know, in transmen, what it's like to undergo testosterone therapy, how that might implicate our athletic ability, and whether we do perform better or worse, in comparison to cis males.

JG: What about the ordinary population, those of us who occasionally do a bit of sport? Sport - participation in sport - is actually really important, whoever you are, whatever you are.

BJ: Yep, of course it is, and perhaps even more so for transgender people. Unfortunately, you know, because of the way society is, trans people tend to report quite high levels of mental health, so a lot of depression, high levels of anxiety, social anxiety, and we know from extensive research that has taken place with the general population that physical activity - sport, you know, sport participation, is a really good kind of treatment to alleviate poor mental health problems. So yeah, of course it can only be a positive thing to make physical activity in sport inclusive for transgender people.

The fact a women can go on women's hour and claim, that there are no physical reasons for segregating women's and men's sports, should surely show everyone how clearly we have been duped into accepting the absurd.

The fact this duping has happened, that the absurd is accepted,
that MNHQ are still trying to police the criticism of the absurd, is truly a horrifying and incredible phenonmenon.

The fact this highly effective thought control has happened in a seemly open democratic society should make our blood run cold, and ceratinly makes me reflect on many historic events in a different way.

Another university dropping down the league tables
I though psychology was more rigorous than this
Where are the biologists ??? Oh wait there isn’t a bloody discussion with them because there isn’t much to say: females are still female.

You should be ok, as you’ve reported yourself.

@PositivelyPERF

Oh no. I didn't realize that. I have just reported myself to avoid a strike, I hope!

user1471451327 it’s just a teeny weeny bit long. 😁

Terfing That’s a banned term, so you’ll get deleted for that. It’s three strikes and your out. I’ve had my first on this thread.

The term cis is also banned, so you can’t describe someone as a cis man or woman. I assume that also means you can’t describe transwomen as none cis men.

"trans woman" is the preferred term of TRAs. For them, it's like "disabled woman" or "black woman" - a description of a particularly oppressed member of the female sex.

They view the term "transwoman" as a micro-aggression, implying a third 'other' class that isn't related to the female sex.

I suspect you could use people who come under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment in the Equality Act as a legal coverall (though a bit of a palavar)

I do think that transsexual makes people think that people have had genital operations, when we know this is not necessarily the case at all.

So much obscuring of facts and realities, and claims of transphobia and triggering when women try to clarify the situation. Just wrong.

It is also about coercive control of language to force a belief system on others whether they share it or not. With the aim that most people will innocently try to please without realising they have been compelled to validate a faith they may not with informed consent, have wished to. Like many parts of this ideology, it is slid in under the table with the hope that it's too embedded to argue with before anyone realises what is going on

Hear hear, this is important stuff, and lots of people will think, whats in a name, whats in a word etc, BUT the power to decide who and what belongs in what category should not be underestimated!

Lets call them transexuals then....there is no LAW on this (yet)

That would be an insult to actual transsexual people. I wouldn’t want to lump them in with MRAs, AGPs, cross dressers and men who claim to be women a couple of days a week, while using their male privilege for their own gain the rest of the week.

I remain astonished that a single person, much less a woman, actually believes that transwomen should be allowed to compete in women's sports.

Lets call them transexuals then....there is no LAW on this (yet)

It is also about coercive control of language to force a belief system on others whether they share it or not. With the aim that most people will innocently try to please without realising they have been compelled to validate a faith they may not with informed consent, have wished to. Like many parts of this ideology, it is slid in under the table with the hope that it's too embedded to argue with before anyone realises what is going on.