Guardian article on women in sport - Holy Moley - concludes that there is a debate!

The other important point is that this debate must be had. No longer can men tell women, such as Martina Navratilova, that when they stick up for a separate women’s sport category that they are ignorant or prejudiced. Such comments carry a pungent whiff of misogyny from the bad old days – when women were told to know their place, and kept on the margins of sport.

Bloody hell! We've only been waiting how many years, for this to be acknowledged?!

And even more amazingly, LOJ has publicly said that scrutiny on change is a Good Thing: "One of the big faults at the moment in this whole debate is the lack of scrutiny".

Well, ok, he made the comment relating to BoJo becoming PM, not male-born people competing in female sports.

...But I can't think of any reason why he'd specifically object to transparent and open investigation of other things that have the potential to dramatically change life for the wider population, like, say male-born people competing in female sports. Right Owen?

Owen?

It still doesn’t take account of the legacy differences from having testosterone through puberty - height, lung capacity, heart capacity, skeletal advantages etc.

It might have been better if Sean Ingle had asked the question "why is women's sport even being debated in this context"?

What is needed is a third category.

No man can ever be a woman and no woman can ever be a man.

Women have 44% less upper body strength “providing men an advantage for sports like boxing, weightlifting and skiing”, say the academics, while muscle mass differences lead to “decreased trunk and lower body strength by 64% and 72% respectively in women

That... just that ALL THE TIME!!! It measurably, indisputably starts in the womb FFS! AND HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR DECADES.

Why did I spend years learning and teaching about human physiology and sport /exericse adaptations? Why the fuck did I waste my time, my passion, my money, effort, brain space?

Still not fair, even if they do reduce the testosterone limits to 2.5 nmol. No female athlete is allowed to dope with testosterone for several years and then knock it off to take part in women's sports.

Sean Ingle has always been about fairness in sport, writes about doping cases with his hands tied, and would probably write better about this if he was given freer rein but I imagine his editor won’t allow it. Note lack of ability to comment. That’s not a surprise.

Wow for the Guardian that's pretty balanced! That's 2 articles recently from them that have shown more balance. I particularly liked this bit;

a guiding principle surely has to be that anyone who transitions does not leap from being bog-average to world beater in a year.

^ if

Bloody hell of this article has made it into the Guardian the tide really is turning.