Here we come ...

@MsGreying I used to be a serial complainer but now there are so many battles, I try to pick and choose! Maybe I should re-start my complaints to the Graun though!

@Tootingbec You put this far better than I did, thank you.
I'm really fucking cross about this. I know I can't expect any better from the guardian, but their article yesterday was quite free of hand wringing about the poor overlooked menz, so that I think I was lulled into a false sense of security. Thankfully I start work soon, and I block chrome on my phone so I'm not distracted so I won't be tempeted to raise my blood pressure any further.

If you want to know the position some very senior people at the UN have on this matter, Alexandra Xanthaki, Special Rapporteur, was interviewed on Radio 4 last night, from about 9 minutes 40 seconds:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002t2w6

It was even worse than you might have imagined.

Oh, and then they bring racism into it! Yes, women of colour suffer more from judgements about looking feminine enough, but they won't be targeted more if everyone is doing the same test. The whole thing has noting to do with judging women on their femininety, and everything to do with correctly categorising people as male or female. Looks don't come into it in the slightest.

Write and tell them

Editor @.

The AOC says they will comply but this this issue is “complex and challenging”

In what way AOC is it complex and challenging? The obfuscation is so rife. There is nothing complex about it - men should not be competing in women’s sports.

And all the hand wringing about “women of colour” being discriminated against because of how they look. What a load of old bollocks. You test everyone once with a cheek swab and then deal with the infinitesimal small number of athletes who don’t fit into XX or XY with respect and sensitivity. Everyone else can crack on with their day.

@spannasaurus yes, that line particularly infuriated me too. They never expand on what that means, and it's so easy for non-thinking folk to just nod along "oh yes, stereotypes, bad things, must be a terrible decision then". There's also a bit about the weightlifter (Hubbard?) failing to win any medals, like that's some sort of gotcha. Allowing men to compete against women would have been such an obviously terrible idea not that long ago. I still don't understand how people's thinking has become so skewed in such a short period of time!

Obviously there are no comments open on the article because then the Graun would have to delete most of them.
I completely resent the years of membership fees I paid to that stupid woman-hating rag. It's just as corrupt as all the other rags it claims to be better than.

As several UN independent experts have noted, binary definitions of sex reinforce harmful stereotypes and erode progress toward substantive gender equality.

How does recognising that there are only two sexes reinforce stereotypes? I want journalists to start asking these experts to explain what they mean when they say this kind of stuff.