Sharron Davies: Injustice of transgender athletes has echo of the dopers I faced

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www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1883a6ea-b020-11ec-8b8c-0207c0fd6104?shareToken=8360506f23bb1f0f0e817d762f48fb44

As a swimmer who faced the androgenised girls of East Germany at every turn in my first career in the pool, I feel the treatment of women in the debate over trans inclusion in sport adds insult to injury.

It all brings back horrid memories of women being robbed of a fair playing field and life-long opportunities, and of anyone who spoke up for justice being told to keep quiet or pay a price.

We’re told that inclusion can only mean one thing: women have to move over and find room for people who grew up as boys and went through puberty before transitioning. At the college swimming championships in the US this month we saw an athlete, Lia Thomas, who was an average club swimmer as a man claim an NCAA title as the US No 1 woman with 20 years of male development in the tank.

Sharron Davies is spot on.

She and her father lost so much by speaking up about that previous scandal that had been allowed to rumble on for decades with no chance of restitution.

Not only did Sharron and her father sacrifice so much, a generation and more of girls and young women didn't have the benefit of a gold medallist role model and as ambassador for swimming and sport in general.

And the poor athletes who were given the drugs - they didn’t always know that their ‘vitamin shots’ were powerful drugs - and had their health permanently damaged. But hey, they were just girls (how many who didn’t ‘make it’ were damaged along the way?).

If you look at what coaches have done in the past (giving athletes drugs under false pretences), a dangerous precedent has been set where average boys will be pressurised into reducing their testosterone levels and competing as girls. Who knows? It may have happened already.

@BootsAndRoots

If you look at what coaches have done in the past (giving athletes drugs under false pretences), a dangerous precedent has been set where average boys will be pressurised into reducing their testosterone levels and competing as girls. Who knows? It may have happened already.

If everyone rolled over and accepted this as the new normal I'm almost certain it would lead to that. For every A team male there's a B or C team male who is good but just not good enough to make a career out of it in elite sport. Depending on the sport we're talking quite a lot of money at stake too.

Given how much money can be made at elite level in some sports, the temptation will be tremendous ,especially in countries where being an elite athlete can change not only your life but your entire family's as well.

Well done for speaking up Sharon. There are some people who will actively abuse this policy but even those men who genuinely identify with their individual internalised belief of what a woman is should not be in women's sports and Sharon is brave for standing up to this assault on women's rights.

Brilliant woman speaking out about this consistently and tenaciously for women and girls.

I saw somewhere within the last year that coaches are looking carefully at girls' sports at the very local level, preferably in poorer countries where genetic testing is unlikely. The goal is to find people like Caster Semenya, who have DSDs that give them higher testosterone levels than average women. They're looking, in effect, for what you might call natural doping.

Then, of course, after the girls have worked themselves to the bone, rise to elite levels and are faced with genetic testing, the whole thing comes crashing down. The girls with DSDs are innocent in this, since they truly don't know. The coaches, however, do know what they're doing.

It's what they'll be doing in spades with the whole trans nonsense if this goes in the men-can-be-women-any-time-they-want direction.

Sharron is a brilliant advocate for this issue. She highlights the lunacy of scrutinising women who take relatively low levels of drugs - and get caught, rightly so - against allowing post pubertal males into womens sport with just testosterone checks. As an elite athlete when extensive drug use was routinely used by certain regimes, she is very well positioned to say this.