Anyone fancy a transcript? I've tried to tease out where they're talking over each other.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00167rq
From 1:38:50 onwards for about ten minutes
Nick Robinson: Let’s turn now at 21 minutes to 9 to another, huge, controversy; something that stirs anger on both sides of an important argument. “Dumped by email” is how Emily Bridges’ mother described the treatment of her daughter, a transgender cyclist, by British Cycling. Bridges has been banned from racing women’s events, as cycling’s governing body reviews its transgender policy. The decision came hours after more than 650 sporting figures signed a letter calling for the rules governing who can compete in cycling to be scrapped. We speak to one of the signatories Sharron Davies in just a moment. First though let’s hear from Doctor Veronica Ivy. She hit the headlines when she became the first transgender woman to win a cycling world title. Back then though she was known as Rachel McKinnon. I asked her for her reaction to the decision to bar Bridges from switching from competing in men’s races to competing in women’s races.
Veronica Ivy: Emily was explicitly told that she could compete in British Cycling national events that are non-UCI, …
NR interjects: That’s the governing body of cycling overall.
VI: That’s the international body for cycling, correct. And then, on April 6th, the British Cycling board had an emergency meeting, to meet and vote on completely throwing out their trans policy entirely, and then that was communicated by email to Emily, saying ‘look you’re just banned as a transwoman from women’s competition’. So they had a policy …
NR interjects: Let me ask you this …. They had a policy and they changed it, is what offends you.
VI: They haven’t changed it, they’ve thrown it out. So they spent months and months, and tens of thousands of dollars, doing this review. They adopted the policy of the UCI, and then because Emily was coming up, and might have won a championship, they got backlash from a concerted well-funded group of anti-trans protestors, and so they panicked. And nothing has changed in terms of any scientific data between January and April.
Here's the thing about Emily in particular. Because she was a member of the British Cycling academy, they have years of her power data. They know how much her power numbers went down. So they know for a fact that she does not have an unfair competitive advantage. (NR interjects: But …)This is entirely based on backlash and fear.
NR: But, Doctor Ivy, there are people who argue that testosterone levels are not enough; that people born with male bodies, people who go through the puberty, do then have a permanent strength advantage. The way some people put it is, you can’t undo male puberty, it’s like boiling an egg. You can take it out of the hot water, you can’t unboil the egg.
Do you accept that?
VI: People have claimed that, but the scientific evidence does not support that. So …
NR interjects: Why don’t we abolish women’s sport if that’s the case, why don’t we just say that all people should participate in the same sport?
VI: With all due respect, I think if your answer to ‘should we or should we not include transwomen in women’s sport’ is to abolish women’s sport - seems a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
NR: No, it was my answer to your suggestion that there is no permanent advantage to people born male and go through the puberty. If there’s no permanent advantage, why do we have separate sports categories?
VI: That is a completely separate question …
NR: It is, and I’m asking you, and I’d like to know the answer if you wouldn’t mind. What is the answer?
VI: [Pause. Raises voice.] It is a completely separate point to the issue of whether we should include … (NR interjects: You see I ask the questions …) VI: … women’s sport.
NR: I ask the questions, and you give the answers if you wouldn’t mind. There are many people who think it is related to this issue. We do have separate categories, for men and women, and we do it because they have different bodies.
VI: No, there’s a fallacious premise there, that requires you to think that transwomen are, male, and men. And both are false. So the United Kingdom law says that, those who go through certain – steps – are legally and medically regarded as female. So, when you’re claiming things like ‘male bodies’, well, that’s cisgender people. We’re talking about transwomen. We are not talking about ‘should we have men’s and women’s competitions’.
(During this next section VI is heard repeatedly in the background)
NR: No, forgive me, what we’re talking about is fairness … (VI: International …) What UCI, which is (VI: Yeah. We are talking about fairness.) the international governing body … OK, well let’s talk about fairness. (VI: Yes.) The international cycling governing body, UCI, says it’s their duty to guarantee fair and meaningful competition. Now clearly there’s (VI: Correct!) two meaning of fairness. There’s fairness (VI:No!) in terms of rights, but there is also fairness in terms of people who have trained all of their lives to compete, face unfair competition from someone who has, quotes, “a male body”.
VI: But you’re begging the question there, that someone with a, “quote”, an incorrectly-labelled male body, has such an advantage. There is no evidence supporting a competitive advantage for transwomen, particularly those who meet the the UCI guidelines.
NR: Final thought. You clearly feel anger on behalf of Emily Bridges, you feel empathy for her. Do you have any empathy for women cyclists who have trained for years and feel that their sport is being altered?
VI: Um, I’m not angry. I think it’s inappropriate and problematic to label transpeople, particularly transwomen as angry when they are making reasoned points about an injustice. And this idea that if we allow transwomen into women’s sports then transwomen will start dominating and ciswomen will never win, it’s also on its merits. No transwoman has won an elite world championship, holds an elite world record. When is long enough for cisgendered people to stop worrying about this fake fantasy of transpeople dominating sports?
NR: Doctor Veronica Ivy, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Well let’s address that very point with Sharron Davies, one of those people who signed the letter calling for a change in the rules in cycling. She, of course, Olympic medal-winning swimmer, morning to you.
Sharron Davies: Good morning Nick. Thank you for that interview. (NR: First …) I was sitting here with smoke coming out of my ears, as I’m sure you’d imagine.
NR: Aha, well let’s deal with the substance though. The point that Doctor Ivy I think makes perfectly doesn’t she, is that you can’t make rules and then change them just a couple of days before a competition that is completely unfair to Emily Bridges and other people - to make rules and then rip them up after pressure.
SD: Yeah, well there was a board meeting by British Cycling in December and they asked their Advisory Group if they should change those rules, and that Advisory Group contained Pippa York who is a transgender woman cyclist and Stonewall, and they said categorically ‘no’. So there’s kind of your answer why those rules weren’t changed quite a long time ago. Um, there is an absolute difference between male and female performance. It ranges between 10% and 30% at Olympic competition and every piece of peer-reviewed evidence that has ever been done at the moment so far, shows that you cannot eliminate all of that male benefit.
NR: Is the difficulty though, for people following this very controversial debate - the International Olympic Committee said there was not a permanent, err, sorry, there was not, you couldn’t have an assumption that men were able to race more successfully or compete at sport more successfully than women.
SD: I think you can have an assumption can’t you? I mean, you mentioned it to Veronica Ivy. You said, why would we have women and men’s sport if we were the same? We have women and men’s sport because otherwise women would win nothing. As you can see from the results they are stronger, they jump higher, they run faster, you know, than women do.
NR: Forgive me I fell over the phrase now that I was stumbling over, that the IOC said there could be no assumption that a transgender athlete automatically has an unfair advantage. Sport’s in a mess about this isn’t it?
SD: Yes, well; they are in a mess, and the rules were changed in 2015 without any consultation with the stakeholders, with female athletes at all. The only people who were spoken to were transactivists, transwomen, and transdoctors. Um, and so we just feel like we’ve been so terribly let down that it’s untrue, really. And I predicted way back then that this was only going to change when we saw transwomen coming in and dominating, as we did at the ?N2A? championships just a couple of weeks ago with Lia Thomas. She went from being 500th as a man one year previous to being first as a woman, and beating 3 Olympic silver medallists.
NR: Doctor Ivy was pointing out that there’s a handful of people and there are many tens of thousands of athletes. Let me just ask you …
[garbled both talking over the other]
SD: The rules only changed in 2015, so no transgender athlete could take part in the Olympics in Rio, so the first Olympics that they could actually take part in was Tokyo, and we had Laurel Hubbard straight away. So it’s only been very short, this period of time it’s been enabled, before that you had to have a gender certificate and you had to have surgery. That is very different from what it is now.
NR: Just time to ask you, I think a big general question that really does matter in the way that I did her, about different categories of sport. Aren’t you in the end saying, that transwomen will never be treated as women in women’s sport, they will be permanently excluded from women’s sport?
SD: They won’t be excluded from sport, though. They will just be excluded from a category where it’s not fair. You know, and this is where the terminology has got to be really careful, because this word ‘banned’ is being lobbied around and it’s really not true, nobody wants anybody banned from sport. They just want fair sport.
NR: Sharron Davies, thank you very much indeed for joining us, and Doctor Veronica Ivy earlier too.