Transgender women in sport on women's hour 20/03/23

[WarriorN]

Just heard they're going to discuss it.

That law lecturer has built her whole career on genderism. The fact that she was unable to come up with any way of balancing fairness and safety for female athletes with including males in the female category is pretty telling.

Yeah cos (intake of breath) it’s complex bla bla bla

I'm trying to find out who the lawyer was, any ideas?

Seema Patel - Nottingham Trent Uni

www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/seema-patel

from the website

Role
Seema is a senior lecturer in law. She leads, lectures and tutors on a number of law modules. Her area of expertise is Sports Law in which she module leads an optional final-year undergraduate module. Seema also leads modules on the LLM Sports Law course. She is involved in the supervision of Sports Law PhD projects.

Many thanks. I did look on the Uni website but couldn't work out who she was.

Like @Ndd135632 I am interested in why the 17 peer reviewed studies, one over 20 years, were dismissed by the BBC. If there is a flaw in the studies then say what it is don’t just silence the mention of them and then give air time to a current study which is struggling to prove its hypothesis.

I didn’t hear the interview but the answer to “lived experience” is
(a) ‘No Thank You’
(b) Every woman that has tried to complain and been told to STFU or else. They are told they’re sore losers/bad at training/just not very good.

@Birdsweepsin I assume your point is that the mediocre men wouldn't be so keen to compete as 'women' if there was nothing in it for them and it would be great to call their bluff in this way....
but what about sports where there is any contact between participants TW would still want to be allowed to play or team sports where the inclusion of one male body tips the balance against an all female team - why should the females on the team only be able to take part non-competitively and there is the issue of changing rooms.
Seema couldn't suggest a way in which safety, fairness and inclusion could be achieved because there isn't a way just a vision of a time when all the nasty old terfs shut up and women budge over to let sad men receive validation.

Woman's Hour Twitter now has a tweet referencing this.

Can't find a link for the recording on BBC, can someone post a link please - if you have it

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k7qr

Oh yeah, you're right @Myaiminlife

Damn.

OK, new idea. All AFAB competitors in contact sports get to wear a power loader robot suit like in Aliens

twitter.com/BBCWomansHour/status/1637816511934136321?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Link in tweet . Segment starts about 28 mins in.

In the twitter thread someone says that the harper study only has one participant left, Bridges.

twitter.com/cathydevine56/status/1637828255595081729?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

If this is correct, no wonder Harper declined to discuss it.

I'm amazed Woman's Hour had the debate at all. Thank god for that. The times they are a-changing. And thank god they had Sharron Davies on, who really knows her stuff.

Clicking through to WarriorN's Twitter link, I see Maria MacLachlan is back on Twitter - good news.

I'm glad they had Sharron Davies on. She's remarkable. And she was on the receiving end of being beaten by athletes using testosterone that she didn't have.

I like listening to her, not just because she's unfailingly polite and calm. But, because she's bloody single-minded. She never wavers from the point, and she can't be deterred. A very necessary characteristic in a world-class swimmer.

I don't tend to listen to Womans Hour now either.

They have totally wavered from the point, and are relentlessly deterred in favour of males.

SD came across well, IMO. It must be really hard to know how best to argue this stuff for a general audience and she mostly did a good job.

Things that were done particularly well IMO included: stressing the reasons for having/retaining sex categories; drawing analogies with age & weight categories in certain sports; mentioning the importance of menstruation [i'd have been tempted to also mention pregnancy, nursing, maybe menopause too]; mentioning the impact on livelihoods; stressing that choosing between sex categories is unique to male competitors.

Things that came across less well - some of the talk around around more esoteric anatomical differences between the sexes, e.g. even if the 'Q angle' stuff is important I think talk of it is best reserved for very technical audiences, it can come across as a little strange/quackish.

I think I more or less liked her 'safety-fairness-inclusion' framework, exploiting the rhetorical power of three is never a bad idea, and it's absolutely right to put safety top, though she for me didn't do quite enough to really stress why fairness should come before inclusion. The other speaker was interesting in that she appeared to be tacitly acknowledging that therapy won't fully mitigate male advantages but intimating that she'd still want to argue the case anyway, it's relatively rare for trans rights campaigners to do this.

I think the single key argument, and in fairness SD started with it but for me maybe didn't return to it quite often enough, is that the whole point of, the whole reason for, women's sport, is to see how good it's possible for people to get without having been through male puberty. That's it, that's it's whole raison d'etre. Everything else flows from this. It's just like, say, the point of under-10's sport being to see how good it's possible for people to get before their 10th birthday; and the point of lightweight boxing is to see how good boxers can get without exceeding 61kg in bodyweight. Whilst it's true that a really exceptional under-10 athlete will beat almost all 11 year olds, and that a really exceptional lightweight boxer will beat nearly all middleweights, that's just not the point at all, neither point in any way invalidates the need for the distinct classes.

You don't need all this esoteric stuff, do you? In the end, what it boils down to is:

Humans can't change sex.

Men shouldn't be in women's sports.

The End.

Inclusion as a concept in this particular context doesn't work. If you include males, you will be excluding females. Almost all of them, in fact. They will never break the record that he sets.

I think they have decided that the word inclusion is emotive, and that's why they are using it. As soon as you start questioning it, tho, it falls apart.

And males are included, in male sport. And if they're not good enough because of the drugs they're taking, then they go lower down the league, just like anyone else. Or, start their own league.

Well said.

Fuck knows how Sharon kept her cool - she is so good at setting out the rational and emotional position for why male bodied athletes have no place in women's sport.

And I love love loved her take down of bloody Tom Daley.

I increasingly think it might need earth to be invaded by an alien species that are only a bit stronger and a bit faster than adult human males for some people to realise that competition isn't 'meaningful' if some of the competitors have a biological advantage.
Sport is all about fine margins and tiny advantages - the arguments about body suits in swimming and handlebar design in cycling happen because a tiny advantage can be the difference between winning and losing but women are supposed to put up and shut up when it comes male advantage. No amount of testosterone suppression will mitigate lung capacity, q angle or the dozens of other differences between male and female bodies and they won't touch the social expectations either.
If athletics can allow male bodies to compete against females when they don't acknowledge the fastest marathon time because it used new trainer technology they are utter hypocrites.