Just stick to bloody football Gary.
Oliver Brown in The Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2025/05/15/gary-lineker-interview-gaza-transgender-america-bbc-motd/
“One other area where Lineker has been noticeably silent is a subject where centrist-dad equivocations are difficult: men masquerading in sport as women. This has been front-page news in his own realm, with the Football Association forced this month to ban males from all levels of the female game, honouring the Supreme Court’s ruling that the definition of a woman was based on biological sex. And yet Lineker has consistently swerved it. When his podcast, The Rest Is Football, tried a public question-and-answer experiment last November, Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies and hundreds of other women asked him what he thought of the FA banning a teenager – revealed by The Telegraph last weekend as Cerys Vaughan – for asking a transgender opponent: “Are you a man?” Even under pressure from a nine-time Wimbledon singles champion and a celebrated Olympic swimmer, he neglected to engage. Why?
“Ugh,” he sighs, slumping so far forward in his chair he nearly hits the table. “You can’t cover that subject properly in a post. It’s too nuanced. I don’t actually think, in terms of sport, that it will ever be a real issue. Sport, as it’s already doing, will sort it out and work out rules. Like they did in boxing, when they realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas.”
Is it not blindingly obvious, however, that sport will not simply “sort it out”? It has taken many determined female campaigners a punishingly long time to undo the damage of gender ideology, compelling sports to prioritise fairness for women rather than vacuous mantras about inclusion. Amid broad acceptance that the rights of half the population should trump the view of a small, vocal minority of men that they are entitled to colonise women’s sport, Lineker makes it clear where his sympathies lie. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue? It’s the same swimmer, the same weightlifter, the same boxer. They’re the only people I ever see.”
Lineker’s perspective here is myopic. The three examples he raises – American swimmer Lia Thomas, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, not transgender but permitted to win gold as a woman at the Paris Olympics despite sex tests indicating the presence of male chromosomes – are indeed well-publicised. But they are far from the only ones he could cite, with a recent report by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, documenting how governing bodies’ failures to act had led to more than 600 female athletes around the world losing 890 medals in 29 different sports.
In his eyes, only cases at elite level matter. “We’ve got the Women’s Euros in the summer. Let’s see if there’s one issue – I don’t think there is. Are you telling me that there are many people who pretend to be women just so they’re going to be good at sport?” The desire of some males to receive affirmation as female can be a powerful motivating force, I argue. “It’s so complex,” Lineker says. “I see both sides to a degree.””