Phillipa york in the guardian

[Theeyeballsinthesky]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/jun/16/when-i-stopped-racing-i-thought-who-am-i-pippa-york-on-leaving-her-old-life-behind

equating young girls going on the pill with puberty blockers

“If you look at puberty blockers, that’s going to start around 12. Young girls are given the pill, so are we going to say that’s not OK? The decisions being made now over puberty blockers are purely political.”

and denying men have an advantage over women

She states that the idea that “somebody who’s been through male puberty has this innate advantage is just ludicrous. People come in all sizes. Each of us has different levels of testosterone at which our body is healthy.”

To suggest that somebody who’s been through male puberty doesn't have an innate advantage is just ludicrous and it is also so fucking insulting to every female athlete. Does he think women repeated fail to get anywhere near to men in speed, strength, stamina, in running, jumping, throwing, riding, swimming, combat sports, rowing, team sports and just about every other physical activity for no reason? Why does he think men our perform women if they don't have any advantage. Why don't journalists asks how they explain school boys beating women's Olympic records if they don't believe in male advantage? 😡🤬😤😠

They get into trampling women's boundaries for their own selfish wants early, eh?

One of the things that annoys me is that it lumps all medication given to women and girls as if it’s the same thing - the pill is nothing like puberty blockers but it seems they’re both “pink” medicines so all just interchangeable

idiot

Oh. A man. Quelle suprise.

Oh, Manface McManface with his "Look at me, am I a man, or am I a man?" face. That fella?

At least Lance Armstrong eventually owned his cheating, and did raise a lot of money for charity.

Millar is a snivelling little cheating weasel without any redeeming features whatsoever.

Look we all know he's lying, don't we? He knows full well.

Yep this.
I'm not sure what's more offensive - him being stupid enough to say it (I very much doubt he actually believes it)
...or ...everyone else just blindly nodding in agreement for fear of not being inclusive enough .....

Because Pippa would have to admit that doping with T was to give him an advantage over other male cyclists.

And then he’d have to admit that males who naturally produce T have gained the physical benefits from male puberty and have an advantage over female athletes.

And then he’d have to admit that transwomen cyclists like Emily Bridges have no place in women’s cycling events.

Which might make him implode.

Does he think women repeated fail to get anywhere near to men in speed, strength, stamina, in running, jumping, throwing, riding, swimming, combat sports, rowing, team sports and just about every other physical activity for no reason?
In fairness, riding - equestrian sports in general - is one of the very few activities where men don't have much of an inherent advantage if any. Because the horse, effectively, provides the muscles.

But otherwise, yeah, we all know.

As one of male cycling’s elite, he knows damn well what effect testosterone has on the body and why female cyclists wouldn’t be competitive in elite men’s events.

Which makes his “basically drops to zero” bullshit even harder to accept as genuine naivety. Even if (and it would be a big if) some trans-supportive doctor made that claim to him, he would know from personal experience that his physical advantages didn’t just puff disappear in a cloud of artificially acquired oestrogen.

I meant cycling rather than equestrianism, but I missed out the word bicycle!

I don't get it. Why would the Guardian print an opinion piece so riddled with inaccuracies that even they feel they have to insert paragraphs to counter the statements made?

Because despite what they claim, facts are no longer sacred.

In the world of The Guardian, facts are scared.

🤣🤣🤣

Doh, that reaction was meant for Nauticant, obviously, I'm not that vain.

He wrote an article in the Times supportive of Laurel Hubbard around the time of the Tokyo Olympics and I commented below the article about his hypocrisy about doping and how his mateship with York was clearly clouding his brain. Despite him replying to others in the comments, he ignored mine, funnily enough.

Sorry!
You can tell who'd rather be on a horse than a bike!

No, I wasn't very clear - the fact that men and women compete on an equal footing in horsey events was what made me say almost all sports so I shouldn't have left room for doubt as to what I meant by 'riding'.

But even in equestrian events , where the horse is doing much of the heavy lifting, men still have an advantage in events when strength is needed, even when they are light bodied men whose outward physical build is on the smaller side. Think how many jump jockeys are male rather than female, that post pubertal muscle strength has a lot to answer for.

I agree this is a dangerous train of reasoning.

1. Even if men had no physical advantage whatsoever and that could be proved, why shouldn't women have their own single-sex sports?

2. Sports performance is highly complex and all factors that go into it will never be quantitatively accounted for, so it will never be possible to make the claim: because sport X doesn't depend on sex differentiated attributes W, Y, Z, men have no advantage. This is in fact is the dishonest argument TAs are constantly using. Once a particular formulation of it is shown to be false, the goalpost is moved. Trying to reason in this manner grants a false premise, unless it's carefully disclaimed.

3. In actual fact, there is a large disparity in outcomes of jockeys of different sexes. In the US approximately 14% of professional jockeys are female, but at the very top tier, the proportion is much lower, e.g. in the Kentucky Derby there have apparently been no female jockeys in the last 10 years. This could be explained in ways that doesn't depend on males' physical advantage, but the most straightforward way to explain it is that, like marathon running, the physical conditioning difference between male and female enthusiasts allows for a degree of overlap in performance, but at elite levels of training men in their prime age categories are so much faster than women, that their times are totally dominant.

@GallantKumquat that is interesting, thank you.

Just another entitled man who when he ran out of milage in his sports career finally gave in to his fetish. He asks in the article "‘What kind of woman am I going to be?’ The correct answer is that he is no kind of woman, he is a trans identifying male who has had body modification surgery and takes cross sex hormones. He is a father ffs, he's a man! He wants to do all that then fine but there is no way he should be competing in women's sports, or using women's spaces or claiming to represent us in anyway, he does not. I also get that older AGP men feel that transing children somehow legitimises them but he has not place weighing in on the treatment of children.

Its always the same old script with these guys isn't it?

I think Philippa is confused. Robert Millar was small and slight, and being smaller gives cyclists an advantage on mountain stages in a bike race. (Kudos to him, he was the first Briton to win a Tour de France jersey.) Bigger cyclists have advantages in other aspects, but being smaller in road cycling is an advantage in the power to weight ratio.

A small man will still have a physical advantage over a woman though. If you compare the bodies of male and female road race cyclists you can see how differently the training affects them - the men are leaner and the women get much bulkier in the hips and thighs. The men have longer legs too and still have a far higher power to weight ratio.