Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events

[Misla]

About time!!

IOC likely to announce new policy early in new year after findings of a scientific review about the permanent physical advantages of being born male

The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.

The IOC’s guidance to Olympic sports has until now been that transgender women can compete with reduced testosterone levels but leaves it up to individual sports to decide. That is now set to change under its new president, Kirsty Coventry, who has promised to protect the female category.

The committee’s medical and scientific director, Dr Jane Thornton, last week presented to IOC members at a meeting in Lausanne the initial findings of a science-based review into the issues of transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) competing in female sport.

Free-to-read link: https://archive.is/kGpyI

Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events

A trans identified woman is just that: a woman with a trans identity. Aka a transman. The wooliness around the language has led to this very confusion and it's supposed to, so that people don't realise that a transwoman is a man.

And that's why headlines and language matter, and news outlets should not be claiming that trans identified people are banned from women's sports. They aren't. Trans identified men are, not because they're trans but because they are men.

It's the bonkers "passport" sex principle that the IOC currently holds to. In their demented fantasy land you can have an SRY gene, be obviously responsive to testosterone, have internal testes & yet not be, in Caster Semenya's words "less of a woman" because your passport marker says "F".

But if they were using genitalia as the basis for the classification, why were they doing a SRY test?

I have forgotten the name of the male weightlifter who stole a place to compete at the Olympics in the female category, but the woman who placed behind him at national level lost the opportunity to even compete at the Olympics because he stole her place. We will never know how she would have fared at the Olympics because she was robbed of her chance to prove her capabilities in international competition by a cheating man. She might have won gold, she might have come last, and we can never know. No scheme to retrospectively allocate medals or prize money can compensate women like her for the loss of her earned chance to even compete.

Angela Carini had to abandon her fight with Imane Khelif to avoid being seriously injured or even killed in the boxing ring. Not only did she lose her chance to compete but she received so much abuse simply for protecting herself that she was forced to make a public apology to Imane.

Ah ok, thanks.

I still like the headline as it is as I think it's clearer than 'transwomen and transmen unless they have stopped taking testosterone for X amount of time'. But I get what you are saying now.

The Good Law Project are suing the England and Wales Cricket Board on behalf of a trans player. After the Supreme Court ruling the ECB changed its policy, previously they had been very much transwomen are welcome in grass roots cricket. Now they are banned from all levels of the sport.

From the Telegraph via MSN:

Meet the Remainer lawyer trying to dismantle British sports’ transgender ban

I think they were just about to drop the SRY test and were saying 'look, we don't need it, we don't get any male interlopers anyway'. Because they thought male=penis. And a 'female' with SRY might end up being unfairly excluded. Yes I know it makes no sense.

ETA genital inspections were still a possibility and Semenya describes being subjected to them.

Females who say they are trans don't take testosterone if they want to compete professionally. See Quinn, the Canadian international soccer player for example.

It was at least in part as the result of scientific papers (shoddy ones) that we got into this mess. It all goes back to the 80s & a Spanish male athlete with a DSD, Maria Patiño, who claimed never to have known his condition until a sex test in 1986 (itself unlikely). He was subsequently stripped of his female category medals & titles & initially banned from the '88 Olympics.
His reported distress & successful legal challenges galvanised a lot of people who should have known better to find excuses & methods to accommodate such males in the female category. They campaigned for a decade, wrote flabby papers & the eventual result was the IOC framework document on "fairness [sic] inclusion and non-discrimination [sic]" that meant neither DSD males nor trans males could be excluded from the female category.

Helen Webberley is furious! https://x.com/HelenWebberley/status/1987886811591344491?s=20

It's just confusing when you think of transgender woman, keep it simple. Men are not allowed in women's changing spaces or toilets. It isn't unreasonable really is it? No need to gaslight people with all this transgender rubbish, keep it simple guys.

.... and demonstrating that she has no idea how biology works. Not a particularly reassuring quality in a medical doctor.

If they weren't "born male" why did they have male reproductive organs when they were born, Helen? Is that an admin error too?

It is about time.

We have watched with revulsion as a procession of mediocre men have taken places, prizes, contracts, opportunities from women.

We have watched aghast as mediocre men have exposed themselves in women's changing rooms and toilets and been protected by sports organisations who threaten the women that they will lose everything if they complain.

There's a trans-identified female boxer, Hergie Bacyadan, who doesn't take testosterone & who competed in the female category at the 2024 Olympics. Not banned then, wouldn't be banned under new proposals.

@ThatCyanCat it was even worse than this. Laurel Hubbard, aged mid forties and mediocre as a male weightlifter in domestic competition, stole the place of 18 year old Roviel Detenamo from the low income Pacific island of Nauru. It would have been her first Olympics.

She didn’t just deny a place to a woman on the relatively large and wealthy Kiwi team, she stole a place from a country who send 1-2 athletes at best per Games, and prevented Roviel from making her Olympic debut.

"their birth certificate was written wrongly"

What a major fuck-up. Nobody asks newly born babies what they identify as, with the result that some have their birth certificates "written wrongly".

Surely there are watertight legal cases here?

Great news.

This.
I think their participation has done untold damage to the Transgender movement, likewise the IOC to the Olympics.

I find it positively obscene that men can decide they are women and then compete against women in any sport.

I applaud those that have refused to compete against them.

The IOC are a disgrace to have taken so long to rule on this.

My cousin has raised two lads who are now both professional athletes, and the oldest lad took part in the last olympics as he had just turned 18. They have been training seriously since around age 7 - and it's almost financially bankrupted my cousin, who has had to remortgage the house again recently. The equipment, travelling, hours and hours of training has been a complete family way of life for nearly 14 years now. In fact it's even harder now to keep up with attending events as they are all international. It was nothing to get up at 4am on a weekend and fall back into bed gone midnight, and repeat it the next day.

I can't imagine as a female athlete to have come through all these years of training, expense and commitment to then have to compete against a biological man whose very genetics mean they are likely to beat them.

How on earth can she possibly be considered fit to practice medicine?

A reminder that Caster semenya still holds the world's best in the 600m female category.
worldathletics.org/news/report/semenya-breaks-600m-world-best-berlin

Just thinking a bit more about this ruling, I wonder if it will have a knock-on effect into domestic sports bodies and schools that still have bonkers policies on mixed-sex sports.

For example, over the course of several years the FA lowered the age it permitted mixed-sex football from under 18 to under 11. Sticking purely with the science here, the IOC now acknowledges the bloody obvious fact that male bodies are different from female bodies, significantly so as a result of puberty. Hopefully within that science is enough understanding of safety risk when it comes to the greater force of a male (faster, stronger) when making contact with a female (lower bone density) in sports like football. Presumably, continuing on with the bloody obvious, it's irrelevant whether males identify as women or not as the science doesn't care about this.

Hopefully this will lead to sports waking up and thinking more carefully about whether mixed-sex participation is appropriate. Each sport will differ but some are obvious: UK boxing already bans mixed-sex sport from grassroots to elite. Football should also be obvious, just like rugby.

In other words, I really hope there is a cascade of common sense. Including all the way down to schools which chose to be "inclusive" and deliver all PE lessons as mixed-sex (presumably to avoid the difficulty of how to manage situations where children identify as the opposite sex). If the IOC sets the standard to follow the science, there's hope that others may too.

Records of that sort should surely be recategorised. In some cases they would be impossible for any XX woman ever to beat.

Ah, Joly. The world has changed direction and yet there he is, dashing the other way to find a new windmill to tilt at.

So happy to hear this. It made me sick to see this transwomen/ genetic men punching out women and then grinning in triumph