In January of this year Tracy & I travelling to Washington, for 48hrs! We went especially so I could speak on the steps of the American Supreme Court as a case was being heard inside to protect the rights & opportunities to fair sport, based on biological reality & scientific evidence, for women & girls.
As we know there are just two sexes, arranged around just two gametes, one large (eggs) & one small (sperm). There is no third sex & no one that produces both gametes. There are infinite personalities, that change & evolve. These are scientific, provable facts.
Sport (& societal rules) must be based on facts. It’s impossible & utterly unfair to a whole sex, half the world, to base a category of sport (or anything else) on a self professed feeling, over a reality. The feelings of males are no more important than those of females. Brave women, before us, fought hard for so much. Men’s feelings cannot be allowed to eclipse a women’s reality.
Think about this for one logical moment. If we allowed humans to select their age, qualifications, weight, height, even their race, based on a self professed ‘feeling’ where would we be? I’d have started drawing my pension years ago… Humans cannot change their sex any more than they can pick their age. Regardless of surgery, make up, hair styles, cloths or even synthetic hormones. We are what we are.
If women had been able to do that, they could have opted out of a millennia of suppression & abuse. Women in Afghanistan could literally say they feel like men & get an education, respect, a voice & independence. Sadly they can’t.
Femininity & masculinity are socially formed & often fashionable concepts, not natures. Nature relies on biology. It doesn’t care what colour you like, or what toys you prefer. Both are very likely to change over time anyway.
Of course I don’t deny a very tiny number of people have genuine gender or body dysmorphia. Much like other dysmorphia. No one is born in someone else’s body. We are born in our bodies, the only one we get, and we need to learn to love it, and take care of it.
Puberty is absolutely not an illness. It’s a vital human stage we move through. It’s not something humans can decide to forgo because it scares them. The medical diagnosis of precocious puberty is very different to wanting to halt normal human maturation.
I will never believe lying to children is the right way, that social contagion hasn’t happened or pretending there isn’t a cohort of men who get gratification from dressing up as if they’re standing on a street corner at midnight under a red light, in fishnets & 5 inch heels. Or that bad men will use bad laws to do bad things. I always find it very telling what certain men, who dress up as women, wear. They rarely wear what I wear; my faded jeans & baggy T-shirt, when I go food shopping or to take the kids to their various sporting activities.
Sport is played with bodies not feelings. Females get a tiny slice of the lucrative sporting cake, even though we represent over 50% of this planet. Women & girls self exclude when presented with males in their changing rooms, or sports. I could tell you dozens of horror stories. Years of self preservation has taught us walk away, stay quiet, give up your dreams, your places, make yourself smaller, cross the road, hold your keys.
One woman is murdered every three days in the Uk. Just imagine how many are thumped, coerced or bullied. Most by someone they know. Rape is on the increase & the mental health, resilience & confidence of young women is through the floor.
So back to Washington. ADF, a legal advocacy firm with proud Christian values have been fighting cases to get females back their sports & spaces in the U.S.A for years. They are experts & they were also willing & kind enough to work with us at the WSU to enforce Uk law: to get back what has been taken away from our own girls.
Now let me make it clear both Tracy & I have our own beliefs. I’m agnostic. We both believe in a women’s choice over her own body, though I’m strongly against full term abortions, and voted in the House of Lords that way. There are areas where we feel differently to ADF like same sex marriage, but we’re all sensible, mature & wise enough to know we can still respect each other’s differences, yet still find areas we very much agree on. That’s the adult way.
I’m a pragmatist. My mums voice ‘treat others how you would like to be treated’ always rings in my ears. I pride myself on travelling widely, because of my sport, from a very young age, meeting people from all over the world; all colours, all sexual orientations, political persuasions & faiths. I’ve never formed definitive opinions on anyone by anything other than their character. And I won’t change now.
The simple truth is women & girls, defined by the Uk Supreme Court are biologically female, they are protected under discrimination laws & we’re entitled to our sports & private changing spaces, all of them, at all levels. Elite women are no more worthy than recreational female sports enthusiasts.
If a sporting activity has a winner, winning team, place, prize or record it IS competitive. How competitive an individual is, is up to them. No one else has the right to decide that. Least of all males who have a physical advantage & more than ten times the chances, financial rewards & facilities. Nor will we be lectured to my obnoxious men who value Parkrun records & places, yet think somehow women matter or care less about those same things.
Men are losing nothing. Their opportunities remain the same. Women are beaten into submission by the ‘be kind’ club. Yet who’s being kind to woman and girls?
It’s up to sports organisers, clubs, schools & governing bodies to stop being lazy or cowardly, to protect women’s sports & find better ways to be inclusive. Because of course sport absolutely must be for all. But the very first principle of sport is.. fairness. And that applies to both sexes.
We’re very grateful to ADF Uk & ADF USA for their amazing help & we pledge to support them, and women all over the world, to get back what belongs to them. Then once we’ve done that here in the uk we want to grow & support bigger & better participation.
It was both pleasing (and frustrating after ten years) to see the IOC at last, do the right thing pre the Los Angelos Olympics. Please find copies of the letters we sent to the first ten sports we have written to, asking for just that, with the intention of moving on to legal action if that is what it takes to get equality & Uk law applied.
This is the hill I’m prepared to die on, partly because I saw a whole generation of female athletes deprived of what was theirs. While for twenty whole years the IOC stood by & did precisely nothing to stop it. Changing the lives of the rightful winners negatively forever & betraying young East German girls, many that have died, all that are ill, because of what was given to them during puberty, so they could unfairly win.
But mostly because it’s just the right thing to do, and the suffragettes will be turning in their graves if we don’t try!
