The Transgender Agenda and Sport By Mrs Vera West
The Australian has published a very good article about Olympic champion, civil rights lawyer and women’s sport activist Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who is leading the charge against the situation seen most recently in America with trans swimmer Lia Thomas, whom Nancy criticises strongly. Thomas is on hormone replacement in accordance to the rules, but apparently has not yet had genital realignment surgery. Still, the point is made that being a male for most of his life has all the unfair advantages of a male body for such sports. In essence the issue here is that biological women are not inferior males, and deserve their own sports.
“When asked how she felt when American transgender swimmer Lia Thomas took the blocks at the NCAA championships last week, Olympic champion, civil rights lawyer and women’s sport activist Nancy Hogshead-Makar replied “disgust” around the unfairness of it all.
“Lia is not that same calibre athlete,” Hogshead-Makar tells The Weekend Australian. “Look, she’s the last person off the starting blocks. She has terrible turns. She has no underwater game — but she has what nobody else has, which is male puberty.”
Hogshead-Maker is a strong voice in a fierce debate that has been triggered again, this time by the rise of Thomas, who at the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships last week was first in the 500-yard freestyle final, beating her nearest competitor, Olympic silver medallist Emma Weyant, by more than a second and a half.
Thomas, who started her collegiate swimming career with three years on the men’s team before having hormone therapy and taking her place on the women’s team this year, recently told Sports Illustrated she would like to swim at the Paris Olympics.
“I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone,” Thomas said. “They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.”
Thomas was not breaking the rules by competing last week — she had been on hormone therapy for two years, longer than the NCAA required one year — but her recent performances have thrust the issues around trans women elite athletes into the spotlight.
The conversation around Thomas has centred on inclusion. It has also focused on the fundamental question of fairness — do trans women have an advantage in elite sports?
Hogshead-Makar and her good friend, nine-time Wimbledon champion and fellow Women Sports Policy Working Group member Martina Navratilova, say if that athlete has undergone male puberty, the answer is a firm “yes”.
They believe these elite athletes have too much of an advantage and quote the science to support it.
For their stand on this issue, the Olympic champion and tennis champion have been dubbed “transphobic” and “anti-trans bigots” and had other repercussions.
“Our women’s sports group has lost money … and it’s hard when you lose relationships with other civil rights groups that you’ve been working with for the last 30 years,” Hogshead-Makar said.
“There was an article in The New Yorker about Lia Thomas recently, which I was interviewed for, but it wasn’t like they were listening to what I had to say, rather I felt they were asking the question: ‘Is Nancy Hogshead-Makar transphobic or not?’ And then they quoted another group to say we were ‘trans hate’.
“I’m not trans-hate, we are not trans-hate … all of us in the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group have worked to stop these bills that stop horrible bans on transpeople.”
The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group mission statement rejects “both the effort to exclude” transgender women from sports and the effort to have female athletes compete against them.
Hogshead-Makar has said she believes transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s athletics, so long as these individuals can show that they’ve mitigated the athletic advantages that come with male puberty.”
That is a fair and ethical position, but I do not see how this will ultimately solve the problem, since the vast majority of trans athletes were biological males after puberty.
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