UK Athletics has now banned trans women from all women's competition. It's the absolute definition of prejudice and their hate won't win.
UK Athletics has banned all transgender women who have "been through male puberty" from competing in women's athletics in Britain with immediate effect. Voices are now being raised to have trans women banned from recreational athletics too. Trans women who have already entered events under old guidelines will be permitted to compete but will have their times and placing erased and will not be eligible to receive a medal. "Consideration" is being given to allowing trans women to join a renamed male category.
Meanwhile, the British government and voices of hate within Britain are working hard to ensure that no trans girl can avoid going through male puberty, by shutting down healthcare for them.
Not that UK Athletics would have cared even had they known about the timing. That they didn't is of course all part of the narrative - the reality of trans people's lives means little to such people. Their rhetoric talks about "fairness" and "inclusion" as it nestles inside paragraphs soaked in Orwellian doublethink (read paragraphs 4a and b of their statement, link above) and they cruelly and abruptly ban all trans women from everything under their jurisdiction. They have wanted to do this for some time but felt unable due to hesitancy about the UK's Equality Act. Now, spurred on by the UK's most ill-named regulatory body, The Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the British Conservative Peer who runs World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, they've done it.
A few details are worth noting. First, intersex women who may share various biological characteristics with trans women, indeed who may also have experienced something like what the UKA calls a "male" puberty are still allowed to compete, under restrictions. The restrictions make me pretty queasy, but at least the door remains open for them as it should.
Unlike analogous trans women, of course, who are now banned across the board.
Second, drug cheats who have who may have simulated something like that "male" puberty through the use of steroids (far more potent than testosterone) are not subject to a lifetime ban.
Unlike trans women, of course, who are now banned across the board.
Why are trans women singled out? Because for UKA and World Athletics, the jury is in, the hate has done its work, the biased research has got through, the political climate has made its mark. Trans women - and I can tell you now that no trans athletes were represented in any of the bodies that made these decisions - are not women. Indeed, they are, says UK Athletics, men. We know this because they claim to have under consideration the option of renaming the 'male' category as 'open'. This new idea groups trans women with men (because of course no cisgender women is ever likely to enter it), where the effect of endocrinological changes in their bodies due to taking oestrogen will mean that they will never win anything. More to the point - they will perpetually be insulted and humiliated, identified as trans, and open to ridicule and abuse as the only (pretend) woman lining up for a race. We know also what UKA thinks because in their statement, they congratulate World Athletics for protecting the category of female sports (paragraph 5a). That word eh? We hear it everywhere. You protect things from a threat. As ever, trans women are reduced to nothing more than this, the smear and the fear implicit but potent.
There's more. In the case of a British trans woman athlete who is already competing in an event, she (or perhaps the UKA now prefers "he"?) will be allowed to continue but will not have their time recorded, nor their placing in the event. If it's a team event, they will not have their points recorded. Nor will they be able to receive a medal. Not since the retouching of photographs in 1930s Soviet Russia has a piece of erasure been so complete. Winston Smith's boss at MiniTrue would have been impressed.
And actually, there's more still. This is happening in the context of a well-worked plan being managed by the British government and its press allies to drive trans women out of society. In the case of trans children and adolescents the aim is to cement in society the belief that they don't exist, that they are the victims of abuse, or displaying mental illness of which their so-called gender identity is just a symptom. Further, action has been taken to remove the possibility that trans girls can actually avoid a "male puberty" at all by making healthcare almost impossible to get and ensuring that puberty-blocking medication - a temporary and effective way of helping them through these years - is almost impossible to find. The message overall to a trans girl who likes to run, or jump, or compete for her school, who loves sport is now don't bother. There is no place for you. But, also, look don't worry, this is all very "fair" and "inclusive" because the statement says so.
To be clear, the science remains equivocal around all this. There are many many factors that influence sporting performance, and the specific hormonal and endocrinological makeup of every athlete in every event will be working for them, or against them, or making no difference at all. Everyone brings a genetic inheritance. Length of stride, height, weight, muscle mass, lung capacity, stamina - all individual and not fully contained - ever - within the human-created labels, 'male' and 'female'.
Chromosomal complexity is well known - though always ignored by people who make rules like this - as they rush to use the permanently undefined and undefinable term popularised by haters and right-wing ideologues in the southern US and elsewhere (prominently, the UK); 'biological sex'. I could add that trans women have been taking part in women's sports for decades, all the way back to tennis player Renee Richards and before (as the linked article points out Richards never won anything and the women's tour did not collapse. It's worth pointing out also that in the almost 20 years since the IOC first admitted trans people to the Olympics, something like 80,000 athletes have taken part and a trans athlete has medalled only once - a Canadian non-binary soccer team member in 2021).
Of course, we live in a world where complexity is very much out and it doesn't look like making a return to civilised society any time soon. So, intelligent solutions around an event-by-event set of regulations that look in detail at the specific discriminating factors that might influence performance (muscle mass, endurance, strength?) and then make judgments on a case-by-case basis for the tiny number of trans women involved in these sports are so 2010 now. Fear and distrust of all trans women, across all aspects of society, is de riguer. There are votes to be had by creating fear - votes to stay on athletics bodies, votes to stay in government.
And where am I in all this? Obviously, I am hardly aiming to line up for the 200 metres at my local athletics club (though my sister-in-law does take part in her local Park Run and, as the organization in charge of Park Runs is affiliated to UKA, it now looks like I would never be able to join her - exactly as ex British swimmer and long-term hater Sharon Davies has long hoped). This is I guess at least one hidden bonus of my worrying lack of physical activity (something that will probably kill me sooner than I might have once expected, perhaps an upside for the TERFs and GCs who'd simply like us gone?) So broadly, in the day-to-day, nothing much changes for me.
But that is of course not the point. The publicity around it arrives on my radar - the reason I am writing this post. The gloating, self-congratulatory excitement of those who have never even watched an athletics meet is plain to see. The UK's repellant right-wing press has given this latest announcement prominence, as has the anti-trans sports writer of The Guardian. This latest news will feed the culture, just as it has been fed by the culture. Other groups will take courage in their attempts to discriminate against trans women. Tory MPs will cheer. The steamroller will roll on. With so-called 'Equalities' minister Kemi Badenoch now back from securing a comically pointless trade deal in the Pacific Rim as part of the government's attempt to perpetuate the Brexit charade, she can now turn I guess to the part of her portfolio which is all about trying to ruin my life...
Is she going to? If my knowledge of who I am was contingent upon the British government, UK Athletics, The Times newspaper, the BBC or the many other hostile voices ranged against me in the UK and those like me, then perhaps. But it's not. I know that. I've done the internal work, and I really know it.
I choose to reject the haters. I choose to remain myself. I choose to hold this dear and self-evident, as I live my life as the woman I am. I have asked myself the painful questions for which those who hate people like me have grotesque, lying answers and I reject their answers from the basement of my soul.
I choose not to be frightened of those who wish me harm, who slander people like me, inspire hatred, who smear us. I choose to not let them in - into the place where they are so desperate to be, the place where I despair, vanish, even die. To hell with them. Literally.
Until they go to hell of course, with all of their hatreds, be they for people like me, or asylum seekers, or refugees, or people of different religions or different skin colours, there will be hatred to endure. I will ask, as I sometimes do, that anyone who reads my words and hears them, properly, lends their weight to the fight against it. That's how to end it, eventually. The hatred is incubated in silence and apathy, as JS Mill famously pointed out in 1867*. It's notable how the new normal seems to be an apathetic acceptance of growing bigotry and prejudice within British society, from its government down.
Or prove me wrong. Speak. Act.
If you'd like to raise your voice and not sit in silence over what UK Athletics has done, you can email them at https://www.uka.org.uk/general-enquires/, or call them on 0121 713 8400.
You can find out who your MP is and contact them via this site https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/
If you are fed up with the cascade of lies, you can get some accurate information about trans people here: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/the-truth-about-trans
And if you want to learn more about the issue of trans people in sport, why not actually hear from one rather than just rely on prejudice and closed minds? Watch this short video
https://youtu.be/AvQNS7mACGY from well respected US LGBTQ+ rights organisation, Human Rights Campaign :
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* “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Edmund Burke is sometimes said to have come up with this thought, but it was in fact Mill.
Excellent as always, Jo.
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