Big Victory for Women’s Sports

Great news for all women athletes!   According to Quillette, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) recently upheld the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) regulations which answered the “who is a woman” question when it comes to international elite athletics competition.

As I’ve written before, the transgendered movement has basically eradicated all women’s sports.  

Don’t believe me?  Here’s a thought experiment.

Is anyone really holding his or her breath until the first biological woman who identifies as a male beats other (real) males. Of course not.  Because there’s a difference inherently between men and women.  That’s why there is such a thing as women’s sports, so female athletes won’t be dominated by men. But apparently, identity politics has begun to trump everything else now in this world, including common sense.

So much work to give women equal space, equal credit and equal pay…. And then, transgendered activists basically made women obsolete in athletic competitions without anyone really noticing.  (Well, people have noticed, but the people who monitor our conversations don’t want “common sense” to leak out into our social media platforms.  For example, on Twitter, The Heritage Foundation’s Director of Media Content, Greg Scott, recently tweeted about this topicand was promptly banned from Twitter.)

That’s why the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s decisionis such great news:

In effect, CAS decided the question “who is a woman” for purposes of elite sport. And it ratified the IAAF’s preferred answer: A woman in sport is anyone whose legal identity is female—whether they personally identify as such or not—and who has testosterone (T) levels in the female range. That may seem like a mere technical ruling. But as I’ll explain in this article, the ramifications are profound for female athletics everywhere—a cause that has been central to my life and to the lives of millions of girls and women worldwide.

The female range for testosterone is categorically different from the male range. In general, males have 10 to 30 times more T than females. Most females, including most elite female athletes, have T levels in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L). For men, typical values are 10 to 35 nmol/L. The reason there is a gap, with no overlap between the ranges, is that beginning in puberty, the testes produce a lot more T than ovaries and adrenal glands combined. And so the IAAF maximum of 5 nmol/L for women has been set, generously, to reflect the upper bound of T levels that can be produced even by polycystic ovaries.

That might seem rather technical and uninteresting, but – believe me – it’s a big deal.  Basically, it means that the transgendered movement is not able to completely eradicate women’s sports.

“It matters that girls and women are afforded opportunities equal to boys and men, including in elite athletics,” writesDoriane Lambelet Coleman.  “It matters because this is the only way sport can achieve its empowerment goals.”

Coleman also beautifully summed up what was at stake.

“We were all really there negotiating the future of women’s sport and the ability of the gender identity movement to use the female competition category to further its agenda. If the Olympic Movement could continue to define the category using at least female T levels, the progressive project that is empowering girls and women through sport had a future. If it couldn’t, that project would fail. The gender identity movement’s goals are also important… But they didn’t similarly ride on the outcome of [this] case.”

Exactly.  So glad to see logic and science win against this irrational, dangerous transgendered movement.