Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.

…

Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some abstract fear, but a concrete reality. We can name the two women whom Petrillo deprived here of a chance to compete under lights at the Stade de France in a Paralympic semi-final: Lorraine Gomes de Aguiar of Brazil and Spain’s Nagore Folgado Garcia. Gomes is 27, Folgado just 20.

The only explanation that fits is that including women doesn’t count as inclusion.

Is that because so many people despise women, or is it because “inclusion” refers only to literal minorities? If it’s the latter that’s fucked up, because exclusion of women has always been and still is absolutely rampant, and everyone knows it.

Those who acquiesced in this must be held to account, and the first is Parsons. All women deserve to have their sporting talents tested on a level playing field, not to have their dreams curtailed by a patently unfair rule, reduced to being unwitting pawns in the affirmation of any male-born opponent’s wishes. It is an outrage – and it cannot go on.

Keep yelling.