Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Shared realities.

The book in question is called Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport, by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford. One of the blurbs quoted on its Amazon page says:

“Sport has been in desperate need of a fresh, nuanced approach to gender, one which has women, nonbinary, and trans people at its core. Open Play challenges the patriarchal system that has dictated women’s participation in sport around the world. Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport. This book is not just a must-read, it should become foundational in the future of women’s sport from the grassroots to professional levels.” — Flo Lloyd-Hughes, sports writer and broadcaster

Sport doesn’t need any approach to gender, desperate or otherwise. Someone wanting to introduce this kind of “nuance” into this topic wants to see men on women’s podiums, and in women’s changing rooms. It’s not gendered souls out on the track, it’s not one’s innermost, true self doing laps in the pool, we’re not seeing how high a bar someone’s “identity” can clear, it’s sexed, physical bodies of flesh, blood, and bone that are reliably known to actually exist, that are competing. The concept of “gender identity” can’t muster enough substance to hold the kind of Gordian Knot that gender ideology, to the exclusion of all others, claims to be able to unravel. Please. You can’t tie a knot in either jello or smoke, and they’re both more real than “gender identity” will ever be.

It is not possible for women, and nonbinary, and trans people to be simultaneously at the core of anything. There’s no room at the inn, and trans identified males want to play Jesus and hog the manger. In practice, attempts to do this have always centered men’s wants and desires over women’s rights and needs. Women get shunted to the side whenever “gender” has to be taken into consideration, which, unlike sex, is a completely invisible, immaterial, undefinable, unmeasurable “entity” that is likely nothing more than an aspect of personality. Do we segregate sports by whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert? No. That’s not a salient criterion. Sex is, and no amount of handwaving is going to hide that fact.

“Nonbinary” females and trans identified females are still female; nothing that they do can change that. Hormone “treatments” that render them ineligible for participation in female sports are not the concern of female sports leagues; it’s a completely understandable consequence of the choices they’ve made, and nobody is obligated to make any accommodation for them whatsoever. Find a team or league that will accept you as you are, assuming you can make the cut. Similarly “nonbinary” males and trans identified males remain males. If the “treatments” they have chosen to subject themselves to result in their no longer being good enough to play on a men’s team, that’s too bad; join the billions of other men not good enough to make men’s teams. Don’t expect women to admit you to their leagues, because you’re not women, and never will be, however much you suppress your testosterone levels. Women are not just “men with low testosterone.” It’s insulting to women to pretend they are, and that monkeying around with T is all you need to do to become female.

It looks like the authors are trying to portray women’s sport as some kind of patriarchal ghetto to which women have been unfairly and unjustly “confined”, rather than a precious refuge which they have had to carve out for themselves against centuries of opposition, ridicule, and hostility. The basic physiological differences between male and female bodies (whatever the degree of overlap there may occasionally be within some parameters when comparing men and women) are real. They are not “cultural constructs” that can be overcome by women trying “harder.” It is not in any way “victimizing” or “infantilizing” women to acknowledge these physiological differences between the sexes. These differences call for separation of sport by sex, to ensure safe, fair competition, particularly for women. This is not a punishment. It is, to use the terminology of gender identity, an actual safe space for women, and a hard won space at that. But if you don’t know (or worse, refuse to acknowledge) what a woman even is, you’re not going to be able to understand (or you’re going to pretend to not understand) this need. Any “inclusive” definition of “woman” is solely for the benefit of men. They’re going to pretend to be “liberating” women from these patriarchal “cultural constructs” of imaginary physical differences between men and women in order to let men into women’s sport. That’s the only point of all of this, and there’s nothing in it for women. They can only lose.

Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport.

Uh-oh: “SO-CALLED ‘FEMINIST’ ALERT”. Presumably meaning the boring kind of feminism that wants to reserve women’s sport to women. How shameful! They want to “exclude” non-women from women’s sport, like Lammy’s feminist “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights.” The authors of this book are the fun, intersectional kind of “feminist” (see, we can use scare quotes too), who want to prevent women from having anything of their own demand inclusivity above all. Tell me: which group of feminists actually has the real interests and safety of women in mind as their first and only priority? Not the one who thinks that “gender” needs to be at the “core” of sports.