Fiona McAnana on how cheerfully people urged men to ruin women’s sports:

In truth, a male athlete’s testosterone levels are largely irrelevant to this debate. Testosterone suppression cannot reverse the changes wrought by male puberty, which is where most of the physiological advantages that men enjoy come from.

Nevertheless, the IOC duly updated its guidance and the UK’s sports councils followed suit. As it turns out, these changes had their biggest impact on non-elite sports. In practice, no one has any idea of their testosterone levels at any given moment and most amateur athletes do not regularly measure their levels. This meant that the male population eligible to compete against women was broadened from just a handful of athletes – that is, those who had undergone surgery and had legally changed their sex – to anyone who merely claimed to be the other sex.

Some sports, like cricket and tennis, dispensed with testosterone-suppression requirements altogether, arguing that anyone should be accepted as whatever they say they are. The UK’s Lawn Tennis Association acknowledged in 2019 that ‘there may be some concerns about fairness in the women’s and mixed game’. But not to worry, explained the association:

‘Our policy assumes that transwomen (male-to-female trans persons) wishing to compete in mixed or female-sanctioned tennis competitions do so with the best of intentions and with no intent to deceive about their status to gain any competitive advantage. Accordingly, you should accept people in the gender they present and verification of their identity should be no more than that expected of any other player.’

My eyes all but popped out of my head on reading that. Why would such a policy assume such a ridiculous thing???

“Our policy assumes that no one ever does anything selfish and dishonest. Accordingly, you should always believe men who say they are women with no backtalk, bitches.”

The main problem is that the whole issue was framed wrongly from the start. It was positioned as being about trans people rather than about who should be eligible for female competitions. Trans-advocacy groups were consulted on these changes, but women’s groups and female athletes were not.

That’s a very polite way of putting it. I’m not as polite as that. I think the issue was framed as being about trans people because women were framed as not mattering. I think the brazen, shocking indifference to women came first, leading to the framing as being about trans people.

People who work in sport are all too aware of the differences between male and female athletic performance, so what were they thinking? I have to conclude that many of them were not thinking at all.

At least, they weren’t thinking about women at all.

Campaign group Fair Play for Women, where I am director of sport, has been pointing out for years that so-called trans-inclusion measures are leading to the exclusion of women and girls. Across most sports and at all levels, we hear personal accounts of how having to compete against a male, or share changing rooms with a male, is turning women and girls away from sport. For a long time, we had found very little media interest in reporting these stories. Sports bodies weren’t hearing them either, because the inclusion of trans-identifying males on their own terms had become an article of faith.

And because it’s so god damn easy to shrug off the concerns of women because women just don’t matter that much.