Finally, we are fighting back on transgender lunacy
WHEN Lia Thomas stood on the winner’s podium as 500-yard freestyle champ in Atlanta, Georgia, she brought the long-brewing row over women’s sport to an international crescendo.
No longer can competition authorities, politicians and individual athletes brush aside demands for clarity and precision on what makes a woman a woman.
Lia, 6ft 3in, was ranked 554th among male swimmers until transitioning in 2019 and leapfrogging to women’s No1 on Friday night, pushing five biological females out of the top slots along the way.
Her legacy of male puberty provides stronger muscles, bigger lungs, larger hands and a longer reach that none of her biologically female rivals can hope to match.
Lia, towering over runner-up Emma Weyant, was booed by some spectators. Emma a Tokyo silver medalist, was loudly cheered.
Some poolside comments make controversial reading in an age when journalists, broadcasters and politicians must tread on verbal eggshells.
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Not so Kellie-Jay Keen, a British activist who attended the Atlanta contest and rejects the idea that an athlete born a man can simply choose to compete as a woman. Keen was recorded telling another spectator: “I am a woman. That is not a woman.”
Asked if she was qualified as a biologist to discuss Lia’s gender, her reply went viral: “I am not a vet, but I know what a dog is.”
Kellie-Jay, some will recall, was barred by Liverpool police from displaying the dictionary definition of a woman — “Adult Female Human Being” — outside a Labour Party rally.
Harry Potter creator JK Rowling similarly triggered a cyber frenzy after mocking attempts to rebrand women as “people who menstruate”.
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She tweeted: “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Astonishingly, the author who turned so-so actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson into millionaire Hogwarts heroes found them publicly distancing themselves from her supposed “transphobia”.
There is no middle ground in this debate. Disagreement is hatred.
Yet it is women, especially lifelong feminists such as Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill, who are leading the fight for a natural-born woman’s rights in sport and elsewhere.
Women feel they are already waging an uphill battle against abuse, rape and male violence. They are fighting to preserve hard-won privacy and safe spaces, free from invasion by biological men.
They resent having to share toilets and changing rooms with big hairy folk, however much they identify as female.
Women prisoners want separate cells. Patients demand single-sex wards.
Now, after Lia’s victory, these demands are extending to the sporting arena, where women want either female-only events or an asterisk to denote trans competitors in open contests.
Their objections are shared by many trans-men and trans-women — including Caitlyn Jenner, who won Olympic gold as a male decathlete before transitioning in 2015 and starring on the cover of Playgirl as the most famous transgender woman in the world.
Their argument is simple — but ferociously debated. Women are genetically defined by “XX” chromosomes, men by “XY” chromosomes.
Biological men have a penis, testicles and naturally high levels of testosterone which enhance their strength and stamina. Biological women do not.
Now top international athletes, from American tennis legend Martina Navratilova to British swimming sensation Sharron Davies, want the definition of women’s sport crystallised once and for all.
They want a clear distinction between athletes born as women and rivals who began life with all the physical advantages of a man.
Sharron yesterday blasted the “cowardly” International Olympic Committee for tinkering with the rules so trans-women can compete after undergoing testosterone suppression, only for them to abandon it altogether.
PASS THE BUCK
“Last year they dropped testosterone suppression and prioritised the inclusion of transgender athletes over fair sport for females, dis-criminating against half of the world’s population,” she told the Mail on Sunday. It was cowardly and it helped to create this situation.”
Politicians do not help. Labour’s Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Diane Abbott pass the buck and the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon would be happy for everyone to transition at the taxpayers’ expense.
But on Friday, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss dipped a toe in this shark-infested sea.
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She told Tory supporters on Saturday: “Now is the time to end the culture of self-doubt, the constant self-questioning and introspection, the ludicrous debates about language, statues and pronouns.”
It was a very small toe. And these are very deep waters.
'It's shameless'
BORIS JOHNSON has dared to compare freedom-loving Ukrainians to Brits who voted Brexit, sending foam-flecked Tory Remainiacs, Lib Dem Rejoiners and Labour hysterics scrambling for their smelling salts.
“It’s shameless, distasteful, insulting,” honked Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Yet it wasn’t only Brexit voters who dubbed Brussels “the new Soviet Union”.
Talk to the Greeks, crushed under the heel of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2009 financial crisis. Or the Italians, Hungarians or Poles today.
Or to the Ukrainians themselves. They are already being sold down the river by Germany, which wants a quick ceasefire.
An early ceasefire means abject surrender to Russia. Or, for the EU, peace at any price.