Reply To: Trans People in Sports
This WreckageI don’t think it’s as simple as you – and World Athletics – make it out. There are many factors which influence humans’ physical abilities besides their biological sex (which itself is difficult to define accurately). For example, height. Should taller runners with longer legs be permitted to compete against shorter runners? If that is permissible, why not trans women against cis women? If there is a question of safety such as in boxing (which is inherently risky anyway), then use existing weight categories.
Competitive sports are deeply unfair by their natures, and many of the existing inequities are not challenged, indeed are vigorously promoted, by the bourgeois anti-trans lobby which claims to only want fairness. Children of wealthier parents gain substantial advantages in sport as in pretty much every area of life:
“Senior judges, politicians and diplomats are traditionally roles belonging to privately educated ‘elites’. But the chances of carving out a successful sporting career are more likely in some sports for those who went to an independent school too, a new report says.
Cricket is one of the top 10 professions for independent school attendance, behind the likes of Cabinet members, military top brass and those sitting in the House of Lords – 43% of men and 35% of women playing international cricket for England went to private school. Some 37% of male British rugby union internationals attended fee-paying schools, and about one in three Olympic medallists. Across the wider population some 7% of people are privately educated.
The head teachers’ leader Geoff Barton said: “State schools work tirelessly to make social justice a reality but the dice are loaded against them in a society where both privilege and disadvantage are perpetuated from one generation to the next.””
