Mick Hartley

They got there in the end. A UN report, “Violence against women and girls in sports", points out the problem – which has been obvious for years – of men stealing all the medals in women's sport. Damian Reilly in the Spectator:

The UN has just issued a report on violence against women and girls in sport that appears to want to put a stop to the bending of gender rules in sport for good. Reading it is like waking up from a particularly wild dream in which everyone seemed to have gone insane. Finally, someone – the UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, in this case – is talking perfect sense.

Alsalem doesn’t hold back. She points out that since trans women – she calls them by the old fashioned term ‘males’ – have been allowed to compete with biological women in sport, ‘over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports’. She makes clear, too, that everything we’ve been told about medications to suppress testosterone in trans women, thereby ensuring they have no athletic advantages over biological women, is a load of rubbish.

She says: ‘Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty… Pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.’ Quite.

It goes without saying the ridiculous debate about whether men should be allowed to compete against women in any sport, let alone contact sports, has had serious repercussions for actual women. Alsalem says: ‘When female-only sports spaces are opened to males, as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball, basketballand soccer… injuries have included knocked-out teeth, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures.’

She cites, too, a study published in Sports Medicine that found:

Even in non-elite sport, ‘the least powerful man produced more power than the most powerful woman’ and states that, where men and women have roughly the same levels of fitness, males’ average punching power has been measured as 162 per cent greater than females.

None of this can possibly come as news to anyone who has walked about in the world with their eyes open.

The way the entire trans issue has been weaponised in recent years by those on the front lines of the culture wars strikes most people, I think, as extremely bizarre. ‘What is a woman?’ has become a staple question of any media interview with a politician, and all of us increasingly – particularly during Pride month, when even captured corporations get in on the fun – are stridently impelled to agree that trans women are indeed women.

Personally, I’ve come suspect the point of it all is just a diabolically clever and deliberate means of making the West question itself constantly, eventually causing it to suffer a nervous breakdown. Looking around, you’d have to say as a plan it’s working quite well.

That may be tongue-in-cheek, but it's not a joke. As Arty Morty points out, the whole issue of “gender identity” has tainted progressive politics in the eyes of an entire generation, with countless people abandoning their liberal political affiliations and losing trust in liberal media outlets because of it. And the most obvious, the most blatant, lies concern the participation of men in women's sport under the mantra that trans women are women, and in the name of inclusivity. It's nonsense, everyone knows it's nonsense….everyone can see it's nonsense. In the spirit of 1984: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”