Mick Hartley

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Waiting for guidance. It has become British sport’s answer to Waiting for Godot, such is the glacial pace with which this major country’s governing bodies move towards upholding fairness for half the population, rather than for the males who want to pass themselves off as female.

The London Marathon is the latest to prevaricate, claiming it wishes to receive a “detailed report” from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) before doing anything to honour the Supreme Court’s unanimous verdict that sex is binary. And so Sunday’s instalment is to take place as if last week’s ruling never happened, with race director Hugh Brasher’s utopian talk of “inclusion” just a limp front for a policy that is fundamentally exclusionary for women.

We can no longer be in any doubt: these organisations will dither, delay and dissemble, continuing to present a cynical facade of being kind, just so long as this kindness does not extend to the women involved. A week has passed since the Supreme Court enshrined the immutability of biology in law, and still the Football Association and England and Wales Cricket Board, both enablers of the cult that suggests you can be whatever sex you say you are, have done nothing.

Now the London Marathon – poised this weekend to surpass Paris as the largest in the world, with more than 56,000 finishers – is also doubling down on its complicity in a fallacy.

Men cannot be women: that is now the law of the land. And yet Brasher is signing off on a set of rules that convey the exact opposite, handing men places on the start line that are meant specifically for women.

Think of it this way: the London Marathon has, in its preoccupation with gender rather than sex, three categories of entry – male, female and non-binary – and not one of them excludes men. While the non-binary class serves only to bestow spurious athletic distinction upon mediocre males who would be nowhere in the men’s field, the women’s event has witnessed such absurdities as Glen Frank, having lined up in both the New York and Tokyo marathons as a man, running in London in 2023 as a woman simply by rebranding as “Glenique”. “Girl power!” Frank shouted, in an interview at Tower Bridge with the BBC.

Will the women denied by mediocre men take the marathon authorities to court over this? We shall see. They'd surely have a good case now.