Imane Khelif, the genetic male expected to win a gold medal tonight after beating a woman in the welterweight final at the Olympics, has dramatically focused attention yet again onto sex differences in sport. She has been allowed to compete as a woman even though they failed an International Boxing Association gender test last year, preventing them from competing as a woman in the Boxing World Championships.
If we still needed it, the success of Khelif is the clearest demonstration yet of gender differences in sport. The evidence for this, of course, has been mounting each year, focused in particular on the unfairness of transgender athletes winning in women’s sporting competitions (although Khelif is not a trans athlete, having been wrongly identified as female at birth due to having a rare condition known as DSD, which stands for disorders in sex development).
Take the case of swimmer Lia Thomas who, by winning the 500-yard freestyle competition, became the first transgender person to win a highly prestigious U.S. College Athletic title. Competing as a man a year or two earlier, however, he had ranked 554th in the U.S. Not a bad uplift on account of transitioning.
While the athletes and their supporters obviously approve of such a dizzying climb, conservative social commentators are aghast. Here’s Allison Pearson in the Telegraph: “Mediocre males can suddenly win prizes that would have been way out of reach had they stayed in their biological sex category.” People like Lia Thomas are “shameless cheats”. Second-placed Ms. Weyant should have won.
As far as I can see, however, no-one is pondering the opposite question. Why is it considered fair that a woman could come first and win accolades in a national sporting competition, when she couldn’t even beat some “mediocre” competitor ranked 554th amongst men?
This is a general question. Why is it fair that Jamaican Elaine Thompson-Herah can win the 100 metres gold medal at the last Olympics, when her time – 10.61 seconds – would not have enabled her to progress through any of the heats, let alone the semi-finals, had she competed against men? How is it fair to the men eliminated, that runners slower than them should continue to international glory simply because they happen to be women?
If you’re a man and ran the 2003 London Marathon in 2 hours 15 minutes, no-one will have noticed you. A woman, however, running the same time created a world record and got international fame, as well as honours from Her Majesty the Queen. We all remember Paula Radcliffe. The men who ran as fast or faster than her are forgotten.
Why is this fair? More importantly, why is this even allowed? In all other areas of our lives, we are compelled – on pain of punishment – not to treat men and women differently. And the aspirational metric for showing whether or not we are doing so is equal numbers of men and women in coveted positions.
The Fawcett Society’s Sex and Power Index catalogues “the progress towards equal representation for women in top jobs across the U.K.” In 2022, women made up only 8% of the CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, it complains. Overall, less than one third of the 5,000 top jobs in the U.K. are taken by women, meaning that there are 1,000 missing women. It’s all because of sexism, the experts say, and society needs to change.
Why the contrast with sports, where we are only able to achieve equality by not treating men and women equally? In England (with parallel legislation elsewhere) it’s all because of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. Section 44 says that in “any sport, game or other activity of a competitive nature” the strictures against sex discrimination do not apply, so men can be discriminated against – let’s be clear, that’s what it amounts to – by allowing less able women to win awards that they couldn’t have achieved if they had competed against men.
Why did the 1975 Act allow this? Because men and women are different. The Sex Discrimination Act recognises that the “physical strength, stamina or physique of the average woman puts her at a disadvantage to the average man”. Sec 195(3) of the Equality Act 2010 incorporates the same language and sentiments.
It was bloody obvious in the case of the poor female boxers that have had to compete against Imane Khelif. It’s always clear when genetic males compete in women’s sports.
It’s important to note that all the evidence concerning transgender people competing in women’s sports has revealed that the perceived unfairness isn’t just because of “physical strength, stamina or physique”. Most important of all is testosterone – as made clear by World Athletics, which under previous rules allowed transgender women to be admitted to women’s sports once they had reduced their blood testosterone level for a period of 12 months.
But testosterone in men not only leads to huge differences in physical strength; it also accounts for psychological differences too. Testosterone drives status-enhancing behaviours in males. It makes men more tolerant of risk-taking. It is a “fuel for dominance”, as one social psychologist put it.
It goes without saying that these differences in testosterone levels between men and women are likely to lead to large sexual differences in the race for sporting dominance. But the same is true of competition in other areas. Testosterone equally favours men and disadvantages women in the race to become a CEO of a FTSE-100 company, say, or Prime Minister, as it does in the race to win in an athletics competition.
Imagine if sport had not been excluded from the Sex Discrimination Act. There would be commissions of enquiry set up into lack of female representation at the highest level in sport. Is it due to sexism? Stereotyping? The patriarchy? Government ministers would urge our Olympic teams to include at least one woman in each discipline – and no-one would be allowed to object that this meant better men were overlooked. And the Fawcett Society would be furiously publishing screeds about the absence of women winning boxing matches, 100m races and tennis matches at the Paris Olympics. It would look forward to the day when this unconscionable ‘discrimination’ would be eliminated and men and women would be able compete on equal terms in every sport, with 50% of the winners being female.
No one would be able to say – or they’d be ostracised if they dared – that perhaps, just perhaps, the lack of women competing at the top level in sport was that they were simply unable to compete with men on equal terms.
So thank goodness that we are allowed to recognise sex differences in sport. It spares us an enormous amount of grief.
But must that grief continue in so many other areas of our lives? Why can’t we be allowed to say it: there are fewer women CEOs or senior politicians or leading clergy or chess grandmasters because men and women are different. Not because of discrimination. Not because of sexism. Not because of the patriarchy. Simply because women are not physically up to it. We don’t say it because we can’t. But, secretly, many of us know it’s true.
Going back to the original legal wording, one possibility occurs to me. Both the 1975 and 2010 Acts have the same wording – the exemption that allows sex discrimination is for any “sport, game or other activity of a competitive nature”.
But “other activities of a competitive nature” surely include the race to become a CEO of a FTSE 100 company or a Prime Minister, or, indeed, any other high status positions. Could there not be a carve-out for those areas, too?
The trans debate has brought this into sharp focus. It really is hopeless for women to try to compete on equal terms in any sport against biological men. The cases of Imane Khelif, Lia Thomas, Austin Killips and all the others mean that no-one can hide from that now. But the outcry over how unfair this is may have opened up the possibility that this could also be as self-evident in other areas of life too. Like becoming a CEO or Prime Minister. There, I’ve said it now. But I have a good job so, of course, I’d never dare attach my name to this article.
Stop Press: Imane Khelif did indeed win a gold medal.
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