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| Mianne Bagger, played competitive women's golf after transitioning |
A case in point is Mianne Bagger, an Australian professional golfer who made history at the Women's Australian Open as the first transgender athlete to compete in a professional golf tournament. Bagger, who transitioned in 1995, explained in an newpaper interview why it was necessary to support the moves in Australia to enact legislation to exclude persons of one sex from competing in sports designated as being for the opposite sex.
Bagger, now 55 years old, said that for a man transitioning there is a loss of strength and stamina, but only over a long time.
However, the main factor is to protect women-only spaces. Bagger said in the interview:
"These days, [the dynamic] has crept into what's called self ID or self identification: male-bodied people presenting as women, who live as women, with varying degrees of medical intervention and in some degrees, no medical intervention, which is just — it's crossed the line, in my view, it really has … It's a slap in the face to women."
She stressed that, when considering the bill, it was "really important" to note "the difference between general society and sport, particularly really high-level sport".
"In every day society, of course we want an inclusive, egalitarian [society]. We want equality, lack of discrimination, and of course every single person should have equal access to life and services and work in society. Of course we all want that, and so do I.
"In sport? It's different. Sport is about physical ability. It's not just about discrimination, it's not just about equality and equal access. It is a physical ability. Now, if you've got one group — males — that are on average stronger, taller, faster, as opposed to women, there has to be a divide. There has to be a division."
Bagger would answer in the affirmative the question: Can one be a true supporter of transgender rights, while also maintaining that an athlete such as American swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, shouldn’t be allowed to compete in the women’s division?
Another is American Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who won three swimming gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and is now an outspoken proponent of women’s sports.
As Associated Press columnist Paul Newberry writes:
Hogshead-Makar considers herself a liberal on social issues. She also has made it clear that she thinks Thomas has a huge biological advantage that should bar her from taking part in women’s events.
“We’ve got people who are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify the fact that they didn’t get their act together and change the policy so that it’s fair for biological women,” Hogshead-Makar said in an interview, less than 24 hours after Thomas became the first transgender swimmer to win a national championship.
Newberry says that his view that there was no example of an athlete gaining an unfair advantage after transitioning from male to female has been challenged by Thomas’ performance. He continues:
Competing as a male at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas had some success but nothing of national significance. After going through hormone-replacement therapy and — let’s make this clear — following the rules set up by the NCAA for transgender athletes, she joined the Penn women’s team and became one of the best college freestylers in the nation.
Qualifying for the NCAA women’s championships at Georgia Tech in three events, Thomas overpowered the field in the closing laps of the 500 free Thursday night, touching 1.75 seconds ahead of everyone else.
What a field it was.
The runner-up, Virginia’s Emma Weyant, was a silver medalist in the 400-meter individual medley at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics. Third-place finisher Erica Sullivan of Texas also won a silver medal in Tokyo, behind the great Katie Ledecky in the 1,500 freestyle. Fourth place went to Stanford’s Brooke Forde, who earned an Olympic silver in the 4x200 free relay.
Thomas finished fifth in Friday night’s 200 freestyle. She came into the meet as the top seed, just as she was in the 500, but touched more than 2 seconds behind Stanford Taylor Ruck.
Hogshead-Makar said Thomas’ times as a female swimmer show her biological advantage “has not been mitigated”.
“She didn’t go from being 500th as a male to 500th as a female,” Hogshead-Makar said. “She went from not being able to even qualify for the NCAAs as a male to being a national champion as a female. That’s not fair.”
In her eyes, Thomas’ supporters are blending gender rights with the biological realities of sex.
“I want trans people to be happy. I want them to have full acceptance,” Hogshead-Makar said. “But this isn’t fair to the women’s category. You can hold those two things to be true at the same time.”
That last thought is in direct contrast to the line pushed by transgender activists that there are so few transgender athletes that there should be minimal supervision on this matter by sports bodies. That argument fails to convince those women athletes who battled to raise the status of women's sports with regards pay, prize money, and public recognition of achievement. If more Lia Thomases appear women athletes would soon lose heart at their ability to make it to the top.
That there has to be a division in sex categories to protect women was also the stance of a leading New Zealand sportswoman last year as a man who identified as a woman was selected to represent New Zealand women in weightlifting at the Olympic Games. At the time, it was reported:
Former New Zealand Olympic medallist Lorraine Moller has questioned the fairness behind allowing transgender athletes to compete in the women's categories at the Games.
Moller's professional running career stretched 22 years and saw her compete at an impressive four Olympic Games starting at the 1984 event in Los Angeles, as well as three Commonwealth Games.
The now 66-year-old was also a strong advocate for women's rights in sport, calling on female athletes to be paid alongside men at a time when they received nothing.
Moller is continuing her support for women's sport, and has taken aim at the potential inclusion of transgender athletes in women's categories at the Olympic Games.
"We fought very hard in our time, especially for us women who didn't have parity in the Olympic events. We were involved in a campaign back then just to have our own events for ourselves, separate from the men's category," she said.
"Now we have suddenly this whole issue of men who identify as women wanting to be included in the women's category, and I find that very concerning and it seems that there's a possibility of derailing the very thing that we fought for because men have considerable advantage across the board. The top women could never beat the top men and if it had been an open category, I would never have had an Olympic team or stood on the podium."
Moller says there is a petition going on behalf of Save Women's Sport - an organisation that's part of an international coalition of women's sport organisations, athletes and support - that believes "sport must be categorised by sex, not gender identity".
Society needed to give more guidance to sports bodies in order to have "more review and be very careful before we allow men to take part in women's sports because we certainly wouldn't want to derail or dilute the opportunities that have been created for young women to enjoy sport at all levels," Moller said.
It's not only sport where men identifying as women were seen to be creating difficulties for women. It has arisen as a problem for women employed in financial services in Britain when it came to assessing equality of access to management positions and to company boards.
The Financial Conduct Authority has now ruled that men identifying as women should not be automatically registered as women in female diversity quotas.
This was a change from an earlier plan to make it compulsory to include "those self-identifying as women" in female diversity targets for boards and senior management roles. The change came after hundreds of women complained about the possible distortion in the actual number of women in those roles.
According to the newspaper report used as the source of this information:
The move is part of the FCA's wider "comply or explain" push for diversity - which will also demand that at least one board member be from an ethnic minority. Companies who fail to meet the requirements will be expected to "explain why not".
The report also noted that transgender activists had created such an outcry that the regulator had to water down its requirement, "ultimately giving UK-listed companies the 'flexibility' to decide how they report their female quotas".
City of London lawyer Cathy Pitt, who is a member of the Sex Matters advisory group, said:
Collecting and reporting data on sex remains important, because how else can we measure improvement on closing the gap between men and women? Large listed firms still need to tackle sex-based discrimination on everything from pay and promotion to harassment and corporate culture.
Maya Forstater, executive director of Sex Matters, said:
The FCA was wise to allow companies to report straightforwardly on the proportion of male and female members of their boards, [...], and not to start requiring them to ask board members to declare that they have one of many fluid “gender identities”. It is not for the financial regulator to redefine what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean.
That last point is an important one. It's for society as a whole to uphold the biological reality of a person's sex so that good order is preserved in society. The FCA had been pressured by activist groups to force companies to have management and board members to self-identify, no matter the biological reality, and that personal declaration would be entered
A sensible rethink changed that requirement, as we saw above.
In such instances as these, we have seen how, whether with sports bodies or other authorities, the promotion of a transgender ideology that proclaims that each person has a "right" to declare their own sex and that everyone else must comply with that declaration - how unfettered self-invention disrupts the harmony that the usual forms of self-restraint of personal desires allow.
Here is the original form the Financial Conduct Authority put forward for use by companies in assessing sex diversity:
To conclude, in his column quoted above, Paul Newberry talks of the goal of fairness and equality when it comes to athletes who identify with the opposite sex. That's a noble sentiment - yes, there is a "but" - but we have to compare like to like for both to be achieved. Personal desires are fine except when they involve the impostion of principles that would transform and re-define social goods like how society can recognise essential characteristics of its members. Society also has a responsibility to protect its members, and to preserve the best conditions for the fundamental life-giving cell of society, the family.
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