Who’s gaining an unfair advantage? Part 2

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the case of Caster Semenya, the South African woman athlete who has naturally high levels of testosterone circulating in her bloodstream, a fact which has put the IAAF in something of a spin. Is she ‘cheating’, or is she simply making the most of the gifts God gave her?

Now the ‘unfair advantage’ debate has been given a new twist. What of athletes who started life as men, but who then change gender and become women? Or the other way round? Is that ‘cheating’? Such luminaries as Sharon Davies and Martina Navratilova think it is. It’s a well known fact that any man ranked in the top 500 would probably beat Serena Williams even on her best day. By changing sex they might win more money on the women’s tour than they could on the men’s. But the transgender lobby, one of the most vociferous and effective of any lobby group out there, counters this by saying that people who have operations to change their sex also have hormone treatment to ‘complete the job’, as it were, and that this truly renders them fully paid up members of their newly chosen sex.

This is a very tricky debate. Feminists such as Germaine Greer argue that you can’t just change to a woman midway through your life, or whenever you choose to do it, and consider yourself a bona fide member of that sex. Because that way you haven’t had to live your life under the conditions your fellow men or women have dealt with from the beginning. Obviously the trans lobby dismisses this as blind prejudice, but it isn’t. They’ve tried to shout her down and ban her from speaking publicly, but Germaine isn’t the sort of woman to go away quietly. Her view is legitimate, even if it isn’t what the trans people want to hear, and freedom of speech demands she be given a hearing. I don’t know what she thinks about trans people in sport, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be the same, that is you have to have had a whole life living as a member of one sex in order to compete with people of that sex. Sorry trans guys/women: it’s the only way it’s gonna work.