The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Sport Saturday
Coe’s comments on two- tier trans policy are nonsensical and unjust
‘Zero tolerance’ approach to doping should extend to protecting all female athletes, not just the elite
In a less-than-crowded field, Lord Coe has distinguished himself as a resolute voice in sport’s roll-back of gender ideology. Amid so much hand-wringing about the transgender debate, the president of World Athletics held firm last March in his long-stated belief that biology trumped gender, banning athletes who had gone through male puberty from the female category. How dismaying, then, to find 10 months later that his conviction comes with a caveat.
“The transgender issue is only at elite level,” he said this week, advocating a more liberal policy everywhere else. Coe’s logic is that while those who have grown up male must be kept out of female events in World Championships and Olympic Games to preserve fairness, anything below this can be a free-for-all, so as not to deny transgender athletes the mental and physical benefits of competition. It is framed as a reasonable trade-off, but in reality it is anything but. Fair sport for females is not a subject for arbitrary compromises. You cannot settle for protecting the 0.01 per cent at the top if you then ask every other woman and girl to accept being placed at a disadvantage.
Where does Coe imagine the journeys of female Olympians originate, if not at the grass roots? And how does he suppose this will be sustained if women, despairing at being used as pawns in certain males’ quest for affirmation as females, are shunted off their development path? The ring-fencing of women’s sport for women is anything but exclusionary. Anyone can still compete according to their sex or in an open category. To allow males into female competition at any level is effectively to declare female athletes matter less. It is astounding that so many administrators still have not grasped the pernicious sexism that their vacillating enables.
We have already seen the consequences of their failure to act. At the Tokyo Games in 2021, Roviel Detenamo should, at 18, have become the first woman to represent the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru in the Olympics for 20 years. Instead, her place went to Laurel Hubbard, a 43-year-old biological male from New Zealand who had only recently transitioned.
At cycling’s Tour of the Gila in New Mexico last April, Mexico’s Marcela Prieto should have been toasting victory in a UCI stage race. Instead, she was knocked off the top of the podium by Austin Killips, a trans-identifying male who had started riding a bike seriously only in 2019 and who wrote a blog about hormone treatment entitled “Oestro Junkie”. This is in the realm that Coe would classify as “elite”. But it percolates down through the entire structure of sport. Take the story disclosed by Telegraph Sport of Sarah Gibson, the rower accepted at face value into the Cambridge women’s second crew at the 2015 Boat Race despite being bio-logically male. It meant that one female rower never earnt her Half-Blue, never secured the lifetime membership of Cambridge University Boat Club that was her due. Is this the type of situation with which Coe would be comfortable? In his own sport, the clearest example of a non-elite activity is parkrun.
Even here, problems are emerging because of the weekly 5km runs’ approach of pure self-ID. Just last week, a report by think tank Policy Exchange, backed by Olympians including Sharron Davies and Daley Thompson, said Sport England should instruct parkrun to collect participants’ data based on sex rather than gender identity, and to update course records to reflect this. “If this does not happen within 12 months,” it declared, “taxpayers’ funding should be withdrawn.”
Its research established that at least three female records in parkrun were held by biological males. In a case highlighted last May by Mara Yamauchi, Britain’s third-fastest female marathon runner, Sian Longthorpe, openly
Where does Coe imagine the journeys of female Olympians originate, if not at the grass roots?
trans, broke a women’s age category record in Porthcawl by over a minute. The outright women’s record in Aberystwyth was set in 2012 by Lauren Jeska. In 2017, Jeska, born a man, was jailed for 18 years for attempting to kill Ralph Knibbs, UK Athletics’ former head of human resources, in a frenzied knife attack arising from a row over the athlete’s eligibility to compete as female. The record has still not been removed. Throughout Coe’s career, he has regarded fairness as paramount, upholding a “zero tolerance” policy on doping. So why can he not apply the same unconditional rules for women desperate to defend the integrity of their own category?
Coe needs to correct this flaw in his rationale, and fast. He is a prime candidate to be the next president of the International Olympic Committee, which for years has spinelessly deflected any transgender policy decisions to individual federations. His opinion is of great import. As such, this is not the moment to suggest to the vast majority of female runners outside the elite that their rights to fairness are of lesser consequence. A two-tier system, with strict rules for the few and a “compete as whatever you like” policy for the rest, is as nonsensical as it is unjust.