Allowing transgender athletes to play sport may sound inclusive but will put players at risk
Recommendations about accommodating transgender athletes in sport are aimed at being inclusive but will naturally inject politics into sport and put players at risk, writes Kevin Donnelly.
Opinion
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One of the most astounding things about cultural-left, politically correct gender theory is that when it appears to have reached the limit of sanity and common sense it produces yet another example of madness and extremist, radical ideology.
The latest example — official guidelines produced by the Australian Human Rights Commission and Sports Australia, advising sporting bodies to allow gender-diverse people and men self-identifying as women to play women’s sports — beggars belief.
The reality based on human genetics and biology is that 99 per cent of babies are born female or male and individuals are inherently programmed to be one or the other. As argued by the American feminist Camille Paglia, “every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death”.
The American College of Paediatricians also argues that “human sexuality is an objective biological trait” that “is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species”.
The Australian feminist Germaine Greer agrees, arguing that anyone who is suffering from gender dysphoria and who wants to change their birth sex and identify as one of the over 40 gender-diverse categories can never change the reality that gender is binary and inescapable.
For Sports Australia and the Human Rights Commission to ask sporting clubs and organisations to implement such bizarre guidelines imposing transgenderism epitomises how political correctness and identity politics now have a stranglehold on our society.
Even though 98 per cent of Australians identify as female or male, the gender warriors will never be satisfied until they bring about their Marxist-inspired utopia: a situation described by Safe Schools’ Roz Ward as a time when “human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinary new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today”.
This latest report represents simply one aspect of radical gender theory involving programs such as Safe Schools, which teach children that gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless and that anyone who thinks differently is guilty of being heteronormative and transphobic.
Universities and government departments now have inclusivity and diversity guidelines warning against using gender-specific pronouns and descriptions such as “‘he” or “she” and “male” or “female” on the basis that to do so is to be guilty of “cisnormativity” — a crime that “assumes everyone is cisgender (assuming that gender is binary) and that all people will continue to identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Cisnormativity erases the existence of trans and gender diverse people.”
And it’s not just the cost of providing new facilities and changing forms to be gender neutral in order to push “gender inclusivity”.
It’s all very well for the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins to argue that it is wrong to discriminate against gender-diverse people but it’s only right and fair to protect the rights of women and girls involved in sporting activities.
Allowing boys who self-identify as girls to use female changing sheds and showers unfairly discriminates against girls.
No amount of gender-inspired indoctrination and group think can change the reality that both sexes, especially girls and women, deserve to have their privacy respected.
As men are physically stronger than women and can outperform them in most sports, allowing transgender men to compete is also unfair and runs the risk of putting women physically at risk.
Not surprisingly, former champion tennis player Martina Navratilova argues “it is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people, biologically, who are still men”.
Sharron Davies, who swam in the Olympics for Great Britain, makes the same point when she argues, “I believe there is a fundamental difference between the binary sex you are born with and the gender you may identify as. To protect women’s sport, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women’s sport.”
Dr Eric Vilain, who is the Director of the US-based Center for Genetic Medicine, agrees when stating “if we push this argument (that) anyone declaring a female gender can compete as a woman, we’re moving toward one big competition, and the very predictable result of that competition is that there will be no women winners”.
The irony is while bodies like the Human Rights Commission boast about justice and equality, what they seek to impose only leads to further discrimination and unfairness.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of How Political Correctness Is Destroying Australia.
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