Well said, AF4WR!
We’d just like to point out a few more things that are wrong with this little item:
- Conflation of transgender with DSDs (differences/disorders of sexual development): Reporter Adam Harvey names three ‘elite athletes’ whose participation in women’s sport has been ‘dogged’ by ‘outrage’: Caster Semenya, Imane Khalif, and Laurel Hubbard. Only Laurel Hubbard is transgender. We wonder, given he was making the situation of transgender athletes the focus of his report, why he didn’t use other examples, like Lia Thomas or Australia’s own Hannah Mouncey.
- Alternatively, given that the proposed IOC policy will reportedly bar from the women’s category ‘any athlete who has gone through male puberty’, Harvey could have opted to cover not only male transgender athletes but also male athletes with DSDs. But in that case, he should have clarified the difference between the two, and provided accurate information about male athletes with DSDs. Instead of which he describes Caster Semenya as ‘born female’. Which is just wrong.
- Semenya, Harvey says, ‘would never have been subject to a transgender ban’: this is part of a point he’s making about what a storm in a teacup this all is. It’s true, yeah, that Semenya wouldn’t be subject to a transgender ban, because Semenya isn’t transgender; but it’s a misleading statement, given that he and other DSD athletes would/will be affected by any ban on athletes who’ve undergone male puberty, which is reportedly what the IOC is considering.
- Ricki Coughlan – one of the interviewees – told us that sex-testing ‘scoops up a lot of women who are maybe just marginal, or don’t fit some norms’. Harvey let this go through to the keeper without challenge, qualification, or counterview. He shouldn’t have. Coughlan’s claim might have held some validity back in the 1960s, but times have changed and technology’s improved. Reem Alsalem, for example, who’s the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, has stated in her report on violence against women and girls in sports, that ‘current technology enables a reliable sex screening procedure’; and World Athletics, World Boxing, and World Aquatics have already started using these modern tests.
- ‘Until now,’ Harvey tells us, ‘the IOC had said that transgender women with reduced testosterone levels could compete, but had left it up to individual sports to decide.’ Not so! The women’s category was strictly women-only up until 2004, and in fact it wasn’t until much later (2015, with further lowering of requirements in 2021) that ‘reduced testosterone levels’ became the only requirement for allowing men-who-say-they’re-women into women’s sport.
- And then there’s Harvey stating that there’s ‘venom’ in the issue, and paraphrasing Coughlan to the effect that banning men-who-say-they’re-women from the women’s category would usher in an ‘uglier era’. This is nonsense. There’s nothing venomous, nothing ugly, about fairness in women’s sport. On the contrary: the venom, the ugliness, come from the anti-woman misinformation peddled by trans-extremists and the organisations – such as the ABC – that have been captured by them.
The ABC’s got lots of form on the topic of women’s sport – forever cheering on the men who’ve chosen to invade it, and telling fibs about the women who call out this misogynist enterprise for what it is. Adam Harvey’s effort this time puts him up there with the ABC’s all-time greats in this respect, like Tracey Holmes, who in 2023 managed to fit six false or misleading statements into a three-minute news item on World Athletics; and Samantha Lewis, who, in a strong field of contenders, took gold for Worst ABC Piece on the Paris Olympics for her tweet on the Zambian women’s soccer team. We wonder, though, how much longer the ABC will be prepared to hold onto its resolute determination to back the men: the BBC’s already teetering under the weight of public revelations about its bias on trans issues …