‘Only a Matter of Time’ Before Trans "Women" Dominate Women’s Sports, Advocate Says

The increasing inclusion of trans-identified male athletes in women’s sports means it is “only a matter of time” before the podiums and the teams on the track and field are dominated by biological males despite trans women representing less than one percent of the population, said an Australian women’s group advocate.

Save Women’s Sports Australasia co-founder Katherine Deves told The Epoch Times that while trans athletes are being “touted” by the media as groundbreaking and trailblazing, the trans inclusion policy creates a “loophole that can now be exploited” by “opportunistic countries, sports teams and individual athletes.”

“We’re going to be seeing these ordinary blokes competing against the world’s most elite women,” Deves said, “There is no sort of measurements or tests to determine what someone’s gender identity is; it’s all based on a self-declaration.”

“We don’t want to see our little girls training their hearts out making the sacrifices… And all of a sudden, you have a boy that just decides to declare that he’s a girl come in and take the space.”

Further, 78 percent said the International Olympics Committee (IOC) did not have “proper consultations” with female athletes about its transgender guidelines.

A graph from the research showing female athlete’s opinions about transgender athletes on Nov. 23, 2021.

During the Tokyo Games 2020, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the first trans woman to participate in the Olympics’ female category, has been accused by women’s groups and Australian Senator Claire Chandler of taking the spot of Roviel Detenamo, an 18-year-old female weightlifter from the island nation of Nauru.

The trans-inclusive policy also fuelled a conflict recently between Iran and Jordan over a women’s soccer match, with Jordan accusing Iran of fielding a male goalkeeper to win a critical game. Transgender goalkeeper Zohreh Koudaei saved two penalties, ensuring Iran’s qualification for the Women’s Asia Cup for the first time.

However, transgender advocates and child psychiatrist at Stanford University, Jack Turban doubts that the inclusion of trans women will push out biological females because there are cases where “cisgender girls can win” when competing with transgender girls.

“There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports,” Turban wrote in Scientific American on March, 2021, “Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children.”

The argument was echoed by LGBTQIA+ groups, which said a person’s genetic make-up and bodily autonomy “are not useful indicators” of athletic performance, and that “trans people are exactly who we say we are.”

“When a person does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, they must be able to transition socially—and that includes participating in sports consistent with their gender identity,” said LGBTQIA+ group American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a commentary.

But Deves argued that while sports organisations and LGBTQIA+ groups might be “pretending that there are no differences between the two sexes,” the world sporting records for men and women as collated over the last few centuries tell a different story.

“The most elite men surpass the most elite women … The only sort of metrics that women perform better than men do are basically to do with things like balance and flexibility,” she continued, “There are 6,000 biological differences between men and women, 3,000 of which are observable.”

Deves believed it is “a false premise” to assume that trans people are marginalised as evidence shows “transgender lobby groups have huge influence and power” over the government and the media.

Meanwhile, Tasmanian Liberal Senator Chandler, who recently introduced a draft bill to protect single-sex sport for Australian women, told The Epoch Times “there is no reason at all that sporting administrators can’t both protect and celebrate women’s single-sex sport and be inclusive of trans people.”Liberal Party Senator Claire Chandler makes her maiden speech in the Senate Chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on July 23, 2019. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)

“The female category exists for a reason,” she noted, “There is no human right to demand entry into something designed for the opposite sex.”

The previous federal Labor government replaced the sex-based definitions of “man” and “women” in the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013 with gender identity and created provisions that grant male-born athletes the right to take legal action if they are barred from the women’s category.

Last month, eight peak Australian sporting bodies, including Rugby Australia, AFL, and Netball Australia, released guidelines for the inclusion of transgender athletes, following the lead of Sport Australia and the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2019.

That's such a cisgendered bias thing to say. Transgendered athletes are *really* female athletes. Of course, even calling them female shows cisgendered bias. Just stop talking about it or we'll have to make it illegal to talk about it, and that will be your fault too.

[snip] “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” [/snip] -- Theodore Dalrymple

Women’s professional sports are already a joke.

Professional sports, both men's and women's, are an entertainment business. They have no intrinsic importance. Sports are fun for a lot of people for 101 perfectly good reasons. They are best appreciated as a participant. As spectators, we tend to appreciate the sports we played ourselves as kids. Throw in school spirit, the old rah-rah and a little tailgating, and sports are a healthy diversion. More kids today should be playing more sports, as opposed to sitting with their noses in a screen while they exercise their fingers and thumbs.

Women's professional sports can be enjoyed on exactly the same basis and for exactly the same reasons as men's professional sports. That said, the success of women's professional sports as a commercial proposition will depend on American women putting their money where their mouth is and buying tickets. It's all about butts in seats and eyeballs on the screen. Fill the stadiums and women's professional sports can succeed.

Women's golf and tennis have already crossed the threshold, but they are individual sports. They sell the superstars who travel a circuit. Team sports are more challenging because clubs are selling a team that plays an extended season. Fans have to buy into the whole team over a long period of time, not just the visiting stars once a year. I think soccer will probably be the first women's team sport to graduate to commercial viability. As things work in the U.S. today, this will probably depend on getting a richer tv contract.

The NWSL is walking a tightrope. Portland already draws MLS size crowds and has clearly graduated. No other club is close, though several are moving slowly in the right direction. The league will also expand next season to 12 teams. This is important because major market coverage is essential in attracting television dollars. (This is what killed the old ABA, which was clearly superior to the NBA on a team by team basis by the time of the merger, but which was simply not large enough to be a viable national league, as the NBA had cornered all the major national market cities. Attempts to develop an alternative to the NFL face the same problem.) IMHO, the biggest threat to the NWSL is the temptation to get greedy and chase subsidy dollars in the name of "fairness." The league needs to build slowly and find its own level. And young women need to buy more tickets. Until they do that, I'm perfectly comfortable telling them to go sit in the corner and shut up about equal pay. Fill the stands first. The pay will take care of itself.

And yes, I have standing to rant. I have season tickets to the Washington Spirit, as part of a group that started (and continues) as a father-daughter thing that began more than ten years ago (prior even to the formation of the current league) when our girls started playing competitive soccer. The dads thought our little girls should watch women's games to see the game that they might actually grow up to play when they became big girls. They see plenty of men's soccer as well, but men's and women's soccer really are two different games tactically. The size and strength thing mostly balances out; the men play on the men's scale and the women play on the women's scale, and that's fine. It evens out.

(Yes, a select U15/U16 boys team can beat the USWNT. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Almost fully grown and highly athletic 15 and 16 year old boys are perfectly capable of mugging, raping or beating to death virtually any adult woman, let alone beating them in soccer. They're that much bigger and stronger. And "almost grown and highly athletic" is who is playing on elite boys teams. These are the guys on the major college and pro track, just like the five star football and basketball prospects of the same age, who are plenty capable of beating up on women too -- and much likelier than soccer players to actually do so from time to time.)

But the undisguisable difference in soccer boils down to leg strength. The women don't have the long passing game like the men, and the women can't shoot effectively from distance. The goalkeepers are good. Unless they're badly out of position, you aren't going to beat them from 25 yards out. That changes everything. But that's a story for another day.

By the way, the Washington Spirit, who just won the championship, are the standingest team in the league. Two kneelers. The rest stand, including this year's Rookie of the Year, this year's Golden Boot winner, and this year's Goalkeeper of the Year.

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