They will prioritize two things that can’t be combined

The IOC can’t decide what to think.

The International Olympic Committee’s new transgender guidelines for sports have been delayed again because of “very conflicting opinions” and are now unlikely to be published until after next February’s Beijing Winter Olympics, three years later than originally planned.

The news was revealed by the IOC’s science and medical director, Dr Richard Budgett, who said the forthcoming advice for international sports federations would “prioritise inclusion” and “avoidance of harm”.

They can’t do both. If they prioritize “inclusion” (by which they mean “inclusion” of men in women’s events) then they can’t also prioritize avoidance of harm. “Including” men in women’s sports is harm, and more harm will flow from it.

The Olympics aren’t “inclusive” anyway. They exclude all but a few hundred people out of the 7 billion on the planet. It’s ridiculous that the one area where they want to play at being inclusive is the one that will harm women. Not everyone, not all Olympians, just women. Women only.

“We’re very aware that sex, of course, is not binary. It’s a continuum. The sectors overlap. And so the solutions are not essentially going to be binary.”

Nonsense. What they claim to be “very aware of” is nonsense.

“Transgender women are women,” Budgett said. “But we also have to separate gender from eligibility. And eligibility needs to be sport-specific in order to have this fair and meaningful competition at all levels, but especially at the elite level where the stakes are that much higher.”

Transgender women are not women though, they’re men who identify as women.

“There’s going to be different criteria for different sports. If you compare archery to hockey to rowing, they require very different skills. And an elite athlete from one is unlikely to be an elite athlete in another. And we have to determine what really is a disproportionate or insurmountable advantage.”

No, actually, they should be reminding themselves that men have huge physical advantages over women end of story. They shouldn’t be deciding to their own satisfaction how much advantage is too much, they should be declining to permit that advantage at all.

5 Responses to “They will prioritize two things that can’t be combined”