Oliver Brown talks to Sharron Davies:
For a decade, Davies has been preoccupied with the pursuit of fairness on a different front, becoming a relentless advocate for women’s right to their own category in sport. Where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was seduced by the activist fallacy of “trans women are women”, Davies had no qualms about pointing out that they were, in fact, men, using the immutable advantages of male physiology to deprive female athletes of records and titles. It has often felt a lonely fight, with many governing bodies more inclined to appease militant trans lobbyists than to protect half the population.
And, to expand on the point, with many governing bodies more inclined to bully and blame and demonize women than to accept that women have rights.
At 63, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-two, she is in no mood to ease off in her quest. Which is why, today, alongside round-the-world yachtswoman Tracy Edwards, she is launching the Women’s Sports Union, a foundation that will specifically target sports still failing to ensure fairness for women at all levels, suing them if necessary.
“We realised that we couldn’t just keep verbally lobbying,” she explains. “We needed to create an umbrella organisation that people could join and donate to, so that we could go down a legal route. What we would like it to be in the future is a voice for women’s sport.”
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The star power behind the union is formidable, with Olympic legend Daley Thompson, boxing’s Barry McGuigan and Judy Murray, tennis’s ultimate tiger mother, all joining the advisory board. Davies has enlisted lawyers to work pro bono, emphasising: “Lawfare is not off the table.”
There are still 34 sports in Britain – including swimming, gymnastics and ice skating – that continue to let males into their grassroots female competitions according to their self-declared “gender identity”. It is this type of schism – restricting the female category at elite level to biological females only but leaving mass-participation sport as a free-for-all – that, they argue, the Supreme Court verdict should have stopped. But many sports say they are waiting for “guidance” before implementing change across the board.
Guidance shmidance! Men are not women: there’s your guidance. Do the right thing.
She’s not a fan of the IOC. It failed to do anything about the East Germans’ doping, which cost her the gold, and now it’s failing to do anything about men invading women’s sports.
It was the IOC who gave Manfred Ewald, mastermind of the East German scheme, its highest award, the Olympic Order, in 1985. And it was the IOC who, only last year in Paris, presided over one of the bleakest scandals in Olympic history, allowing Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan to sweep to gold in women’s boxing, despite the fact that previous sex tests had indicated male chromosomes. Italy’s Angela Carini withdrew from her bout against Khelif after just 46 seconds, claiming she had never been punched so hard in her life. “I am here for gold,” the Algerian told the BBC. “I will fight anybody, I will fight them all.”
“I’m astonished that the IOC survived what happened last summer, because to me, that was almost criminal negligence,” Davies says. “I think, for the last 10 years, we’ve been waiting for a woman to be paralysed or killed.”
She reveals that this perspective was far from popular at the BBC, for whom she has worked at 13 Olympic Games as a poolside interviewer. She continues to juggle her broadcast duties alongside her online personal fitness company and her increasingly demanding campaign work. “I was warned several times about my tweeting on Khelif, even though it was factual.”
The corporation has come under sustained fire in recent days over its coverage of these issues, with The Telegraph revealing internal staff messages that raised concerns over several years about the number of BBC “puff pieces” on biological males in female sport, with little or no balancing coverage of the women affected.
She was incandescent that Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC director of sport, had written a 2019 article for The Times dismissing Davies and nine-time Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova as “not experts” on the subject, suggesting her views were tantamount to saying, “Don’t let black men in the same shops as you or they’ll rape your women”. Davies was married for six years to sprinter Derek Redmond, the son of Caribbean immigrants, and had two children with him. They divorced in 2000.
I’d be incandescent and beyond. How extremely disgusting.
“It was absolutely ludicrous, and I did call him up on it,” she says. “I told Tim Davie, the director-general [who resigned last week] that if he didn’t apologise, I would sue him. We got an assurance at the time that, in future, he would leave his politics at the door.
“To try to imply that I was racist, that this was the same as a situation involving a black person? My daughter’s black. How stupid and ignorant was that? There are a large number of activists in the BBC, imposing trans ideology, language and agendas.”
And kicking women in the teeth every chance they get.
