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Female rowers are sold down the river

Governing body endorses ‘dishonest’ transgender concept that is essentially unjust to women athletes

Oliver Brown Chief Sports Writer

The sport of rowing emphasises, to a greater extent than almost any other Olympic discipline, the inherent physiological advantages enjoyed by men.

It is one where speed is determined by the interplay of upper body strength, lung capacity and length of levers, all metrics that are influenced decisively by biology. Among women, the average lung volume is 4.3 litres. For men, this rises to 5.8 litres.

For British Olympic champion Pete Reed, it was a scarcely credible 11.7 litres, the highest reading ever recorded by a sportsman and one that helped propel him to gold medals at three consecutive Games. The difference that this creates on the time-sheets

Nothing less than a U-turn – a response all the rage these days – will suffice on a policy that, frankly, is an outrage

is self-evident, with the world’s best time for a men’s coxless four over 2,000 metres 37 seconds faster than for the equivalent female crew.

These are not complex principles to comprehend. And yet British Rowing, in the latest update to its “trans and non-binary inclusion competition policy”, has seen fit to enable male advantage in the female category that was explicitly designed to counter it.

From now on, the governing body will, in its desperation to showcase greater diversity, allow transgender athletes to compete in the same races as women, as long as they can prove that their testosterone has been suppressed below five nanomoles per litre.

Just so we are clear, the average testosterone level for women is between 0.5 and 2.4 nmol/l. In effect, therefore, British Rowing is giving trans women a free pass into female events even when their residual benefits of having been born male are preserved. In recreational rowing, this liberalisation reaches even more absurd extremes, with the organisation advising local clubs that if squads are gendersegregated, a “trans or non-binary person should be able to participate in whichever squad they feel most comfortable with”.

It is a grim irony that in the literature announcing these spectacularly ill-conceived changes, British Rowing underscores a “zero-tolerance approach to all forms of discrimination, including transphobia”. So far, so achingly worthy. What it neglects to consider, though, is how it is essentially advocating indirect sex discrimination, pushing through a policy that disproportionately benefits men at the expense of women.

As ever in sport, the self-styled bleeding hearts choose to overlook this particular injustice, instead prioritising the inclusion of trans women by whatever means possible.

Doubly galling is the fact that these rules are being imposed, in the main, by men. British Rowing has a male majority on its board: both its chairman and its chief executive are male, together with its athlete director and the head of its sporting committee. Why on earth should they be at liberty to enforce changes that deny women equal competitive opportunities on the basis of their sex?

Already, the move is threatening to detonate a firestorm of protest. “Makes me so p----- off,” tennis great Martina Navratilova wrote this week. “Where and when will this end? Why is it so impossible for women to have their own spaces, their own categories?”

Daley Thompson, Britain’s decathlon legend, went even further, offering to crowdfund any efforts to sue British Rowing for its stance. “I know a little about institutional discrimination and can’t abide it or the people who enable it,” he said.

British Rowing openly acknowledges last year’s report by the Sports Council Equality Group, declaring that there can be no balancing of inclusion of born males in the female category with fairness for women. But extraordinarily, it has then subverted that very conclusion by endorsing an approach fundamentally unjust to women.

As Dr Ross Tucker, sports scientist for World Rugby, puts it: “British Rowing should be embarrassed by this grand deception. A claim that it follows the council guidelines is followed by intellectual tap dancing and outright dishonesty, the end result being discrimination against women. Congratulations, you’ve failed almost everywhere.”

Mark Davies, British Rowing’s chairman, insists that its thinking is aligned with that of World Rowing and that it will be reviewed within a year. But ultimately, nothing less than a U-turn – a response all the rage these days – will suffice. Do not forget, British Rowing already has an “open” category that allows for everybody to be included. Why, then, does it refuse to guarantee sex-based eligibility for women?

Sadly, it gives every impression of kowtowing to the fashionable but profoundly flawed logic that trans athletes must be accommodated at all costs, foisting an exclusionary policy on its female rowers.

That, frankly, is an outrage, and it cannot stand.

Sport | Racing

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2022-10-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/281715503506241

Daily Telegraph