Sports-watch update
Spotted overnight on the worldwide media, here are some reports and articles that might be of interest to our sport-loving readers:-
TRANSGENDER ATHLETES
Such are the complexity and variety of the issues surrounding transgender athletes – I need only reference the competing and/or contradictory rights arising from the notion that everyone should be allowed to ‘self-identify’ as whatever gender they wish … versus the right of people who are (binarily, if that’s the correct term) either men or women to take part in what might otherwise be called ‘fair competition’ – that your author is somewhat concerned that he may be inadvertently committing a faux pas in bracketing these items together.
Nevertheless, I’m getting straight to it – here goes:
Caster Seymena
Caster Seymena will now not be defending her 800 metres title in the forthcoming World Championships following a Swiss Supreme Court tribunal hearing that has overturned its previous decision that she was entitled to do so.
See here for a report by Paul MacInnes as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Separate competition category for trangender athletes?
Here on this organ we’re quite proud of our radical – but we’d submit entirely logical – solution to the vexed complexities surrounding ‘competition fairness’, viz. that in a world of total equality between the sexes (as allegedly is being sought by some) there would be no need for any gender-based classifications at all.
In other words, if a female or transgender (whichever way that person’s life journey happens to be heading) athlete, cricketer or player of any other game known to the human race is good enough to play in an elite team or competition … then that what they should jolly well do (and, incidentally, whilst doing so get paid just as much as their team mates, or indeed whatever more than that their agent may be able to negotiate for them).
Nevertheless, see here for an article by Isabella Nikolic reporting upon suggestions that 41 year old transgender Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard (and others like him/her) should be placed in a category of his/her own at the forthcoming Pacific Games, as appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
