Olympic swimmer and campaigner Sharron Davies has welcomed the news that Sir Keir Starmer is ‘supportive’ of moves to protect the female category of sporting competitions, but says he first needs to be able to define what a woman is.
Speaking to GB News Sharron Davies said:
“I’ve been talking about this since 2015 and the reason I talk about it so much is that East German era that I was involved with, where those young girls were given huge amounts of testosterone, put through a form of male puberty and they totally dominated women's sport for 20 years and nothing was done.
“I saw so many of my friends lose out and I just did not want to see another generation of young girls lose out because exactly the same thing is going to happen.
“But even worse, because this wasn't just East Germans, this was going to be across the whole world and across every single sport.
“And we've now got about 900 trans-identifying men that we know: we've got 50 in the FA just here in England.
“Just in this past couple of weeks, we've had the FA not standing up for a league of 6000 young girls up in Yorkshire, where the parents of a trans identifying young boy says he wants to play football with the girls.
“The parents and the girls have said no, we want to keep this as a girls’ sport for safety and for fairness. And they have said, we're going to close you down.
“So one boy outranks 6000 girls who want to play fair sport, and this is how ridiculous this has become.
“I have to say it's good news to hear what Keir has had to say. I’m not holding my breath if I'm really honest because there's a lot of [flip flopping] that goes on.
“And first and foremost, he needs to be able to identify what a woman is. We can't protect women if we can't define them.
“At the moment, the Equality Act has been purposely made grey, so the first thing you need to do is to clarify that and when we use the word sex, we mean biological sex. We need to be able to defend sex discrimination in this country. And at the moment, it's very difficult to do that.
“It's biological sex full stop. Humans can't change sex; It's absolutely impossible to do that. Even people with differences of sexual development who are an absolutely miniscule part of society, they're still male or female, and they still cannot change sex.
“So it doesn't matter what hormones you take, how much testosterone you suppress, what surgery you take: you will still be male or female. That's biological.
“There are only a thousand women in the UK that earn a living from sport. There are 11,000 men and 2 per cent of the sponsorship dollar goes to women compared to 98 per cent going to men.
“So we already have this really tiny piece of the cake anyway, which we're working on trying to grow and this will not help it by turning around and saying that we value the feelings of males more than we value the reality of people that are biologically female.”
