Level the playing field
Re: "Trans women banned from female athletics," (BP, March 24).
There is a much better solution to this contentious sporting issue borne of improving technology and respect for individuals.
World Athletics has squandered that opportunity. Instead of perpetuating the ancient obsession with biological sex, the focus could instead have been put on relevant physical criteria, such as the cited testosterone levels, and allow athletes to compete in categories according to which set of those physical criteria they met, irrespective of genetic sex.
How could that be unfair to anyone competing in such a category?
This solution to it would have defused the controversy without perpetuating inherited notions that focus on judging women differently to men merely because they are biologically women.
In what other area of human contest is such sex-based discrimination still an accepted norm?
Are women managers kept carefully sequestered from male managers, or do both compete in the corporate field on the same set of relevant criteria, with their sex being irrelevant?
In the case of athletics, those criteria would include things like testosterone level, height, weight, lung capacity, and so on. Why, after all, should weaker women be forced to compete against stronger women merely because they happen to be in the category of biological female?
When other playing fields are moving past it, why does sport remain determined to discriminate on the basis of sex?
Why the refusal to treat individuals impartially according to relevant criteria for ability?