Thank heaven for little athletes

I hope I shan’t compromise my liberal credentials by observing that, for some unfathomable reason, men tend to outperform women in sports.

That is, the reason is unfathomable only to liberals like me. We desperately want men and women to be not just equal but the same. And if sports, with their annoyingly objective criteria of success, show some differences, we like to ascribe them to purely environmental factors.

Take her dollies, pink pinafores and lace away from a little girl, expose her to the same training as boys get, and she’ll grow up competing with men on equal terms. Such is our article of faith.

But then I look at male and female athletes, who have indeed undergone identical routines of training, diet and conditioning, and latent doubts begin to gnaw at the pit of my stomach. For the men still have a much higher muscle mass and a much lower fat content – and these are just the differences visible to the plain eye.

That’s why men and women have always competed in separate events: exposing female athletes to the innate physiological superiority of men would be unfair. If the women’s 100m record stands at 10.49, it would be silly to make them sprint against men, whose record is almost a second lower (9.58).

However, it pains me to report that the bodies governing sports have always applied antediluvian criteria to establishing what constitutes a woman. We know that a woman is anyone who identifies as such. Yet those troglodytes insist on certain biological markers, showing gross insensitivity to everything we hold sacred.

Now, as every liberal knows, communist countries were much more advanced than the West in every respect, social, political – and scientific. That’s why they insisted on fielding female athletes who weren’t everyone’s idea of, well, a female.

Yet back in the old days the only way to establish an athlete’s sex was to pull his/her/its knickers down and have a look. That procedure, declared the communist countries, was demeaning to the honour of communist athletes. Hence they refused to comply, and international federations went along – God forbid communist probity be offended.

Thanks to such sensitivity, ‘female’ athletes from the USSR and Eastern Europe were harvesting a rich crop of cups, medals and records. However, in 1966 perfidious capitalists prevailed and chromosome testing was introduced. Suddenly, it became hard to insist that providing, say, a saliva sample was degrading.

A magic wand was thereby waved, and a lot of questionably female athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement.

But then progress arrived, or rather accelerated. The liberal personkind has won the battle of the sexes, and those fascisoid biological markers have fallen by the wayside. As we now know, the difference between men and women is purely a matter of personal choice – and quite right too.

Yet those international federations remain stragglers on the march of progress. They obtusely insist that intersex persons (who used to be called hermaphrodites), especially those who are closer to men than to women, enjoy an unfair advantage. That’s why they ought to be kept out of some – not, God forbid, all – athletic events, such as running the Olympic distances of 400, 800 and 1,500 metres.

But the liberals have launched a massive campaign to repeal such discriminatory restrictions. And naturally, in order to succeed, any such crusade must have a celebrity figurehead. Acting in this capacity here is Caster Semenya, Olympic champion in some of the proscribed events.

I shan’t bore you with the details of her courageous decade-long fight to admit men into women’s events. I use the word ‘men’ advisedly and obsoletely, to designate anyone who, like Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya, was born with XY chromosomes and male levels of testosterone, if, one likes to believe, without a certain male appendage.

Thanks to her heroic efforts, international bodies are now prepared to overlook those silly chromosomes. Yet the fight is only half-won since they still insist that Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya suppress her testosterone levels either chemically or surgically, to bring them down into the range normally associated with women.

As a fully paid-up, card-carrying liberal, I’m aghast. And I’m not the only one.

Our cause is valiantly defended by an organisation called The Human Rights Watch, which describes such restrictions as abominable. For one thing, argue its spokespersons, there’s no evidence that high testosterone levels improve performance.

I’m sure they acknowledge that there’s plenty of physical, measurable evidence (all those seconds and metres). But they also know, as I do, that the ultimate truth isn’t physical but metaphysical. And, metaphysically speaking, the 13-second difference between men’s and women’s 800m records is trivial, not to say nonexistent.

“These regulations demean women, make them feel inadequate…,” runs the organisation’s statement. “Modern sport should adapt itself to support inclusion and non-discrimination rather than perpetuate exclusion and discrimination.”

Hear, hear. Moreover, “These regulations are damaging because the underlying assumptions are inherently sexist – that women athletes are always inferior to men athletes, so we must police women’s sports in order to protect women. This policing does nothing to protect women; it only serves to harm them.”

I couldn’t agree more. It’s time we brought down those artificial, socially constructed barriers to give the persons of all currently identified 74 sexes equal access to all sporting events.

To that effect, I hereby propose that all competitions be opened to all sexes. Since male physiology confers no performance advantages whatsoever, at least on the solely relevant metaphysical level, let them all compete together – and may the best man/woman/other win.

As to Miss/Mr/Ms Semenya, she should be given the highest award of her native South Africa, elevated to sainthood in every church where that institution exists, and given the status of Honorary Woman. We must give our heroes their due.