Summary
The Real Threat to Women's Sports. Claims of trans women dominating elite sport are unsupported by evidence. No trans woman has won a major gold medal and none even qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics. This lack of elite success has led gender critics to shift their focus toward targeting community events and policing the biology of cisgender women.
The Real Threat to Women’s Sports
The Real Threat to Women’s Sports – It’s Not Trans Athletes, It’s the Gender Police.
Over the past decade, an ever-increasingly vocal campaign fuelled by UK media has demanded the “protection” of women’s sport, claiming it is being “destroyed” by trans women who are “breaking all women’s records and taking all their elite medals.” Yet in ten years, still no evidence supports this claim: not a single trans woman has come even close to winning gold or breaking any record in elite women’s sport.
The Myth of Trans Dominance and the Retreat: From Elite Sport down to Parkrun
Despite repeated claims that ‘average’ male athletes will dominate women’s sport following their transitioning, the evidence over the past 22 years tells a very different story. Across 11 Olympic Games and more than 92,000 participating Olympians, only one openly trans woman has qualified and competed: Laurel Hubbard, a New Zealand weightlifter in 2021, who finished last.
With no elite trans winners to target, and clearly no evidence to prove their baseless claim, Gender Critical opposition has shifted its focus to events like Parkrun—a non-elite, community event promoting community spirit and good health. It has zero connection or relevance to elite sport. Participants run, jog, or walk with children or dogs, and finish times are for personal tracking only. Times and placings are meaningless in elite sport, and this focus on Parkrun simply highlights that trans women are having no impact in elite sport.
As a result, Gender Criticals had no option but to abandon their baseless claims of “destroying” women’s sport, replacing it now with the assertion that merely competing enables trans women “steal the places of cisgender women.” But this, too, is false, as it can’t be pinned down as a unique impact of trans inclusion.
“Stealing Places”: A Claim That Collapses Under Scrutiny
As trans women are accused of “stealing a hard-earned place,” the question must be asked: Is this standard applied consistently across sport?
Every champion benefits from natural advantages that help them outperform rivals. Michael Phelps exemplifies this: a long torso with short legs, wingspan longer than his height, double-jointed ankles, knees, and elbows, large hands and size-13 feet acting as paddles, and reduced lactic acid production, which enables much faster recovery and is of great benefit with multiple events over a short Olympic swimming timetable —all these advantages combined with elite training to make him virtually unbeatable. Were these advantages fair? No. Were they cheating? Also no. They were simply natural-born attributes used to his advantage within the sport’s rules. Fans rightly celebrated and idolised Phelps, and no one targeted him for being “born different” or demanded his expulsion because of the clear, unfair advantages he had that denied others and stole their medals or places.
When “Stealing Places” Is Ignored.
The real threat to Women’s Sports – When Martina Navratilova took US citizenship and represented the United States in the Tennis Federation Cup after previously competing for Czechoslovakia, she thereby displaced a natural-born US player. That player’s hard-earned hopes and dreams had been taken away, but it was within the rules, and no one in the US complained when Navratilova helped the USA lift the trophy.
Financial Doping: The Advantage No One Complains About.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Great Britain won only 15 medals, including just one gold. Many GB athletes were effectively amateurs, funding their own training, and faced competing against known drug cheats with inadequate drug testing. GB Sport responded to Atlanta with massive investment, funded largely by the National Lottery, which was intentionally intended not just to become more competitive, but to totally dominate and obliterate all other nations, unable to match our nation’s resources. This became known as “Financial Doping.” Legal, yes—but fair? That’s highly questionable, but it is within the rules.
As a result of this decision, by the time of the London 2012 Olympics, Team GB had amassed 65 medals, including 29 golds. Does any Gender Critical campaign about GB athletes “stealing” places from others unable to compete? No, they don’t — they are treated as heroes by every sports fan throughout the UK.
The fact is that every sporting advantage will push less fortunate competitors down the sporting pecking order. All will undoubtedly have worked hard and had their dreams destroyed, but that’s simply the very essence of sport!
We have winners and losers, and everyone who didn’t fulfil their sporting dreams will have been denied by someone else. So singling out a tiny number of trans women as uniquely “stealing” places is clearly and wholly unmerited when compared to every place ‘stolen’ by any other accepted competitor. If “stealing places” were applied consistently, elite sport would be full of theft.
It’s also important to note that, unlike any other natural unfair advantage in sport, trans inclusion is based on ensuring there is fairness and that any unfair advantage gained from male puberty is removed. This is the reason there are no trans women having success at the elite level, because of their treatment. Furthermore, it is also conveniently ignored that by trans men leaving women’s sport, it actually improves placings and team call-ups for some cisgender women. Their dreams may well have been fulfilled and realised because trans men exist.
Paris 2024: When There Were No Trans Athletes to Target
To perpetuate a claim that trans women are unfairly impacting women’s elite sport was always going to be difficult, as not one trans woman qualified to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Facing the prospect of a public realisation that this exposed a baseless claim, the media attention focused on two cisgender women, boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, who were both initially falsely accused of being trans. Both were quickly confirmed as cisgender, but the narrative persisted, shifting due to alleged failures in IBA “gender eligibility tests” that were disputed by the IOC, but resulted in both boxers being labelled in the media as ‘men’.
Trans women are routinely labelled by those Gender Critical as ‘men’, but with no trans athletes at Paris to focus on, this comparison ensured that a story of “men competing in women’s sport” remained high profile in the media. But what this also meant was that cis women failing to meet a new required level ‘female’ had now become a target in sport. Keeping ‘men’ out of women’s sport effectively kept the trans debate in media headlines even though this was no longer a trans issue.
The Next Escalation: Sex Testing of All Cisgender Women in Sport
So how far will this spread? If we expand on the claim recently made by World Athletics that there are 50-60 ‘male’ finalists in elite Athletics since 2000, over the last 50 years, there could have been 100 elite cis women medallists in Athletics alone who would theoretically have failed their sex test. Given the way ‘outing males from female sport’ is today being pushed so vehemently, it is not unreasonable to assume there would be a demand to do precisely the same with any easy-to-apply SRY test. It is therefore highly feasible that once the testing is fully operational and removing those who fail, calls for widespread testing of all previous female medallists and record holders will surely follow – but it is only women who are being targeted.
At an Olympics with no trans involvement, a reported 40 drug cheats were identified during the Paris pre-Games testing, and 5 were exposed during the Olympics. So how have we reached this position where drug cheats are no longer the priority, and a fixation on trans women has led to the targeting of cisgender women?
The real threat to women’s sports is not trans athletes, it never has been — it’s the Gender Police.
