Olympian and Commonwealth Games gold medallist Jane Flemming has announced that transgender athletes should be barred from competing in female sport on safety grounds.
The 55-year-old former track and field champion has weighed into the divisive issue as several sporting codes, including rugby, face calls to ban female sport to competitors born as girls.
The federal Sex Discrimination Act, however, prohibits gender or gender identity-based discrimination.
Jane Flemming who represented Australia at three Commonwealth and two Olympic games during the late 1980s and early 1990s, said transgender athletes were a safety risk to female competitors.
She told the ABC’s 7.30 programme that the problem was that for the human species that’s been born biologically male, if they go through puberty in particular, they have, undoubtedly some physiological advantages.
She said whether it’s bone strength or additional capillarization or larger muscle dimension, but then there are other aspects of that as well. Not only does that affect performance but there’s a health or danger factor as well.
The issue of transgender athletes is so politically tainted and Tasmanian Liberal senator Claire Chandler was labelled as transphobic after calling for transgender rugby players to be banned to protect women’s safety.
Labour senator Nita Green compared Senator Claire Chandler to Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who’s outraged trans activists by suggesting only someone born biologically female could comprehend what it was like to be a woman.
She informed the Senate in late August that Senator Chandler had made at least two speeches, attempting to veil her transphobic beliefs as faux-feminist values.
She said that they knew where Senator Chandler’s getting her speeches from because she said in an address to the senate that she stood with JK Rowling and millions of women around the world who were determined to ensure that their rights as women were not traded off in the name of diversity.
Senator Chandler has previously told news outlets that they needed to look at the research that’s within the report, adopt the findings and prioritise women’s rugby being for women.
And she said that women’s sport was invented for people of the female sex and any hint that it’s somewhat provocative or controversial to articulate this view, she thought was rather ridiculous.
Physically there is no contest and maybe they should have their own competition, such as an LGBTQ sports event, but make it official. It just makes common sense, something that’s in short supply these days.
I’m not against transgender people, but they are built differently, but common sense has to be enforced at some point and it makes sense because some suppress or increase hormones to appear what they’re not, but you can’t conceal the adrenaline signs or the dominance of the chromosome, and it’s almost like cheating.
A team should be created so that they can play against other transgenders, it’s not rocket science and it should have been thought of a long time ago, after all, we are in the 21st century.
Regardless of what transgender people would like to be known as, they just don’t have the same muscle structure, stamina or metabolism as true females do, but it’s all about equal rights and stuff, but wouldn’t it be a bit like a boxing match – featherweight v heavyweight, there’s no contest really.
What determines your gender is your chromosome combination and not your mental state. Transgender people are not mental, and they definitely should not be in a mental facility, but some people are just born in the wrong body, and many transgender people have transitioned well into society, but unfortunately, some have not because society as a whole is far too short-sighted to see the bigger picture.
We should all be permitted to do the things we enjoy, no matter who we are.
Perhaps we should show everyone an oyster – there are two types of male oyster, and one of them can switch gender at will, and before man crawled out of the muck, perhaps he had the same option.
Maybe originally we were supposed to be able to change genders, and being born with just one sex is a mutation.
Of course, beauty is a societal construction, but then so is gender and when people find out that you’re slightly different from the norm they think you’re a psychopath.
