A level playing field?

Amid the many splendours of West Side Story is this lyric: ‘My sister wears a moustache, my brother wears a dress/ Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess.’ Quite what Officer Krupke would have made of planned reforms to the Gender Recognition Act is hard to say, though not much at a guess. The proposed changes have just been through a consultation period and may become law. They are said to have the support of the Prime Minister but that is no guarantee of anything these days. The amendments will allow anyone to self-identify rather than living in their preferred gender for two years and getting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. In short, as I understand it, if you want to say ‘I’m a woman’, that’s good enough, even if you are biologically a man and have lived as one for years.

These are murky waters, and you can appreciate the liberal instincts of the new law — it must be hellish feeling you are trapped in the wrong body — but once men can say they are women, then the implications for some sports are enormous. This is not the same as, say, Caitlyn Jenner winning Olympic gold as Bruce and then changing gender. Or Richard Raskind who didn’t shake the world of men’s tennis but as Renée Richards reached a US Open doubles final. Her story is moving but even she admitted that had she transitioned in her twenties rather than her forties, then in tennis ‘no genetic woman would have come close to me’. Nor is it the same as the East European women athletes of the 1960s pumped full of steroids and smashing records before disappearing once gender testing started taking place on location, as it were.