Unfair sex

Lana Lawless, a stocky blonde in her fifties, stepped up to the tee at the 2008 World Long Drive Championship and smashed the ball into a 40 mile per hour headwind. It landed 254 yards away, the length of two-and-a-half football pitches. With that swing, Lawless became women’s world champion.

At the turn of the millennium, Lana didn’t even exist. Or rather she existed only in the mind of a 17-stone police officer assigned to a gang unit in one of California’s roughest cities. Lawless’s SWAT team colleagues never guessed that he longed to be ‘a normal girl’. In 2005 he had a sex-change operation and began to pursue the title of long-drive queen.

But now Lawless’s career is on hold. The organisers of the World Long Drive Championship recently adopted the ‘female at birth’ policy of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. This month Lawless filed a federal lawsuit against the LPGA, arguing that the rule violates civil rights laws.

For many, Lawless is an unsettling figure. They look at the player’s rapid ascent and wonder whether female sport is about to be taken over by transsexuals: athletes legally recognised as women but enjoying the physical advantages of men. They conjure up a future Olympics at which competitors who make Eric Pickles look feminine sweep the women’s medals.

Lawless isn’t the first person to cross sport’s male-female divide. One of the earliest was Dora Ratjen, a cheerful girl with a passing resemblance to David Walliams, who competed in the 1936 women’s Olympic high jump. Two years later the athlete was arrested after a train conductor reported seeing ‘a man dressed as a woman’. Ratjen confessed that he was indeed a man and narrowly escaped jail after promising never to compete again.