Embrace fair play
Re: "Gender woes in sports", (PostBag, Aug 4). Miro King, in support of real women, is right to be upset about the Olympic boxing matches. There seems to be unfairness in the match between Angela Carini and Imane Khelif, who was born a woman, albeit with male-genetic XY chromosomes.
The solution once used is to ban female boxers with such genetic advantage that leads to greater strength, higher testosterone levels, greater muscle mass, and the like.
It is this set of natural physical characteristics, rather than the accident of sex, that are argued to constitute unfairness. That solution sounds reasonable and right.
Yet, the solution should extend the categorisation system to include the full set of measurable physical characteristics held to be relevant.
Sex is no more one of those characteristics than it is for competing in business, academia, or employment.
Indeed, it is time to end sex-based discrimination in sports and improve the criteria for deciding who can compete against whom.
Therefore, athletes, whether natural-born males or females, should be able to compete fairly against other humans who meet the same qualifying criteria for the category.
Biological females and males will then have an equal chance of defeating their competitors of either sex.
This will resolve the current disputes about who should be allowed to compete against whom by neatly dissolving sports clinging to the old habit of treating women as being so inferior to men as to require a separate category to compete in.
Boxing controversy
Re: "Gender woes in sports", (PostBag, Aug 4).
If Miro King was truly a "supporter of real women," why criticise a natural-born woman athlete competing in the Olympic boxing competition as per the rules and who has previously lost nine bouts against women boxers?
And why throw in the IBA's opinion, a now discredited, Russian-led, corrupt organisation thrown out by the IOC, a decision upheld by the Court of Arbitration in Sport?
The disgusting abuse this woman has had to take from people who don't know the difference between a woman and a transgender woman is beyond the pale, and shame on those who are too stupid to recognise their ignorance.
Prediction fizzles
Re: "Climate change: the August deadline", (Opinion, Aug 3).
Climate crier Gwynne Dyer reports noted climate modeller Gavin Schmidt has claimed, "By August, if we're still looking at record-breaking temperatures, then we really have moved into uncharted territory."
Well, here it is, August, and everything seems the same.
No record temperatures except in the fake data which is generated by 20 years' worth of climate modeling feeding upon itself, generated by no new measurements, but rather ever new constants inserted into always changing mathematical models designed to predict the doom we are causing by, among other things, breathing.
[Such people are] never accountable, always promising to get better at spewing scarier news.
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