Friday 25 June 2021

Trans Weightlifter Unfair Advantage

Once the football is over and Italy have the European Championship Trophy safely tucked away somewhere in Rome, it is the turn of the Olympics and a month of superfit athletes jumping, throwing and running but one sport that i have never watched is weight lifting.
Without Googling, i could not name you a single weightlifter alive or dead but one New Zealand lifter is now making headlines as Ms Laurel Hubbard was up until 2012 Mr Laurel Hubbard and will be competing in the women's competition.
Now i am not a biologist, i spent most Biology lessons at school around the back of the bicycle sheds with Benson and Hedges but a male physiology is very different to a females, one scientist who did less smoking at school than i did put the advantage at as much as 34% which is borne out in the record books that the heaviest weight lifted ever by a woman is 246 kg while the male record is 484 kg.   
I understand the argument that Laurel is now a woman and more power to her, she can be who she likes, but it seems very unfair that women will be competing against with such a massive biological advantage, especially when athletics spends millions trying to catch drug cheats trying to gain a tiny but important advantage.
We have been here before with 800m runner Mokgadi Caster Semenya who was assigned female at birth but had the body of a man with the XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone levels which won her two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships and despite Hubbard being a totally average male lifter, she will still lift more than the top female lifters because despite everything, she has a male body.
Sport has separate male and female separate competition for a reason and this just blurs the line and no amount of training will be enough to overcome the physical advantage that Hubbard has and that can't be fair.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

I cannot believe it. We finally agree 100% on a controversial topic. Men have a speed and power advantage. Women, in general, have a agility and flexibility advantage. Many olympic sports reflect this.

Not sure what to do about it when a man changes to a woman, then wants to compete with women by birth.

Perhaps create another category for competition. Male, Female, Transgender competitions.