Neither *safety* nor *fairness* can be met by 'case-by-case' inclusion of males in the female category, but in different ways. Both values need to be explained before we do the analysis, so here we go: ... Absolute safety is not really available to us in any sport since sport is a matter of trying to do difficult things. Difficult actions involve risks. So the criterion we need is not 'safety' but *informed consent to foreseeable risk* ...

How justified are age bands in sport? Highly justified, they preserve fairness and make sport inclusive. There are no serious arguments against them. ... ... No one serious would say 'well, we should be flexible about age bands, so as not to upset anyone. And perhaps we need to consider scrapping age bands altogether.'

More good news, that deserves a bit of comment. The rules that established male puberty as a cut off for entry into the female category, were, at the time (2022-4) a largely welcome step towards fairness in sport. They marked a significant break with the ideological claim that TWAW... ... and effectively said: 'No, the science counts more than identity claims.' Some of those who pushed for these policies at the time were brave, pushing against the influence of Stonewall and other pressure groups in NGBs. ...

There are far more important things wrong with that piece by Dr Kennedy, but I know my place, so I'll just do a thread on this one, since Kennedy has a PhD in Philosophy, apparently ... Oh dear, where to start? Maybe with (1) a *bog standard* debate in the philosophy of equality about affirmative action or positive discrimination. And (2) a *bog standard* feminist political principle. Now, I'm not going to try persuade you of my views on these matters, but I am going to try to spell out the argument, and its relation to the debate on trans identifying males in female chess competitions. ...

There are some general questions for @ConversationEDU @ConversationUK @ConversationUS that arise from the Sinclair piece.
The conversation is an international brand with regional autonomous organisations. Its reputation rests on the integrity of the pieces it publishes. ... ... it is fairly simple to demonstrate that the Sinclair piece lacks integrity and makes serious errors, thereby misrepresenting the policy it discusses. This isn't a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact.

The ever reliable @Scienceofsport and @FondOfBeetles have ...

That rather petulant piece by Dr Pape in Le Temps directs us to a short paper I'd forgotten about, but which is indicative of the complete absence of rigour in the IOC's Framework Document That's the document that led to the boxing debacle #Paris24. Here's a short thread ... ... The Framework Document was supposed to guide IFs in constructing their eligibility rules. Most of the big IFs have ignored it, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but perhaps mainly because it makes no sense. It's the one with 'no presumption of advantage' on the basis of sex. ...

Here is my latest paper, published today in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and co-authored with Dr Emma Hilton @fondofbeetles from Manchester University. I would like to thank @OpenUniversity for their ongoing support of my research
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… It is a response to this paper by Hilary Bowman-Smart, Julian Savulescu, Michele O'Connell and Andrew Sinclair.



Somewhat confusingly, as we explain in a footnote, the Bowman-Smart et al. paper criticises the WA regulations as they were in place from 2023 ...tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

This is, at least from my perspective, and probably, good news.

Reason: @realworldboxing is the new affiliate of the @IOC and has eligibility rules that involve PCR sex screening for the SRY gene.

These are the rules that were introduced just before Eindhoven, and dissuaded Imane Khelif from attending.

The eligibility rules of @realworldboxing contradict the extant position of the IOC Framework Document.

'Contradict' is a strong term, and I need to make good on it. .... ... So, check out this 2023 paper published in the BJSM: (I'll put the references at the end).

The authors are a list of senior IOC figures, who have tried by one way or another to allow male athletes into female sport. Martowicz is the head of Human Rights at the IOC, Budgett and Pape wrote the framework document, and Pitsiladis is the main sport science advocate of T suppression.

There will be academics at @SussexUni - which is under the cosh for other reasons, at the moment - who will feel unfairly hit by this OfS fine, because they, themselves, did nothing wrong.

But:
They did nothing wrong, because, in many cases, they did nothing. Complicity is a ... ... notoriously tricky concept, but I know that some saw what was going on, realised it was out of order, but failed to act. The students who protested, who demanded that @Docstockk be sacked for wrongthink, all had tutors. ...

Cautiously optimistic report from @seaningle 🔽

I'll comment on this bit, which looks bland, but isn't:
theguardian.com/sport/2025/mar… ... Of course, 'setting up a task force' is what people do if either (i) they want to solve a problem in a big organisation or (ii) they want to kick a problem into the long grass. So we can't know which it is. The devil is in the details. If it is anything like the process...

The claim that such-and-such is a 'moral panic' is overused and has lost its critical edge. However...

a promising candidate for a moral panic is the idea that sex eligibility rests on 'genital inspections'. It doesn't, and the suggestion that it does is dishonest... ... In ordinary social settings, sex eligibility rules don't rest on a mechanism of verification *at all*. They rest on people acting properly. If a gym says that it is for females only, don't go in if you are male. ...

These last years have been troublesome, in some ways - but to see National Governing Body after NGB, and International Federation after IF coming out, (albeit some more clearly than others) for the integrity of female sport - has been a joy.

It exposes something important ...

https://twitter.com/IceHockeyUK/status/1898010780122902952

... The TRAs took a top-down approach. TRAs captured the policy making apparatus at a high level - like the IOC - and 'retraining' in various bits of convoluted language was pushed hard, as a substitute for policy. So they never really established a justifiable, rational, policy. The IOC's ...

Three reasons why this study is worthless, in my view. These are not technical reasons to do with study design, though there are those as well. I'll group the reasons under three headings: 1) Performance metrics, 2) Body metrics, 3) Fair sport...

https://twitter.com/EvaPoen/status/1893296304584831183

...So: 1) Performance metrics. We know, already, that lots of different variable inputs, like training load, can affect performance metrics. Those who push t-reduction assume that some (small) reduction in performance generates conclusions about fairness and categories. But they fail to provide any argument to that effect.

We know that T-reduction may have some effect on some performance metrics.

So can lead weights.

So what?

So. I've been looking at the World Athletics consultation on DSDs, announced earlier this week, and I think I've spotted a shift. If so, it's good and important.🧵
Here's what the consultation document says, side by side with what the IAAF said at CAS in the Semenya case (2019)
.. I should say that I think WA (IAAF: they're the same organisation) have been trying to do the right thing for quite a while, so none of this is an attack on their will.

I think the new move is to say 'we're not interested in your gender identity, it's not relevant, we don't judge or question it, that's up to you. ...

A couple of reflections about process, as we get to the end of a fluffed opportunity after a years long process. I've been involved in quite a few of these eligibility discussion, as you might expect, and still the best model is @WorldRugby: Two days, in a big room, face to face, with lots of different perspectives argued out. ... ... This is very different from a series of Zoom presentations over several months, with none of the 'experts' cross-questioning each other. It's a *deliberative* model you need. It's an *iterative* model.

So @worldtriathlon has just released new eligibility rules fro Transgender Athletes. The embargo on these rules passed about two hours ago, so you can see them and download them here.

The politest way to describe these is as a bit of a curate's egg.
triathlon.org/documents In this thread about the new eligibility rules I’ll analyse them, saying what I think they get right, what they get wrong, and what these rules say about the developing and changing regulation of female sport, and the fight to preserve the integrity of the female category.

The regulations are difficult to sum up, because they are a bit of a mess. If you really want a TL:DR: I think they are deeply confused, to the point of being incoherent, but in practice likely to be OK.

I think that it’s unlikely that, under these regulations, any male triathlete will get to compete in the female category. I can’t be certain of this: World Triathlon has left itself open to having its own Lia Thomas moment. If this happens, it will only have itself to blame. I think the proposals are, in part, unethical, and in some respects cynical, but that this won’t turn out to be a huge problem in practice.

Perhaps the best way two understand this is to start with two positions: the first is that of the Fair Sports Brigade, and the second is the T-suppression sports scientists. The FSB (people like @FondOfBeetles @cathydevine56 @Scienceofsport and me) tend to prefer a Female category and an Open category. We are also critical of a division between elite and non-elite sport, holding that women have a right to fairness at all levels of sport. I should add that some of us (including me) were consulted in the WT process.

Well, we got Female and Open, but we also got a division between elite and non-elite sport. And the T-Suppression people, like Yanis Pitsiladis and Joanna Harper got the elite policy.

This is very odd, and interesting, because so far, lots of these policies have differentiated between elite and non-elite, but the other way around: the elite have had fair sport secured, whilst the non-elite have been told to ‘be kind’ and allow males who identify as women to compete in the female category...

This @ECB_cricket response to the widespread calls for a boycott of the upcoming match between En gland and Afghanistan is interesting. I'll be a bit charitable, and then a bit analytical 🧵
bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/… ... Whilst it's easy to see this as a rebuff to those calling for a boycott, I'm not sure it's as simple as that. The ECB say:

"A coordinated, ICC-wide approach would be significantly more impactful than unilateral actions by individual members."

And this is *true.* ...

It's been clear for a while that there is a shift in the argument from the other side, away from the claim that T suppression makes it fair for TW/TiM to compete in the female category. ... ... I think the T suppression argument (which was never much good) has collapsed. Now the advocates of males in female sport have gone in two directions. ...

There's a new edition of the Sociology of Sport Journal (@SSJ_Journal) and it's making me twitch and grind my teeth. I still can't get over the intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness of some contributions to the debate over sport eligibility. Here's an example from a ... ... sometime interlocuter here @MichaelSabres14.

Michael Burke wants to argue against Gender Critical Feminists so much that he seems to have forgotten some basic standards of intellectual discourse. I'll unpick this step by step.
Here's the paper ($) ...
journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/…

OK, so I'll indulge in a Friday thread here, on a couple of papers that have come out in a new journal, and Open Access, because I think they show something important ... ... there are three contributions: first a paper from Hamilton, Pitsiladis, second a critical letter from @TLexercise. @ChrisKirk_ASP @BrowngaGreg @MaryOConnorMD and Noel Pollock, and third, a response from H,P, et al. ...

On the claim about Banda, Khelif, Semnya et al, there are perhaps two philosophical issues that it would be useful to disentangle. Here's a thread in which I try to do this. ... ... The first question is 'what is sex?' But, rather than address that head on, lets take a much simpler and narrower question: 'what is the appropriate criterion of sex in sport?' ...