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.
