Tennis great Martina Navratilova has criticised the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for continuing to allow men to play in women’s competitions.
Navratilova, 68, urged the WTA to be on the “right side of history” by following the Supreme Court’s lead and categorising women’s sport by biological sex, not self-identification.
The WTA currently allows men who identify as women to compete in women’s tournaments if they confirm that their testosterone levels will remain below a certain level for two years and that they identify as female or non-binary.
Biological advantage
Navratilova highlighted the numerous biological advantages males have in sport. She cited a study that found that after 15 years of hormone therapy, they still had a 20 per cent advantage over women: “That’s massive in sports. You cannot compete with that. So it takes me 20 per cent more to hit the ball just as hard as you. Massive advantage.”
She said that the WTA should “100 per cent” follow the Supreme Court’s judgment that sex is biological, stating: “Male bodies need to play in male sports. They just need to compete in the proper category, which is the male category. It’s that simple”.
The tennis legend added that “by including male bodies in the women’s tournament, now somebody is not getting into the tournament. A woman is not going into the tournament because now a male has taken her place.”
‘Indoctrinated’
According to The Daily Telegraph, 18-year-olds have been among over two thousand men referred for “feminising genital surgery” between 2021-23.
Freedom of information requests to Nuffield Health revealed that over a third of its patients who underwent the sex-swap surgery were under 30. Overall, the NHS Gender Dysphoria National Referral Support Services referred 2,071 men for the procedure.
This is not what medicine is for
The founder of Transgender Trend, Stephanie Davies-Arai, said: “This is the same cohort of young people who have been indoctrinated as children into believing that they have a gender identity and that they are trans who are now being referred into adult clinics and for these surgeries.”
“This is not what medicine is for, it is not what a health service is for. This is irreversible and it will leave these young people with medical problems for the rest of their lives which the NHS will have to deal with.”
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