OU GCRN Seminar: Cathy Devine 'Sex, gender identity and sport'

How do gender identity eligibility criteria affect the human rights of female athletes both in high performance sport and sport participation settings?
Cathy discusses aspects of a recent published work including two of her papers: Female Sports Participation, Gender Identity and the British 2010 Equality Act, and Female Olympians’ voices: Female sports categories and International Olympic Committee Transgender guidelines. She also touches on contemporary examples including the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas.
References
Cathy Devine (2021): Female Sports Participation, Gender Identity and the British 2010 Equality Act, Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. DOI: 10.1080/17511321.2021.199398
Cathy Devine (2021): Female Olympians’ voices: Female sports categories and International Olympic Committee Transgender guidelines, International Review for the Sociology of Sport. DOI: 10.1177/10126902211021559
Twitter: @cathydevine56

[@pseudonamed]

Thank you for focusing on actual research and what we can take away from it.

[@rosemarybowser5543]

💪

[@noelplum99]

I cannot see Cathy's point on option 4. Cathy spends a huge amount of time arguing how sport is asymmetric then says she doesn't like option 4 because it is "asymmetric". In my view option 4 reflects the reality of sport, just as having an open age category alongside under 18s and over 40s categories (we don't have an exclusive 18-40 category). Lastly I would say that Cathy (who I side with on a lot of this) makes the point that women must decide how the women's category is formulated. The corollary of this is surely that it is for men to decide whether to turn our category into an open category, not for Cathy and her fellow women, yet Cathy seems to talk about it as if changes to the men's category purely in terms of women and women's interests. I find that all a bit odd, if I am honest.