Grassroots sports should lose their funding if they allow trans women to compete in female categories, a rightwing thinktank has claimed.
A report published by the organisation Policy Exchange argues that “the problem of biological males competing in the female category” goes beyond well-reported issues in elite competition and is in fact “a threat to the entirety of female sport”.
Single-sex categories, the report argues, “are important in encouraging women and girls to engage in sport and physical activity in the first instance” while the inclusion of trans women in grassroots competition could “impact hundreds of female rankings and selections” and “risks removing the female entry level into sport and – in time – the elite female athletes of the future”.
The report – endorsed by the high‑profile former sports stars Sharron Davies, Martina Navratilova and Daley Thompson – concludes that far tougher measures must be taken at grassroots level to enforce protected categories, and that the government should take the lead in enforcing them.
“Sport is not affected by a person’s declared identity, but it is affected by biological sex,” the report says. “Unlike many policy areas, the solution to this particular policy problem is simple: within every sex‑affected sport, and at every level, the female category must be restricted to biological females. The integrity and spirit of all sport depends on it.”
The report continues: “The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) must require all national governing bodies, within 12 months, to update their policies to ensure there is a protected female single‑sex category. This should be made a condition of funding, with taxpayers’ funding withdrawn from those that do not protect female same‑sex sport.”
Written by Lottie Moore, the head of biology matters and equality and identity at Policy Exchange, the report argues that even the community sport event Parkrun should be threatened with sanctions. Hailed for its community‑led approach to increasing physical activity, Parkrun describes itself as an organisation that is “positive, welcoming and inclusive”, where “there is no time limit and no one finishes last”. According to the report, however, Parkrun currently records the self-identified gender of its participants not their sex. That policy should be reversed within 12 months, it says, or public funding should be removed.
The report comes at the end of a year in which elite sport has continued to change its rules – although not in a consistent direction – over transgender participation in female sports categories. In November the International Cricket Council banned transgender players from women’s cricket altogether, while last March World Athletics banned from female competition trans athletes who had undergone male puberty or recorded testosterone values above a determined level. World Aquatics also banned trans women from female competition, creating instead an “open” category for all athletes. In October the Guardian reported there had been no entrants into the “open” category at the swimming World Cup in Berlin.
Natalie Washington of the LGBTIQ+ inclusion group Pride Sports called the Policy Exchange report “pseudoscientific political propaganda”. Trans women, she said, “have participated with other women at grassroots level for years”, while “many grassroots sports and recreational activities are mixed, and often necessarily so. Without this, there are sometimes not the requisite numbers of participants to run activities at all.”
With levels of activity among British women still lower than before the pandemic, Washington warns against taking action that could, even unintentionally, limit activity further. “People who want to get moving and get active have all sorts of reasons for doing so, and often just want to play with family and friends of a similar ability, no matter their gender,” she said.
“This is an important part of what makes sport appealing to many people, and as a society we need to be removing barriers to getting people active, not creating them. Women, in particular, want to know that they can turn up and be included in sport, not have to participate in onerous and invasive sex testing to run around a park with their friends.”
