Face of Nation :British Olympians call for IOC to shelve ‘unfair’ transgender guidelines
Survey of 15 female athletes finds frustration over current policy
The International Olympic Committee’s guidelines for transgender athletes are unfair on female athletes and should be suspended while more research is carried out, according to a group of former and current Team GB athletes surveyed by an academic.
In the survey of 15 female British Olympians, most of them answering anonymously, 11 also agreed with the view that “it can never be fair for transgender athletes who have been through male puberty to compete in female sport”, with another declining to answer.
Cathy Devine, who conducted the research and will present her findings at a conference at St Mary’s University in southwest London on Wednesday, says it is the first of its kind in this contentious area of sports policy.
Devine said those surveyed have won seven Olympic and 56 world championship medals between them. She defended the small number of athletes in the study, saying it was a starting point as athletes often did not want to speak out for fear of recriminations. She said she had used a standard qualitative research technique in the social sciences called “snowball sampling”, which is used to get information from of hard-to-reach groups and investigate difficult topics, and was not intended to be wholly representative.
Among those questioned – who came from track and field, swimming, rowing and modern pentathlon – were Tessa Sanderson, the 1984 Olympic javelin gold medallist, and Sharron Davies, who won a swimming silver in 1980, both of whom have already made their views known.
One respondent to Devine’s survey said: “New guidelines do not level the playing field, or protect our human rights to equal opportunities. There was not enough science-based research on elite athletes to make rules. It’s a live experiment where female athletes will lose out until the obvious is proved. Then it will be changed. That’s not fair.”
