There are easier ways to cheat at sports than pretending to be trans. You would think Paula Radcliffe would know that.
Another day, another scaremongering article in the Murdoch media about trans and gender-nonconforming women. This time it’s Paula Radcliffe, claiming we will kill women’s sport. Oh sorry, I should apologise — she doesn’t mean us of course. She’s just concerned, as her sort so often say they are, that dishonest men could claim to be women in order to cheat their way to sporting glory.
My first response to Radcliffe’s concern isn’t even anger, to be honest. I’m just disappointed. An athlete like her should be an ambassador for women’s sports. But what faith does she have in female athletes, if she thinks their achievements could be wiped out by tenth-rate men?
Trans women, of course, and intersex athletes like Caster Semenya, are far from being tenth-rate men. But remember, it isn’t us Radcliffe has problems with, dear me no — she’s just worried that loopholes might be exploited by cis men claiming to be intersex or trans.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because its exactly the same as the anti-trans bathroom canard, and can be debunked just as easily. As I’ve said before, the fact we live in a rape culture means there are much easier ways for men to rape women and get away with it than pretending to be trans. If you’re a cis man and you want to get into women’s bathrooms, you’re better off with a mop than a frock. And it’s the same in athletics, really. Drug-testing, thanks to technological advances and a more systematic approach, has improved immeasurably in recent years, but it still remains an arms race between athletic bodies seeking to ensure fair play, and athletes wanting to enhance their bodies to score an advantage.
The funny thing is, you would think Paula Radcliffe would know this really. She faced allegations of doping herself back in 2015, and found herself back in the British press in 2017 when changes to IAAF policy threatened to wipe out her status as the Women’s Marathon World Record Holder.
That marathon record, set on home turf in London in 2003, is the defining achievement of Radcliffe’s career. In sixteen years since, the time has never been bettered — today’s official record holder, Mary Keitany, set a new best in 2017 with a time almost two minutes slower than Radcliffe’s heroic effort.
The possibility that Radcliffe might lose her record stirred up a great deal of controversy in the UK, for which it would seem the IAAF was not prepared. Radcliffe, by then considered a national treasure by many Britons — a status which was, if anything, enhanced by her having to stop during a 2005 run to answer a call of nature — could count on a friendly media to fight her corner against the IAAF, much as she now relies on it today to report her new concerns.
The end result of all this controversy was a compromise position whereby the IAAF recognises both Keitany’s record, the best time recorded since 2005, when the IAAF started keeping accurate records of doping samples, and Radcliffe’s Stakhanovite time in 2003, two years before her bodily functions overcame her during another race in London (and just to add to the ambiguity, lots of fans were unsure whether Radcliffe was pausing to expel solid or liquid waste that day — a pressing matter which still stirs rumblings of discussion).
Other athletes who’ve made similar claims about trans participation in sports, like Martina Navratilova, can be forgiven for being less aware than Radcliffe of the extent of doping, and the measures necessary to fight it — Navratilova, after all, retired from her epic career in singles competition a year before the World Lawn Tennis Association got more systematic about drug testing. But Radcliffe, an athlete all too painfully aware of the doping arms race, and the loopholes athletes will exploit to try and get around it, must surely be aware that good old-fashioned drugs are an easier way to cheat one’s way to gold than her hypothetical Shakespearean gender comedies. Surely?
