A decorated swimmer who won a silver medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics is the latest athlete to criticize men competing in women’s sports.
“It’s not rocket science it’s not hard,” British swimmer Sharron Davies wrote on X today. On March 31, she wrote that it’s “simply cheating” for male athletes to compete in female races.
Last year, Davies released a book, Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport, which argues that allowing men who “identify” as women to compete as females “is merely the latest stage in a decades-long history of sexism on the part of sport’s higher-ups.”
“Sharron Davies is no stranger to battling the routine sexism the sporting world,” the book’s blurb explains. “She missed out on Olympic Gold because of blatant doping among East German athletes in the 1980s, and has never received justice. Now, biological males are being allowed to compete directly against women under the guise of trans ‘self-ID’, a development that could destroy the integrity of female sport.”
Davies has reposted a number of stories about “trans” athletes dominating female sports. She is also critical of Scotland’s new “hate crime” law, which critics such as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling have warned will effectively criminalize free speech as related to transgenderism.
The rise of male athletes being allowed to compete in women’s sports has allowed men to steal victories from at least 635 female athletes, according to the website shewon.org, which tracks such incidents. It has also led to injuries of female athletes and forced them to undress in locker rooms alongside males.
“My teammates and I were forced to undress in the presence of Lia (sic), a six-feet, four-inch-tall biological man fully intact with male genitalia, 18 times per week. Some girls opted to change in bathroom stalls and others used the family bathroom to avoid this,” University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlan told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last year.