Sharron Davies is a woman that young women and girls, especially those involved in sports or intending to become involved in sports, should look up to. Davies competed in the 1980 Olympics, representing the United Kingdom, and won a silver medal in the 400 Medley event.
It's important to note that in 1980 Davies was only competing against other women. Were she to compete in women's swimming today, that might not be the case.
This brings us to another reason to hold Sharron Davies up as someone to respect: She's calling this nonsense out when she sees it, specifically in the case of a "transgender" athlete - that is to say, a man - one CeCe Telfer, who the NCAA allowed to compete in a women's track event in 2019.
Sharron Davies, a former Olympic swimmer who won a silver in the 400 medley for Britain in 1980, was among those to call out the unfairness in allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports on Sunday.
A picture of transgender track athlete CeCe Telfer circulated across social media from an event earlier this year. Telfer was competing in a meet a few years after winning an NCAA Division II championship with Franklin Pierce University in 2019.
"Spot the male athlete in the women’s race! It’s simply Cheating," Davies wrote on X.
Spot the male athlete in the women’s race! It’s simply Cheating https://t.co/e5AhnCuRCF
— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) March 31, 2024
Look at the second competitor from the left, and one thing is obvious. As a certain famous international man of mystery might say, that's a man, man.
See Related: Women Athletes Suing NCAA Over Transgender Policy Allowing Men in Women's Sports
The NCAA excuses this by claiming to take a "sport-by-sport" approach as to who gets to compete on women's teams, to which the only proper reply involves a one-word invocation of the malodorous assimilated residue of the digestive process in male bovines.
Currently, the NCAA takes a sport-by-sport approach when it comes to its transgender participation rules and takes its rules from the sport’s national governing body. USA Track and Field takes its policy from the International Olympic Committee, which says that "robust and peer-reviewed research" should determine eligibility.
"This Framework recognizes both the need to ensure that everyone, irrespective of their gender identity or sex variations, can practice sport in a safe, harassment-free environment that recognizes and respects their needs and identities," the IOC said in January.
They clearly do not use any "robust and peer-reviewed research" in determining this policy, as there is plenty of actual peer-reviewed research that establishes that the NCAA is full of the material described above.
What's more, the physical advantages that men enjoy over women are never greater than in sports that involve competing in speed, strength, endurance, and stamina. Sports like, say, swimming or track and field. A year ago, World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field events, passed a rule prohibiting "transgender athletes" - in other words, men - from competing on women's teams in their sponsored events. The Olympics, looking ahead to this summer's Games in Paris, have released new rules as well, mandating that an athlete's "transition" must have been completed before age 12 - effectively a ban, as more and more nations are prohibiting medical "transitioning" of minors.
Sharron Davies, Riley Gaines, and others like them are the ones who are bearing witness to this hideously unfair practice. In a just world, this could be resolved without girls and women walking off the fields of competition en masse and simply refusing to compete against men. But, while things seem to be leaning in that direction, recent events - including the Biden administration's recent deliberate insulting of a majority of the population over the "transgender" issue - tell us we still have a long way to go.
