Martina Navratilova: It’s ‘Cheating’ to Allow Trans Athletes in Women’s Sports

A famous and groundbreaking gay athlete has spoken out approximately transgenderism and sports — and her comments don’t fit the LGBT narrative. Martina Navratilova, a professional tennis participant who got here out as a lesbian in 1981, induced a stir in December when she spoke out in opposition to biological guys competing as women. She deleted those tweets and pledged to study the problem. But in a Feb. 17 article for The Sunday Times, she says her beliefs have simplest “strengthened” and that it is unfair for organic guys to compete as girls in sports. Navratilova was an 18-time Grand Slam winner.

“To placed the argument at its most fundamental: a man can determine to be girl, take hormones if required by whatever wearing business enterprise is worried, win the whole lot insight and perhaps earn a small fortune, after which reverse his choice and cross again to making babies if he so desires,” she wrote. “It’s insane, and it’s cheating. I am glad to cope with a transgender female in anything shape she prefers; however, I would not be happy to compete in opposition to her. It might no longer be fair.”

In Connecticut, biological men have won country championships in women’s song and discipline. Elsewhere, a natural male who completes as a female received a global biking championship. That transgender female, Rachel McKinnon, becomes required to decrease testosterone degrees earlier than competing. Navratilova, even though, says men who compete as girls have existence-long herbal benefits also though they do decrease their testosterone tiers. “Simply decreasing hormone tiers — the prescription most sports have followed — does not remedy the problem,” Navratilova wrote. “A man builds up muscle and bone density, in addition to a more wide variety of oxygen-wearing crimson blood cells, from adolescence. Training will increase the discrepancy. Indeed, if a male were to change gender in this type of way to dispose of any accrued benefit, he might begin hormone remedy earlier than puberty. For me, that is unthinkable.”

She brought prevailing championships as women that they never ought to have won as adult males. “Hundreds of athletes who have modified gender through assertion and restrained hormone treatment have already executed honors as girls that have been beyond their capabilities as guys, mainly in sports activities in which energy rather than talent is paramount,” Navratilova wrote. “McKinnon is just one example. That may additionally uphold the International Olympic Committee’s charter, which holds that ‘the exercise of sport is a human proper.’ Still, it is virtually unfair on ladies who have to compete towards individuals who, biologically, are nevertheless guys.”

Navratilova concluded by using urging transgender supporters not to name her names. She lamented the “growing tendency among transgender activists to denounce all and sundry who argues against them and to label them all as ‘transphobes.’” “That’s just some other shape of tyranny,” she wrote. “I’m tremendously difficult and changed into able to rise for myself in my Twitter change with McKinnon. However, I worry that others can be cowed into silence or submission.”