You’ve got to give it to Shania Twain.  When she belted out her 1997 hit, Man! I feel like a woman! she was well ahead of the pack. 

Who would have thought?    

She’s gone from country to contemporary, for who else could have predicted the advance of the Trans movement in just one song more than 20 years ago? 

And so it is that we find ourselves in a time when a man can indeed feel like a woman. Or a woman can feel like a man. On another day, a man might feel like a man, or a woman feel like a woman. Or any variation on the theme.  

With an alphabet of options, you can be whatever you like. You can be a champion of a new world order. 

Silly, or sensible, that’s reality in 2021. 

The rules and regulations industry is roaring around the transgender movement like a fierce flame, torching tradition. In changing the rules for the transgender, they’re changing them for everyone. 

Three men have competed in the Tokyo Olympic Games as women this year, despite it being allowed by the IOC since 2004.    

The most well-known is Laurel Hubbard, the New Zealand weight-lifter. In a sport in which strength is king, she competed against non-trans athletes, that is, genetic women who have never had the advantage of male levels of androgenising, strengthening testosterone in their body.  

 Chelsea Wolfe, reserve rider in the US BMX team didn’t ultimately compete and Canadian archer, Stephanie Barrett, finished well outside the medals. She had sex-assignment surgery in 2012 and is listed on the Olympic website as female. 

Hubbard, Wolfe and Barrett have taken the place of women born female. That they failed to succeed as desired, does not diminish the argument of unfair advantage. 

 Put simply, as male athletes, it’s unlikely they would have made the Olympic team.  As a female, they get a gig, potentially confirming that even an ‘average male’ can make Olympic teams ahead of genetic, or cis, females.   

Katherine Deves from Save Women’s Sports Australasia told Sky Australia that 99.98 per cent of people are born observably male or female. 

Along with Tasmanian Liberal Senator, Claire Chandler, both believe this intrusion at the highest level of sports brings an end to women’s sport as we know it.  If they make it to the podium, female athletes are `second-class citizens’ in their own field. 

To prove the point, do this: flip it. 

Ask yourself, how many women-turned-male athletes are competing against men in the Olympics? You won’t need one hand to count them. 

Men and women are different. The best man will always run faster, jump higher and throw further than the best woman.  

Actually, it doesn’t take the best man to beat the best woman. A recent study on ‘Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage’, by British and Swedish scientists, showed that ‘approximately 10,000 males have personal best times that are faster than the current Olympic 100 m female champion’. 

To compete in the Olympics, the trans-women do not face mandated testosterone testing.  

As Deves says, “it is just an expectation that they’ve said they’ve done it.  If they get caught exceeding the limit – then they potentially get excluded from women’s sport for 12 months.  So, apparently they can go back to competing with the men and then have another crack at the women’s category.” 

It almost stops you breathing.  

By advocating and advancing the alphabet+, the Olympic message to young girls and female athletes is brutal. It’s a hand brake on hope. 

It green-lights the nations wanting to fill the women’s podium with men. Gold, Silver and Bronze to the boys. Once they/thou/them/it have won gold, they can self-declare back to being men. History will count the gold either way. 

It’s not cheating. They’re the rules.  

Despite this year’s Olympic trans-gender model being set, there is relief that the IOC has finally admitted fault with the current settings and standards.  It is reviewing its transgender policy, acknowledging the science upon which this year’s rules have been based is barely science at all.  

Safety for female athletes competing against trans-athletes will be a part of any new guidelines expected in the coming weeks. 

Whatever the new and improved policy may be, it will still be hard to shake off the round peg, square hole feel about it.   

A cultural chasm is being created and it’s women who are falling from the precipice. 

For the decades of advances for women and girls, we find ourselves in 2021 heading backwards, sent to our naughty corners by the trans-lobby to whom no one feels able to say no.   

Saying ‘no’ gets you labelled a bully or in court for breaching an anti-discrimination law somewhere, somehow. 

Today’s sporting podiums are no longer places of genuine merit.  

They are testosterone-tilted with a thick swipe of red lippy.  

Beverley McArthur is a Liberal Legislative Councillor for the Western Victoria Region.

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