New Olympic rules, scientific reality, and the conflict over who belongs in women’s sports collide in a debate that treats biology and fairness as political flashpoints.

The International Olympic Committee is poised to bar “trans athletes” from competing in women’s events at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, a move many see as restoring fairness to female competition. Reports note that roughly 900 women have lost medals and opportunities to men in athletic contests, a stark number that underlines why the policy change matters. This isn’t about cruelty; it’s about the integrity of women’s sport and the safety of female competitors.

I’ve been labeled a TERF for pointing out that men competing against women skews results and risks safety, and I’ll wear that label if it means defending female athletes. The call to keep men out of women’s divisions is increasingly framed as common sense rather than bigotry. It’s not only profoundly unfair, but it’s dangerous.

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom)

A visit to the Marathon Run Museum in Greece shows the gap in plain sight: even lower-tier male marathon times eclipse the best female performances. Anyone who cares about honest competition can see that the playing field is not level when biological males enter women’s events. Preserving separate categories for men and women has always been the pragmatic way to make sport meaningful.

The response from trans activists is predictable—anger and rhetorical fury instead of data-driven engagement. That fury has pushed them to toss aside basic biology and embrace narratives that ignore measurable differences in strength, speed, and endurance. In pursuing political goals they’ve abandoned scientific rigour and common sense.

Some defenders of the activist position are clinicians who publicly argue that people were simply “assigned” the wrong gender at birth. Webberley, for example, presents as a real doctor advocating that men who identify as women were merely mislabeled. That argument was also used in the case of Jonni Skinner, the Michigan man transitioned as a child, where physicians claimed he had a “female brain.”

What a load of scientific garbage.

Biology matters here. Sex is determined at conception when sperm carrying either an X or Y chromosome fertilizes an egg, and that chromosomal setup drives the development of male or female bodies. With almost 100 percent accuracy we can determine gender before birth through genetic testing or by ultrasound, and many parents know the sex of their unborn child months before delivery. Personal identity and medical interventions do not rewrite the chromosome pattern coded into someone’s DNA.

That means those men who identify as women did not wake up in the wrong body; they were male at conception and male at birth. Their birth certificates were not “written wrongly,” and medical procedures do not change the biological facts that define males and females for purposes of athletic categories. Policies that ignore this reality create unfair competition and erode the protections women fought for decades to secure.

Calling for trans inclusion in women’s sport elevates feelings over facts and forces female athletes to surrender hard-won spaces. Hormones and surgeries do change appearance and certain physiological parameters, but they do not erase the developmental advantages conferred by male biology in many sports. The blunt truth is that men retain measurable advantages in muscle mass, bone structure, and oxygen capacity even after transition protocols, and that matters in competition.

We can empathize with people struggling over identity while still insisting on rules that protect fairness in sport and safety in locker rooms and competition settings. Lawmakers, sport bodies, and coaches should craft policies rooted in biology and evidence, not in the desire to placate activists who demand immediate inclusion at the expense of women. Women’s sports deserve rules that reflect real physiological differences and preserve opportunity for female athletes.

When governing bodies like the IOC take steps to preserve separate women’s categories, they are not waging a culture war for its own sake—they are protecting the principle that competition should be fair and that female athletes should not be expected to compete against biological men. That principle is simple and it has practical consequences: women must have places to compete where their achievements are not precluded by male physiology.