Olympian Sharron Davies Doesn’t Want Trans Women Competing in Women’s Sports: “There Needs to Be a Level Playing Field”

British Olympian Sharron Davies MBE has taken to Twitter to claim that transgender women should not compete in women’s sports, reports the Independent.

Davies won silver at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and two gold medals at the 1978 Edmonton Commonwealth Games.

She tweeted out that there was a “fundamental difference between the binary sex you are born with & the gender you may identify as.

“To protect women’s sport, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women’s sport.”

Her post was retweeted nearly 4,000 times, drawing both criticism and support.

“Every single woman athlete I’ve spoken to, and I have spoken to many, all of my friends in international sports, understand and feel the same way as me,” she said to BBC Sport. “It is not a transphobic thing – I really want to say we have no issue with people who are transgender.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people who are in the races [now] are in a very difficult predicament when they can’t speak out. It maybe falls to the people who were competing [in the past] who would understand the predicament that is being faced at the moment to try to create a debate, and try to explain how we feel there needs to be a fair and level playing field.

“We need to come up with something that works for everybody and everybody agrees with, rather than having all sorts of diverse rules.”