it has just it hasjust gone it has just gone about half past fourin it has just gone about half past four in the morning. it is now time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. elite—level sport is ruthlessly competitive. the best male and female athletes push hard against their physical limits in the quest for those marginal gains. but what happens when athletes change gender? in particular, when individuals born biologically male transition to female after puberty. should they be allowed to compete as women? well, my guest is former champion british swimmer turned sports commentator, sharron davies. how well does the sporting notion of fairness cope with the complexities of gender identity? sharron davies, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. you spent a lifetime in sport, of course as a champion swimmer and competitor but also as a commentator and an analyst. i want to begin with this concept of fairness in sport. what does fairness mean to you? it think itjust means equal opportunities between the sexes. so the opportunities to win medals, to win scholarships, to get a profile, to create a platform to get sponsorships, to have the career, you know, of being a successful athlete. it means, i suppose, all sorts of things. itjust means having a level playing field as much as we possibly can get. and i'm passionate, because, i suppose, there's many things during my life that i've had to find to try and get that level playing field. and as a competing athlete, it's very hard to raise your head above the pulpit at the moment to raise your opinions and i think the few of us that have done that are sort of ex—athletes. yeah. just feel that we have to do our bit. it in no way reflects our opinions on what way people choose to live their life out, this is just about biology playing a huge part in sport. well, we'll get to that because you have raised your voice in a debate that has become very heated around the world around gender and sport. but before we get to that, i just want to stick with fairness a little bit longer in its broadest sense. you just talked about a level playing field, but the playing field is never level in sport because we are all born with difficult — different physical attributes for a start. but we also have different economic circumstances. some of us are lucky enough to have parents who can afford to train us from a young age, hire coaches, others do not. there is nothing about sporting success which is really about that level playing field. but it's about creating as level a playing field as we possibly can. if you just take the success that we have had in the uk over the last few years in regards to lottery which has sort of levelled us in regards to russia and america and big countries around the world that have been supporting their athletes, that is something that has been injected into british sport and has meant that we have done incredibly well, you know, in the olympic games since well, 1996 was the last time that we, i think, won one gold medal and decided we really needed to help our athletes. so we came up with the form of lottery so we could financially support them. so yes, i totally agree that, you know, obviously, there is all sorts of different things that give us a slight advantage, whether you might have slightly bigger feet than the person that you stand next to, but that person might have a slightly better recovery rate. so the idea is that it all balances out. what we're trying to do is not give massive advantages away. if you look at an olympic final, for example, the majority of people in 100 metres on the track, they will finished within less than 1% of each other. mm. so that's the eight people. and in fact, if you probably went out to the next 2a, they wouldn't be won more than 1.5%. so the differences there are so marginal and so tiny. whereas if you put someone that has a 8—10% advantage, straightaway, well, you can't live in the same ballpark. and i know you are leading me back again to discuss the gender issue and we are going to get there. no, no, take me back, take me back. but before we even get there, i do want to get personal with you. because you as a sportswoman, as a competitor, you started out very young as a competitive swimmer. by the age of 13 you were swimming for britain in the olympics. which is — you know, used to be standard in swimming. i guess it's a younger sport like gymnastics. yeah. but, reflect with me on those years, ‘cause we're going back to 1980s now. did you when you were in the pool and swimming competitively against athletes from, for example, the former soviet empire... yeah, and east germans. ..countries like the gdr, did you feel that there was a level playing field in any way at that time? no, there wasn't. i mean, there was a sort of, a 20—year window where the east germans were on a state—run doping programme. and it was a very nasty state—run doping programme. it was quite — very basic, stera nabol and testosterone that they were using on athletes. this is cheating. absolutely. there were rules, even back then. absolutely. and the problem was in those days our doping system was not very good. there was no out—of—season testing, there was no random testing. it was very basic and not very good testing. there was an east german doctor that sat on the olympic doping panel, so they knew exactly what testing was going to come. i did a documentary for channel 5 where i went and i met the lady that beat me and i talked to her, i was invited to look at the stasi files on all their documented programmes and what they were taking and how much improvement it meant. and they could... are you talking about petra schneider who beat you to the gold medal in the olympics? yeah. you came second. did you, when you touched the end of the pool and realised you were second, did you immediately feel cheated ? well, and before that. so i had already won a bronze medal i think at the european champions behind two east germans two years prior to the olympic games. so pretty much all of my international career the first time around was against east germans. all of my bronze and silver medals are behind east germans, every single one of them. i mean, so say this is something you reflected on later when you were talking about the degree to which cheating — drugs cheating had dominated your sport. you said "i would look around..." notjust my sport. true. yeah, i mean, you know, very much track and field, pretty much everything. oh, but we — we, just a few weeks ago went to berlin. we interviewed a sprinter called innes skiepal who has suffered physically a great deal from the drugs that she in essence was forced to take as a teenager because her father happened to be in the stasi colluded with the authorities in giving this blue pill to here as a talented sprinter athlete at a young age. mm. but coming back to you, you've described looking across the swimming lanes and seeing that your east german rivals had "...terrible skin, huge muscle development, very, very deep voices." even "five o'clock shadow." yeah. so you knew, physically you knew that these young women were doing some very different. yes. and, you know, they would arrive at a major international and we had never seen them before. they would literally turn up at a world championship or a european championships and they would have three new athletes in the particular race that you were in and you had never seen them perform. which doesn't happen. you know? you have to work your way through junior ranks and you're improving at a very slow rate at that level, and they would come from nowhere. because the 9% that they could prove and that they could make an improvement on meant you could take an average swimmer, a club swimmer, and turn them into a world record holder. but why didn't you shout it from the rooftops? we did, we did. we absolutely did. yeah, we did. and i got told by my own association to keep quiet because they had been tested and my father who constantly used to remonstrate about it never got selected as an international coach because he constantly would say something should be done about this. so we did. so, you then became an analyst and commentator in your own sport, in swimming. yeah. so i put it to you that when you took that role, a different sort of observer role, you didn't speak as loud as you might have done on various occasions. i'm thinking of one infamous occasion, the 1996 olympics where an irish swimmer... 0h, idid. idid. i got told off by the bbc! because i'm a bbc representative! when she emerged from the pool and you were getting one of the first interviews with her, you didn't actually raise the questions which are in so many people's minds because her performance levels had dramatically changed. absolutely. i trained with her in fact, i'd trained with her in toronto. so i knew what type of athlete she was. she had been to two previous olympic games, she hadn't — she was not that talented athlete. she was a terrier, she was a very hard worker and a very, very intelligent young lady as well. and all of a sudden she had a relationship with a — i think it was a shot—put coach, but a field coach became her boyfriend. she went and trained by herself and everybody knew. the problem you have with all of that, stephen, is that at the end of it you still have to have evidence. you know? because ultimately you can't accuse somebody. you can ask ‘how come you have made such a big improvement?‘ and i think i asked that every time she did an interview. and she would say to me it's because i'm training by herself, we're doing something different from everybody else and we're keeping it a secret. but, you know, i'm also a bbc employee, i was told i had to not ask certain questions. well, let's leave — never mind the bbc, let's just be honest with each other. i mean, were you, to a certain extent, still an insider in a spot which finds it very difficult to come to terms with the scale of cheating over many, many years? because in recent times we've seen the chinese. we've had whistleblowers saying that the chinese swimming programme in the 1990s was rife with drugs. yeah. but it took a long time for that to come out. so do insiders find it difficult to speak out? again you do have to have proof. so , you know, the east german that beat me set a world record that stood until one of those chinese athletes took it. and again, you know, very much probably a drug—filled world record. it is very frustrating. we do speak about it. but at the end of the day with all of these things you still have to have the proof before an athlete can be banned. yeah. and on that we should point out, michelle smith, whom we talked about — the irish swimmer, she ultimately — she was found guilty of tampering with a urine sample, she was not found guilty of taking illegal substances. so she never had to return any of her medals. so all of those people that she beat still probably feel quite, you know, quite upset that they didn't receive the medals they should have received. and a final thought on that, here we sit in 2019 and we're going to move on to gender issues in a minute, butjust on your career and the fact that you never won that olympic gold but so many british people wanted to see you win, you then made a much later attempt in the late 90s to get the ioc to acknowledge that the person who beat you was a cheater and that in effect, you should have had the gold medal. but that never came to pass. well, it was all part of the documentary. so it was all sort of part of trying to find the story behind, you know? and i was taken to dresden, i was taken to where they were training, i was shown lots of black and white film i was shown muscle biopsies that they did which were just horrendous, and we saw all the proof of what they were taking when they were taking it. and then i met to meet petra and i spoke to her. and at the time i was nursing my own little girl, a second one who i have — gracie, who is now 20. and i took her with me and there was tears, you know, in the eyes of petra because she wanted more kids and she couldn't have more children. so i have massive empathy for these athletes and what they've been put through, however i get very frustrated that the ioc do not put a serious wrong right. even theyjust put an asterisk, you know, next to the records or next to a period of time in the record books in the ioc, it's a very dark time that they are just choosing to ignore, didn't happen. 0k. let's fast forward to another issue that raises fundamental questions of fairness in sport and an issue that you have, if i may say so, waded into in a big way with a very public profile and lots of commentary from yourself. and that is this issue, not about cheating. it's about those particular individuals who biologically are born male, but who identify as female. they transition, they call themselves women, they don't necessarily have surgery, they live their lives as women and they want to compete in sport as women and you have a problem with that. the rules changed. in 2015—16, no longer do you need to have surgery, no longer do you need to have a doctor's diagnosis for gender dysphoria. no longer do need to have long—term hormone replacement, you just have to... well, they do need to have hormone therapies. one year. and testosterone levels are measured. just one year. we don't even have enough money at the moment to test for... these are guidelines. these are guidelines set by the ioc. and then those guidelines are adapted. with the iaaf, and caster semenya, that level of five nanomole. so that's per litre of blood. these are the testosterone levels. the ioc set these guidelines and they changed recently and they are very different from what they were previously. so the problem you've got now is that people need to just self—identify. so they have the benefits from puberty, muscle memory, increased cardiovascular system, bigger heart, bigger lungs, better red blood cell count, denser bone structure. angle of hip to the knee, hands, feet, being taller... all of these things will not go away with a reduction of testosterone. there are a lot of benefits. fascinating. let's comment on that a little bit. let's talk about caster semenya. the brilliant south african runner. we'll get to her case a moment. these issues aren't about gender identity, we were talking about earlier, she is a woman. that is a separate case. we will talk about that in a minute. we will talk about that in a minute. it is important because there has been a case. it's very important but it raises certain issues. i'm interested in those who choose to transition, who are born biologically male but identify as a woman and want to compete as a woman, having undertaken hormone therapies. they have undertaken them. no, they haven't. they haven't got to do that. they haven't got to do that, so you need to check that, stephen, because they haven't got to do that. they have only got to reduce their testorterone for one year. that's all they have to do. they don't have to do... but how are they going to do that without undertaking treatment? so all you need to do for testosterone to be reduced is to take a contraception pill. that's all caster semenya has to do to reduce her testosterone levels. of which the majority of people... now you've gone back to semenya. let's not get stuck on caster semenya. no, same protocol would be used. so you've just asked me about transgender, i'm answering that question, so either let me answer it or don't, alright? no, no, i am wanting to hear the answer. all you need to do is reduce your testosterone level to either five if it's the iaaf recommendations, or ten if it is the ioc guidelines. at the moment, all of the associations are kind of finding their way. some of them like the american powerlifting association said no, we're not going to do this. we're going to ring fence female athletes. we're going to go xx born athletes are going to be protected, and we're going to say no, this is not going to happen. and that's where i'm coming from. and you like that because it seems to me, underpinning your grave concerns about what is happening with these transgender athletes, is a belief that they are gaming the system, that they are... that they could potentially game the system. you seem to be... let me quote your tweet which caused an awful lot of controversy. you tweeted out recently: "to protect women's sport those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women's sport." as though their entire objective was simply to sort of transition for the purposes of winning medals. no i didn't say that in that tweet... no you didn't. i didn't say that in that tweet so you're putting those words... no, it's not! you said people are gaming the system. for sporting advantage. no, i'm saying there's potentialfor a rule to be broken or bent or used, the same way there was potential with the east germans all those years ago. what i'm saying is that i don't understand how the potential of a 10% benefit, which is the difference on the whole between male and female elite performances, some sports it is 20%. alright, so highjump for example is i think 18 or 19%, the difference between an elite female versus an elite man. if you just ignore that potential benefit, women, xx born natal females will not be able to win any of their medals, any of their sports scholarships, any of their profile opportunities to be able to get a platform. how is that fair? we are in a society where 50% of us are women. well you ask an interesting question. do you understand when you ask that question, and you pose the problem in the way that you have, do you understand why, for example, some transgender athletes including rachel mckinnon, dr rachel mckinnon, who's a doctor of philosophy, but nonetheless... not a medical doctor, a very important... ..she's also a top level cyclist. no, she's a master cyclist. so she's, she's a master cyclist. in her level and her age group, she's a top level cyclist. if she was competing in the male events. she would win a medal in the 70 age category. by what you and indeed martina navratilova tweeted about this issue, and she said that what you have said smacks of being transphobic, and can you understand that? i absolutely dispute that comment. i don't think i'm transphobic by any shape or form. i'm absolutely happy for anyone to live their life life as they want to. i believe that gender is a social constraint and anyone who chooses to be whichever gender they would like to be to live socially, is fine by me. if you're not hurting anybody else, live however you want to live. however, sport is based in biology. so if we were in sport, we need to categorise it by sex. by the chromosomes that you're born with and that is something that if you want to protect, female spot, if you want young girls to be able to be involved in sport and make their dreams come true, we have to protect them otherwise it just won't happen, we will lose that opportunity. just in brief, without getting too deep into the biology and the science, there's an interesting work by a woman called byjoanna harper, again transgender... happen, we will lose that opportunity. 0n non—elite athletes, though. she looked at physical attributes having gone through the hormone therapies and she showed that in terms of the new levels of fat they had in their bodies, the loss of muscle mass, the loss of strength, that there was a real impact from this hormone therapy which did mean that they were pretty much the same as transgender women as they had been as men, in terms of the quality of their athletics. but they don't lose all the benefits that i mentioned earlier on, and also it was non—elite people they were using. they used eight non—elite middle—distance runners. you don't accept that evidence? i accept there was an awful lot more evidence the opposite way. that's what i'm saying. are you honestly sitting here and telling me that you don't believe that men are stronger than women? no, i'm not saying that at all. i can tell you categorically that the difference in top level performance is a minimum of 10%. i guess what we're discussing is whether people who suffer from this condition, gender dysphoria and they are wanting to transition, they are transgender, you seem to be suggesting some of them may do it to seek glory and victory in a sporting arena and i am saying... who is deciding that they have gender dysphoria? i suppose this is where... could you answer my question though? but who is deciding they have gender dysphoria ? they no longer have to see a doctor. this is a personal self id basis. you don't trust the transgender community to be genuine? no, i'm saying that in sport it is not fair on females to lose their platform to be able to compete on as level platform as we can create for them to have the same opportunities that males, born males could have. why should born males have this chance and born females don't get it? i just don't understand. in this conviction that fairness remains at the heart of this, let us finally get back to something we mentioned earlier. in the case of caster semenya, here she is, a world—class medal winning south african runner, 800m, she was born with a condition which means she has very high levels of testosterone. she was born with differences of sexual development. and the net result is that she has high levels of testosterone. caster semenya is 46 xy, you know what that is don't you? so you know that? yes. so would the bbc like to say what that means? they didn't report this once. i think it's called scientifically hyper androgynism and which means she has various attributes which to many people are confusing in terms of her sex. you're 46 xy. i'm not. i'm 46 xx. caster semenya was 46 xy. it's an extremely unusual biological situation. if caster semenya had been born in this country, caster semenya would have had a blood test straightaway and caster semenya would have probably had an ultrasound scan which would have revealed internal testes. she would have been brought up as a little boy. she wasn't born in this country, she was born in africa. the cases of dsd are coming down in africa now because medical intervention and the promises are getting better. just to end this conversation about caster semenya because we don't know what's going to happen but you support the idea that she should be banned from running in women's athletic competition? no, i would like to see us moving forward in all sport that we protect a female category. that there is an xx female category going forward. we then have an open honest debate that has been closed by name—calling, to discuss how we make it inclusive for everybody. whether that means we have an open category, whether that means we include different categories, but there needs to be open and honest debates, we can't keep closing everybody down, wejust calling people names. 0k, well, let's not do that but very specifically, caster semenya is one of the great athletes of our time, where should she be running in your view? you talk about open category, different categories, are you saying she has to run her own? here is another interesting statistic for you, 0k? dsd accounts for, as far as the world health organization is concerned, 0.01% of the population. please explain to me why the first three in the women's 800m in rio, where all dsd athletes if there was no advantage to their condition? for you as a former top level athlete, now a commentator, an analyst, when you look at sport today, whether it be in the swimming pool or on the racetrack, do you believe in it, do you actually regard it as fair competition? it's as fair as it possibly can be. iam involved in my swimming. i've been doing it internationally for 45 years. whether that's at three 0lympic games competing or working on the side of the pool. so i believe that my sport swimming is pretty clean, we still have cheats in swimming, same as they have cheats in pretty much every walk of life. the bigger the reward, the usually more number of cheats there are, that is just human nature. but ijust believe that we can't give up on it, i don't believe we have to put our hands in the air and say, "we are failing." we still have to keep trying to make the playing field as level and as fair, and bring as much equality to sport and equal opportunities as we possibly can. and if we do this to women's sport, women will lose their equal opportunities and that's not fair. ya sharron davies, it's been a pleasure to have you on hardtalk. thank you. sharron davies, it's been a pleasure to have you on hardtalk. hello there. we've had some interesting clouds sent in to us here at the bbc weather centre over recent days. this was monday's effort from cardiff. it's a funnel cloud, a tornado that doesn't quite reach its way all the way down to the ground. and what about this beauty, from sunday, from the north yorkshire area. but what if the atmosphere had 25 times more energy built up in it, ready to be released in one violent outbreak? well, that's what we've got going on across parts of the united states at the moment, through texas and oklahoma. these storm clouds have already produced some tornadoes, and there is the potential for some of these tornadoes to become violent, wide, and have a long track along the ground. so some extreme weather there across the united states. here in the uk, though, over the next few hours, expect a little bit more rain to come in. scotland, some damp weather here. otherwise, it's a largely dry picture, but again it's quite murky around some of our eastern coasts, with some mist and fog patches particularly again for eastern areas of scotland. so for tuesday morning, for many of us, actually, it's a decent start to the day. the winds should be light and there should be plenty of sunshine around across northern ireland, for most of england and wales. and increasingly, we'll see the skies brighten up in scotland as well. but, as that process happens, the rain eases, we'll start to see some showers breaking out, and they could turn heavy and thundery. maybe a few showers as well getting going across eastern england. otherwise it's dry and in any sunshine, it should feel pleasantly warm, given the light winds. it's a similar day for many of us on wednesday. again, a lot of drier weather around, with some sunshine. but there will be some thicker cloud working into northern scotland, particularly the northern isles, with some rain and cool weather. temperatures just 10 in lerwick. we might see some rain getting into aberdeenshire as well. elsewhere, a similar kind of weather prospect. a few isolated showers, but mainly dry with some sunshine. the next few days, feeling warm in any sunshine. a few slow—moving showers are possible and the winds are going to stay light. subtle signs of something of a change into thursday. we've got a weather system lurking in the atlantic, and there's a chance that we could see some of the rain brushing into western areas. a little bit of uncertainty about that, but for many of us, i think there'll be a little bit more in the way of high cloud in the sky, making any sunshine hazy. quite warm again, though — temperatures high teens to low 20s fairly widely. 0n into friday and the weekend, it looks like the jetstream is going to start moving straight across the uk, and that will tend to encourage outbreaks of rain, particularly across northern areas, so we could see some rain at times. some uncertainty in the details of the rain. it'll probably turn cloudier and breezier, though, through the weekend. that's your weather. this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock. our top story: tributes to a formula 1 legend — the three—time world champion niki lauda dies at the age of 70. scientists warn sea levels could rise far more than predicted due to accelerating melting in greenland and antarctica. and will fears about pollution, colour germany green at the european elections? — we have a special report. putting huawei on hold. the us gives a temporary reprieve to its sweeping restrictions on the chinese telecoms giant.

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