139 - Sex, Politics, and Double-Standards in Women's Sports with Coach Linda Blade
Gender: A Wider Lens
Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley
4.6 • 961 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2023
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Coach Linda Blade joins Sasha & Stella for an incredible conversation about the critical issues surrounding fairness and inclusivity in women's sports. They explore the challenges and biases faced by female athletes in the wake of transgender athletes competing in women's categories, particularly the profound psychological impact. The conversation also sheds light on the rich historical context of fairness in competition.
Dr. Linda Blade is a former Canadian Champion (1986) and a full scholarship NCAA All American (1984) in Track & Field. As a Chartered Professional Coach, Linda has worked internationally for over 30 years with hundreds of athletes. Her expertise has extended to leadership roles (selected): Provincial President (2014 -2023) of Athletics Alberta, where she developed sex-based eligibility guidelines; Co-author of UNSPORTING: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport (2021); Collaborator in the establishment of the International Consortium on Female Sport (ICFS). Linda has been publicly advocating for the fairness and safety of female athletes since 2018. Dr. Blade will be presenting at Genspect’s The Bigger Picture Conference in Denver, CO.
Don’t miss this valuable discussion emphasizing the importance of sex-based policies for fostering a fair competition environment. Dr. Blade even offers insights into the use of puberty blockers in youth sports, highlighting the potential risks and implications for young athletes, and also the challenges with data collection and analysis.
The conversation also touches on the question of intersex conditions and how they have influenced elite women's sports, underscoring the need for thoughtful policies and guidelines to address DSD (differences in sexual development), ensuring fairness and inclusivity while respecting the unique circumstances of athletes like Caster Semenya, a South African intersex olympic athlete. This is an engaging episode offering a vital perspective on the complexities of balancing inclusivity with fairness.
Attend Genspect’s: The Bigger Picture
https://genspect.org/the-bigger-picture-continues-denver-colorado/
Find Coach Blade on Twitter: @coachblade
More About Coach Blade:
https://worldathletics.org/personal-best/lifestyle/linda-blade-life-in-athletics
Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport
Women's Rights, Gender Wrongs: the global impact of gender-identity ideology
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Womens-Rights-Gender-Wrongs-gender-identity/dp/1739265602
Contribute to the International Consortium of Female Sport
Contribute to The Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS)
Contribute to Champion Women
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.widerlenspod.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy? How's it going? |
| 0:02.0 | Going well. We had a cool guest on today. |
| 0:05.0 | Yeah, this is a subject that we've often thought we must do and we've finally done, which is sports and gender. |
| 0:11.0 | And we've got a brilliant person to speak to. Coach |
| 0:15.0 | Belaid she's going to be speaking in Denver and you can still get just |
| 0:18.3 | streaming tickets I think maybe but you'll certainly be able to see it in the |
| 0:21.2 | future if you can't. |
| 0:22.8 | And you know, she's doing a presentation in Denver |
| 0:26.3 | like when sports meets trans ideology or gender ideology. |
| 0:29.9 | And it's well named because she has been there for decades. |
| 0:34.4 | She is a real expert in elite sports and it just shines from her |
| 0:40.4 | that she's just into the kind of concept of sporting chance, you know, fairness in |
| 0:46.4 | sport and that's why she's such a brilliant representative to speak about fairness and sport in this |
| 0:51.6 | context. Yeah, she herself was an athlete, a very elite level athlete, and then she's been coaching |
| 0:57.7 | for decades and what's interesting is Dr. Blade also lived all around the world. |
| 1:02.4 | She lived in Nigeria, she lived in Iran, she's lived in all these different cultures and grew up down by the Anazad. I share this extraordinary childhood. She grew up in Bolivia. She tells us this, I mean you'll see our faces, the story that we |
| 1:16.0 | launched with about her childhood was like absolutely remarkable. So she really surprised me because I've been following her work for a while, but there's so many interesting aspects of her story. |
| 1:26.4 | And we got to ask Coach Blade, like all of our burning questions about |
| 1:34.1 | Trans and our listener community section. |
| 1:36.2 | We also asked her about this new trend of non-binary athletes |
| 1:40.7 | and making like third sports categories because this is often argued as like this is the great |
| 1:45.6 | solution just make a third category but as Coach Blade explains like there are a lot of problems with that too. |
... |
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