I'm just astonished. To me, I would have thought that one of the first principles of sport

was fairness. It has to be based on science and reality and not based on a feeling. You

can't run a race on a feeling. How do we quantify a feeling? How to start that person's feeling

is real and that person's feeling is not real. You know, we have age groups, we have

paralympic categories, we have weight categories in things like boxing and we have the biggest

difference is sex categories. We've allowed this emotion, you know, to take over and all

you're teaching girls is that they can't win anything.

Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill Show with me, Brendan O'Neill and my special guest

this week, Sharon Davies. Sharon, welcome to the show. Hello, I speak to you. It's great

to have you on, not least because you've got this new book out, which I want to talk to you

about. It's brilliant. I highly recommend it to all listeners. It's called unfair play,

the battle for women's sports. It's full of your story, other sports women's stories. It's

got color. It is absolutely packed with facts, particularly on one of the big controversial

questions of our age, which is the trans question. And in this instance, the question of whether

trans women i.e. biological males should be allowed to partake in women's sport. It covers

all angles and it's really, really digs deep into the whole issue. So I want to get into those

questions with you today, but I want to kick off by asking you what drove you into this debate.

This is a rocky area for any woman to go into because as you describe in the book, you get

abuse, you get slack, you are demonized, that's what happens to women who put their heads

above the parapet on this issue. What compelled you to, I guess, no pun intended, jump in at the

deep end on this question? And then you hit the nail on the head when you say women, because

you know, I've got several male friends who are sportsmen and they speak and have the same

...