Martina Navratilova criticizes trans swimmer Lia Thomas after her attack on feminism

The tennis player says that "it is not fair" that transgender women can participate in women's competitions since the physical conditions are not the same.

Martina Navratilova en una imagen publicada en 2019. — (Wikimedia Commons)

Published by

Rosana Rábago Sainz

28 de abril, 2023

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Tennis player Martina Navratilova criticized trans swimmer Lia Thomas after her attack on feminism. She did so following comments that Thomas had previously made in which the transgender woman claimed that she did not feel supported by women. Many of them did not look favorably on Thomas competing in women's competitions. Faced with this, Navratilova sent a tweet in which she assured that Thomas should not give an opinion on these matters:

This is not the first time Navratilova has spoken out about the controversy that is simmering in the sport today. Trans athletes' participation in competitions of a gender other than their biological sex is controversial in the United States. The Czech-American tennis player has always been against it.

She stated this in an opinion piece published in the London Times three years ago, where she said it was "insane and cheating" to allow transgender people to compete in sports tournaments of a gender other than their biological gender:

A man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organization is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.

She asserted that despite these people reducing their "hormone levels," this would not solve the problem and that it was simply unfair for transgender women to participate in sports competitions as the physical conditions are not the same:

Simply reducing hormone levels — the prescription most sports have adopted — does not solve the problem. A man builds up muscle and bone density, as well as a greater number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, from childhood. Training increases the discrepancy. Indeed, if a male were to change gender in such a way as to eliminate any accumulated advantage, he would have to begin hormone treatment before puberty. For me, that is unthinkable.