Raquel Rosario Sánchez from FiLiA in conversation with Linda Blade Sports coach and President of the Track and Field Athletics Association in  Alberta Canada. 

https://savewomensports.com

Raquel: My name is Raquel Rosario Sánchez and I am the spokeswoman for FiLiA. Today we are absolutely over the moon to have coach Linda Blade, the President of Athletics Alberta in Canada. And she's a coach for track and field. She's very outspoken in her defence of the rights of women and girls to a fair level playing field in sports.

At FiLiA we are deeply committed to this issue and we are interested in hearing the voices of women who are experts in this field and who have experience in the world of sports. So welcome Linda. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Linda: Thank you very much, Raquel. 

Raquel: How are you? I mean, how are you doing overall with all of this situation going on worldwide pandemic and all that?

Linda: Well, it's been very disruptive to sports and to my life as a coach. I don't coach very much. I have maybe one or two athletes now that I coach at a distance. I had 33 or more athletes before. And these two happen to be in a certain bubble. So I am continuing with them, but generally, thank God, my family and I are healthy and Canada is a nice place to live and we are very grateful. And I would say that internationally, the delay of the Olympic Games has allowed some of us to have more time to lobby the International Olympic Committee IOC to maybe suspend its policy that they brought in in 2015. And we can get into that a little bit, but I'm just saying that it just gives us some time.

Raquel: I have a couple of questions about the IOC later on. But first of all, I want to know how did Linda became interested in sports? What was the thing that led to: I wanted to do sports I wanted to participate in sports. I always wanted to know how people who have made this their professional life.

Linda: Great question. I was born in Bolivia in South America, actually. And, as a small child, I had two older sisters who were very girly, but I was gender nonconforming in a way. I liked to play soccer in the streets with my brother. My brother and I were best friends and we would play football and no matter where we would go, we would find the group of boys playing.

And you know, I'd say and of course we had our real ball. Some of them didn't have even a very good ball. So we were lucky we could participate, but you know, as soon as I became a teenager and my body was starting to change, I noticed that, I could still beat a lot of the boys, but psychologically I could see they weren't trying hard against me. And I realised I need to find something that's just women only. 

And so I went to, you know, every Sunday is, football in the stadium. And I went there and I saw a race of the girls at halftime at the football game. And I said, well, maybe I can join those girls. I can beat those girls. So it got me into track and field athletics. 

So yes, so I was always good at sports. And then I was Bolivian champion just at 15, and then we moved to Canada and now, you know, I'm almost 60 years old, that was a long time ago. That was in the seventies. So I was introduced to sports there and went to the United States on the NCAA scholarship.

So I feel grateful that sport paid for me to go to the university, but because I went there as a foreign student to the United States, but because they paid for my university and it was Title IX, it also helped me realise that I was very fortunate for the laws of the United States to have changed, to allow women and girls to have scholarships.

So I think every step on the way I was realising that women's sports would not happen without a lot of effort in terms of the policy making. And I've always appreciated that. And then after I was Canadian champion, and then I finished, and then I got my PhD in Kinesiology, I travelled the world. My husband is an agronomist and he does a lot of research in Africa. So we spent some time overseas in Africa. And I was coaching there for the IAAF. 

So I just started to coach and teach coaches how to coach. And then after all this time, you know, I moved to Canada, finally stayed in Canada for a long time now in Edmonton, Alberta. And I've been coaching athletes in many different sports, because as you can imagine, if you're a football player or you are a basketball player, you still need athletics. You still need to jump. You need to run fast and a lot of figure skaters and, and hockey players, everybody likes to come for some help sometimes to a track coach for some skills. And so I have a private business now that allows me to coach athletes. I've coached athletes in maybe 17 different sports and helped them to improve.

And then finally I was elected in 2014 to President of the Track and Field Athletics Association, which is about 3,500 athletes. I represent those athletes. Every two years they elect its President of the Board. In 2018, which was the last time I stood for office to be elected again, I already started to read about and understand about the gender ideology and the way the Canadian government was starting to push very hard. So I literally made this my campaign. I felt I should tell them my position because it would not be fair if they elected me president. And then I started saying all these things about gender ideology. So I was really honest with them.

 Raquel: Was this back in 2014?  

Linda: No, this was when I first became President and I didn't know about this ideology. I became President first in 2014, then I re-elected in 2016. And then by 2018, I became aware because of my position and I started to read policies.

So on my last round, when I was running again in 2018, I just, I basically just told them everything. I said, you know, this is a policy and an ideology that's going to say that boys can compete with girls. I explained everything to them and they were shocked because in 2018, most people had not even heard of this. And most people would not imagine that Canadian sport officials would force this policy on the sports. 

Raquel: What was their reaction when you told them?

Linda:  That they were so shocked, I'm telling you Raquel, like the room went so quiet and then people were looking at each other, like, is she crazy? Like, what is she saying? And then parents would come to me afterwards who had girls because they were representing their clubs. And they said, you know, Linda, I thank you for being willing to fight because if this policy comes in, I want to take my daughter out of sport. I just want to make sure that she's safe and we just can't have this happening.

As I was standing there campaigning and giving my speech, I did say, this is the policy, this is my position. This is what I'm going to fight for. So if you elect me as your president, this is what I'm going to be saying. These are the things I'm going to be saying. I'm going to be fighting for you for your daughters, for everybody, for the sport, because it it's going to affect everybody, so don't vote for me now, if you think that that's not what you want me to say, then don't vote for me now. 

So I really put it on the line because I didn't want them to feel like, you know, like I was tricking them by putting me in there. And then suddenly I say something that embarrasses them.

So I felt like I really had a mandate really, even a political mandate to speak the truth, speak honestly, and help the Canadian sports system perhaps, have this conversation about what is the right policy going forward. We want to include trans people and we can, but you can't be putting women and girls at a big disadvantage.

Raquel: In some sports, putting them at risk.

Linda: Exactly. So fortunately in athletics, unless it's a race where you're together, like in a marathon or 1500 meter run, distance running, where somebody can give you an elbow. Most of our sports in athletics are track and field athletics are individual, but for sure, my advocacy extends to all the sports because I feel it is very dangerous if you have contact sports or like, I saw the policy for judo, Canada, you know where you're fighting with people and another body. And if that other body is a male body and he could really hurt the girl and it really has no meaning. If sport isn't fair. If it's not on a level playing field, same sex, then it has no meaning. It has no meaning at all. 

Raquel: I empathise with what you said about when you explain to people what is happening, sometimes they look at you like you're crazy. Like what you're saying, it's like, so unbelievable. It's so outside of the realm of possibility that they just cannot comprehend that this could be happening, therefore they think, well, maybe she's exaggerating. It's a jump to get people to actually see we're describing policy that goes all the way up to national Olympics.

You were explaining to me is that you run on a platform that explicitly sought to protect women's sex-based rights and fairness for women in sports. 

Now the question I have for you is number one, did you receive a backlash and number two, how did you manage to cope with it? How did you manage to pull through? 

Linda: Well, those are good questions. The first of all, the group elected me and said yes to my Presidency, 95% maybe. And the other 5%. Some of them kind of understood because their school teachers are already seeing it in schools. They were just too scared to actually support me openly.

But privately, they even say that's really honestly not fair, but there was nobody, nobody, I mean, there was obviously LGBTQ people in the room and, well, it was surprising to me in 2018, even the LGBTQ people in my sport had never heard of this. So, those people were saying, Linda, are you sure?

One of them really asked me, like, where is this coming from? How can this be? I think that one was a lesbian, but you know, they were just saying like, what really? Like, is this really happening? And so I really have not had explicit sort of somebody in my own room, for example, yelling at me or something saying you're wrong. That only happens on Twitter. Honestly, it will start to happen. I think it will happen, but I think it's just because in our sport world, we're still just catching up. Most people just don't even know yet. And so I'm expecting a backlash. And even if I have it, like when I have a little bit, I have had some messages, but very rare and what I get from the government, who's trying to push this at us, I just get silence. 

I've tried to meet with my local Minister of Sport. And at first they say, yes, they'll meet. When I contact the Minister directly, she says, well, we will meet to talk about it, and then the Deputy or the assistant or the secretary or somebody in the office who understands the landmine that this is, will then send me a message back saying the minister has changed her mind about meeting. 

The people who are up in the government are just trying to avoid the issue because they just want to put the policy quickly and then not have any questions about it. 

 The way I found out was actually being on a committee because I, since I'm President of one of the provinces in Canada, like every province sends their President to the meetings, national meetings, Canadian bureaucracy, like in the, Ottawa at the centre at the capital.

And at that level I just called the guy who was responsible for the main policy statements on inclusiveness. And the irony of that is that he's the CEO of the anti-doping agency in Canada, like the anti-doping, it's called Canadian Centre for Ethics and Sport that came up because of Ben Johnson and the one-hundred-meter sprinter in Canada back in like 1988.

And then he got caught, you know, he beat Carl Lewis and then he got caught. And then the Canadian government set up this centre for ethics and sport because they needed to have a centre where we could educate the Canadian sports about no doping. And now, that is the entity now pushing trans women into women's sport, which is worse than doping, so that man told me I was exaggerating.

Raquel: But if they push it, people are less likely to believe that they would be the ones pushing for something that would be unfair in sports. So actually that's very astute. 

Linda: The reason, and they came up with it, they convened a committee or a working group in 2013, that man put together, as if it was like representative group of coaches, athletes, and medical people like to talk about trans in sport.

And when you look at the list of people he picked, it was all so biased. In fact, the only person who had a real education in human biology really, was a doctor who's involved in transitioning of children, was sitting on that committee. And it was supposed to just be a working group to propose a possible policy.

And now, because they had that group meeting and they put out a document now that document's like the Bible for some reason. And those people who came up with that policy, that was not a representative group. It's just secret behind closed doors. Okay. Boom, boom, boom. We have this policy now you must put it in your policy.

So that's when I found out. It's a lobby effort. but then when they present it to us, that's at the centre, that's at the national government, so when they tell somebody like me, I'm President of a sport in one of the provinces, I'm just a small person to them. I mean, in my province, I'm the one that makes sure everything runs properly with my Board and our employees, but they think we're just small people. They can just tell us, well, this is requirement now. 

Raquel: You mentioned that the only person who was a doctor in that lobby group. was someone who was involved in the medicalisation of children. Whereas you have a PhD in Kinesiology, and the fact that they would think that they could educate you instead of the other way around is also interesting. 

Linda: The thing is they didn't even ask, they were just trying to push it and assume everybody just does the copy paste. You know, this is what we should do. And I'm the only one in the room saying, wait a minute I need to ask some serious questions. This isn't right. This is not right. And this can't be happening. Like this is going to ruin our sports. 

That's when you get these people saying things like, well, we just want to make sure sports is safe, inclusive, and equitable.

They may have all these words they always use for like trying to make the world a better place. And I looked at him and I said, listen, it's not going to be safer because of what you just pointed out for the bodies and girls and boys clashing with their bodies. And not only that, boys in the locker rooms, boys in the hotel rooms on a trip and adult males who are saying they can be a woman to supervise the girls on a trip.

You know what I'm saying? Like, if it goes over, it goes more and more and more so, so I said, it's not safe. You think it's safe, it's not safe. And I said, it's not inclusive because if you put a boy in a girl's race, you exclude the girl. So how can it be safe and inclusive? And then all they can say is, oh, you're just exaggerating because there's not going to be that many and you should just be nice, you know? And that's never the reason that can't be the reason. And he is just in denial. Like everybody else, he just, he wants those woke or those, you know, those identitarian points or something, and he wants to just look like he's doing the thing that the government wants everybody to do. So he's just saying those things.

It doesn't take that many, all it takes Raquel, is maybe three, two or three men on a podium and women's sport and all the rest of the women will give up. So it doesn't even take that much, and beyond the safety issue and, and let's talk about safety.

So if we say, all the policies, part of the cut and paste is that the boys should absolutely, if a boy says he's a girl, should absolutely be allowed in the washroom, in the locker rooms, in the showers, he should absolutely be allowed in the hotel rooms on a trip, but even on the track, Raquel, if we suddenly say, okay, the women's bathroom or the toilet becomes universal toilet, for the male athlete, one or two, who says, he's a girl, then anybody who's in the crowd, any spectator now sees it, they can just go in there. So we can't safeguard. 

As soon as you make an exception for one or two athletes, everybody in the environment around that sport is allowed to then violate those safety rules and violate the single sex space. 

So I can't control that as a President and our officials again, if our officials see a male body, like in a girl's race, and then the official goes and starts asking a question like, are you sure you're in the right category? They might then be accused of hate because in Canadian law you can't. 

So then our officials who are mostly volunteer now, they're going to probably, and they're older people who retired and they just really want to help sport and they want to have something to do. Are they going to stay and help us?

Like, if, if it's too dangerous, if it's too weird, if it's just too awkward and they don't know whether they're going to say the wrong thing or even our coaches are at risk because maybe a boy beats a girl in a race, and then the coach complaints, or like you see in the judo, for example, let's say a boy is like really beating up a girl. And maybe the coach says, no, that's just not fair. Then the coach could be sanctioned. And even for me, I have even said like, if this actually becomes the real actual law, instead of just a strong recommendation, why would I even coach? Why would I? It's not fair for me to tell a little girl, it's all going to be fair.

And what can I tell a girl or a teenager? Yeah. You train hard. You're going to make, can make the podium. No. If the women's section isn't specifically for female bodies, then what am I doing being a coach in that system? Like, it doesn't even make any sense. It just defeats everything.

So that's why I told my people, this has to be the hill that I die on I cannot let this go. And if I lose, then I'm out because I can't live in that world. And sport is not that important in the sense of larger society. But I think sport is the indicator. You know, it's like the canary and the coal mine, like sport is the tip of the spear.

The first thing that is obvious that everybody sees, it's not the most important thing in society, much more important are the little girls who don't want to be a woman because there's so many awful things happening these days and they want to be a man instead, I mean, who wouldn't want to the way women are treated these days.

I mean, look at JK Rowling. I mean, it's just a messed up thing. I think sport is the battlefield, sport is the obvious battlefield. That's what I think. 

Raquel: Well, thank you for sharing that. I think it's very brave of you to essentially take a stand and say, now this is important and I will defend it unapologetically. 

Linda: Because I have to.

Raquel: You describe like the coaches and how that interacts and the dynamics of the girls and the people who can use their facilities and the dynamics of the volunteers, like all that kind of stuff. It just sounds like things are being engineered to make sports unfair for those girls and women.

So before we go any further, it's clear that you feel very passionate about this but let's talk about the importance of sports for the lives of women and girls. You know, why is it like so passionate about fairness in sports for women and girls. 

Linda: Well, first of all, the fairness has to be there for meaning.

So for anybody to enter sports, they have to understand that there are rules and guidelines that if they, if we play by the rules, then it will be fair and there will be achievement but once the girl is in sports, two really important things happen. 

First of all, the girls become physically engaged. So basically you learn how to use your body physically in an active way. and you have stronger hearts and lungs and bones. And one of the big things as teenagers, girls need to make sure they have strong bones and healthy body. So that later in life, it's really true that if you build up your body early, you have a lot longer to live before you become the frail old lady that breaks her hip. It really does make a difference physically in your life. 

And also just had giving you self-confidence, because there's a link between having a strong muscular body and being able to perform something and your self-esteem like there's lots of data that shows that the women in the US, the girls who do sports in high school are less likely to become pregnant in high school and a higher achievement, just because of your self-esteem and you're with a group.

 But then beyond the physical and even the psychological, in a sense of your immediate psychological health, there's also the character building. You learn how to play on a team. You learn how to lose. Like a lot of times women, I've noticed with girls, like the one thing is that even the champion girls, sometimes if you introduce something new to them they right away say, oh, I'm not really good at that, just give me a chance. I'm going to try to work at this. They think they're not good in it.

You learn to realize that even if you're not good at something that you can master that very quickly and if you lose a competition, you're not going to give up because the next time you might win. 

And so a lot of the C-suite like we call it. C-suite like the CEOs of the mega corporations, a lot of the women who have risen to the top of those organisations, most of them had sports in their background because I think it helped you to understand how to compete, how to fight, how to fight back, how to say, well, I might lose this time, but I won't lose the next time. I think it gives women and girls a certain idea about how to actually play in a men's world.

Obviously we still have a world of patriarchy and male dominated space. We need to learn how to live in those spaces and work and play the game in our own way, but rough and tough, like them so that we also can succeed, you know, and we don't have to take crap from anybody. We can stand up and make a stand and say, no, and I think sport allows you to be more assertive like that. 

So there's huge advantages to allow young girls to have a chance to participate in sport and so that they feel like they can excel and that they're safe and what else we're teaching people is that in life, in greater society, there's a certain set of policies and rules. If you play by those rules, you will win. If you play well enough.

 But if we tell them there's a different set of rules for the boys and the girls and the boys can do whatever they want. I mean, it's devastating but it just sets them up that they don't even feel like they will ever want to try.

And I just don't think our Canadian officials who are pushing these kinds of policies, because they want to do it on an ideological basis. I don't think they understand the devastation that this might have on a lot of young girls in sports. 

But as I said, Raquel, it's not just the girls because if the officials aren't there, there's no competitions for the young boys either, right?

Like if you ruin the whole system, your whole sports system just sort of becomes less for everybody. 

Raquel: Personally, I love sports. I love football. I love volleyball. I used to play it a lot when I was in high school. But then I sort of switched to dancing and then I took a different styles of dancing. But every time I get a chance to play sports, I love it. I don't like to watch it. I like to play it. And what I like about sports is that it teaches you to trust yourself and to trust your skill and to trust your friends and to think like the ability, like the strength that you get from that confidence. And to think that this is taken away from girls is devastating. Because as you were saying, it's like, so many of us learn this in high school.  

Let’s just think about some of these arguments that are being presented when you speak about male and female bodies, is it true as many gender identity advocates claim that the advantages of males physically can be erased through either testosterone reduction or whatever other process, is that true?

And if it's not true, then how can you explain it?

Linda: Let me just explain it where that whole testosterone policy, where it was champion was at the level of the International Olympic Committee and the reason they said that if you reduce your testosterone to a certain level, then it will make it fair because they base that on a very biased study, again, undertaken by a trans woman where only eight trans athletes self-reported that they did 10% to 12% slower running times after they took the testosterone. But those were trans women who, over a period of like 20 or 30 years. So like when they were older men, they were running slower than when they were younger.

Like when they were older trans women, they were running slower than - 

Raquel: Wait. It was a study of eight trans women? 

Linda: Yeah. Who used to be to athletes when they were younger. 

Raquel: And it was accounting for the way that their bodies slowed down when they aged?

Linda: No, but she was saying, Joanna Harper is the name. Joanna was saying that the difference between men and women's performances is 10% to 12%. So if by doing the testosterone reduction, they became 12% slower, they're equal now to the women. 

First of all, was not observed by scientists. It was say what your best time used to be. And now tell us now, and there was like, in some cases, 10 and 20 years’ difference between ages. So when you look at the reduction in just men over the age, if you look at track and field and what they do when they're in their twenties, of course they slow down with age. 

Raquel: Was that peer reviewed?

Linda: No, and the Olympic Committee made the rule that allowing male bodies into women's sports based on that non peer review study. 

And there was another Institute, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2018, started a study. I think maybe it was even earlier, but then they reported in 2019 and their study was peer reviewed. They had a group of trans women that they started right from the beginning of them starting the testosterone reduction treatment. And they followed their muscle strength and performance difference. And after the required year of low testosterone, they did not reduce their strength at all. And that's peer reviewed.

The muscle mass went down a little bit. So they lost some of the size of the muscle, but their strength performance did not reduce that much. So what does that tell me? It makes sense to me because as a coach, it's not just your muscles that perform the strength. It's also your nervous system, like how you put effort. Like you learn how to put effort. So if a man knows how to give an effort in sport, reduces his testosterone, he still knows how to perform that sport. It's like a muscle memory, you still can do more than the women. The testosterone doesn't really make that big a difference. And that's the peer review study.  

Raquel: Your body's so much more than that. Like when you think about like lung capacity, when you think about like the bone and the strength in the bones, all that kind of stuff. 

Linda: That's what I was going to say.

So even if, so, even if it would equalise in terms of maybe just some sort of, you know, strength, but men still would have longer, bigger bones and bigger heart, bigger lungs, higher blood volume, there's 6,000. Imagine Raquel, 6,000 biological variables whereby you can see that there's a difference between males and females and testosterone is only one of the 6,000.

Okay. It's a big one, but it's only one. I mean, there's so many things, like I always say. Maybe it sounds bad, but it's like saying, if you take a male athlete and they want to take some hormones and try to become a female athlete, it's like saying I'm going to take a three story building and change myself into a two story building by changing the plumbing.

It doesn't work. And, and so based on the latest research, we have a very strong claim. That's why I want to make sure I get this in that that's the basis of a petition that I worked on with Save Women's Sports, to ask the IOC, to suspend that rule, allowing male athletes into women's sports. They did that quickly in 2015 quickly, nobody knew they were going to do that. And they made a very silly, foolish unwise decision based on very flimsy data and one trans person. So see, there you go. 

It doesn't take that many trans people. It takes one on a committee and now they've changed the rule for everybody. So it does matter even if it's one or two. And the only other thing I will say about that is why would the IOC change the rule so quickly when everything else that women have asked for in sport, it takes them years.

And I will give you an example. Women's first Olympics. Okay. They did not let women do the marathon. Imagine, so many women running the marathon these days, the IOC did not allow women's marathon until 1984. So it took 84 years for the Olympics IOC, to accept marathon for women in the games.

So we had to work at it for 84 years, they had to make sure we were safe. They had to make sure it was right for women. And so 84 years when we want something. But when a man wants something like become a woman, he gets it in. All he takes is one or two meetings and now they change the rule for him.

It's utterly so ridiculous and so insulting. I can hardly believe it. 

Raquel: I imagine that it must be extremely frustrating to be someone in your position who knows sports so well. And who knows sort of how the sports world functions and to watch this happen before your eyes. It sounds as if it's falling into their fears, because, well, let's just ask the question. Why do you think that there is such a keen interest in desegregating sports? 

Linda: I think it's what Jennifer Bilek says, the lady from the US where she talks about the big pharma and big corporations run by billionaires and a few billionaires are trans. And I think it's just an ideological agenda, but here's my question for the IOC specifically.

I think the International Olympic Committee must know that this is a huge risk. Can you imagine Raquel if in next year's Olympics, you see one male body on a female podium, the world is going to explode like the actual, the brand of the IOC surely will be tainted. The mystery for me is why would you make a decision that puts your sport and your name and your brand at so much risk?

 There are 13 companies that are partners that are sponsorship partners at the official partner program means that each of those companies has spent at least a hundred million dollars over the four years in gifts and funding the IOC as partners, each one of them Coca-Cola, all of these different companies, their brands are going to be also questioned if the Olympics loses credibility.

And so for me, it really is a huge question mark, a mystery, why would you not be more careful? Why would they insist on this policy? And even all the things that women like me have been saying and of course, I'm just a small player. You look at Martina Navratilova, you hear Sharron Davies, Fair Play For Women, a lot of people have written letters and petitions asking the IOC please reconsider. And they don't say anything it's just silence. They're just ignoring us. So the question is why? And so for me, I have to believe there's the only thing the IOC does when it's this extreme is because of big money.

There's no other way. I don't see how that's any other way that it can mean anything except somebody there, and maybe the whole corporation is getting a lot of money to do this. It has to be because otherwise, why would you risk your integrity and your credibility? I mean, you can imagine TVs all over the world will turn off if they suddenly see a man on a woman's podium, like people say, well, this is a big joke. What are we talking about here?  

Raquel: I agree with your assessment that during the Olympic Games, if this policy goes ahead, then a lot of people are going to realise this is not fair. This is there's something here that doesn't make sense. I agree with that. But what if it's the opposite? What if instead, a lot of people in corporations and all that kind of stuff, what if they just turn around and say we don't care. We care about being seen as inclusive, just being as diverse. I'm just thinking about it. 

Look at what's happening to JK Rowling. Like here's a woman who is saying, I have been sexually assaulted. I have gone through domestic violence. And instead of people supporting her stance, which is scientific, sex is a part of every single cell that we have in our bodies. And instead of supporting her for saying that we all know, look at what she has received?

So I wonder during the Olympics if it's going to be the same thing. 

Linda: Well, you know what my experience is, is that whenever you just have made an anecdotal, this is not peer review science, but you know, when you look at Twitter for the last two years, I've been obviously involved. Once I knew about this, I started tweeting like crazy because I thought I have to keep tweeting because otherwise, like we need to push back soon. Otherwise it's too late. So, you know, I almost felt this urgency, like we speak, speak, speak, speak, because if you don't speak, my gosh, the whole thing is going to fall apart. And so when I see people put up, for example, you know, on Twitter, you can put up that silly survey where somebody can pick the box or whatever.

And when people say, do you believe that men should be in women's sports or male bodies should be allowed in women's sports, almost consistently it's around 80%, even for Twitter. And Twitter is more extreme in terms of gender ideology. So I would say even if at that rate, 80% of the public disagrees. You can have all these people extremists with blue and green hair, you know, saying bravo, but the quiet, silent majority of people are just going to say you people are just out of control. 

I think that's happened even with JK Rowling has said that she has so much more letters of support than the people who are yelling against her.

So I think that it's at least 80% or more of the population of the earth is not going to agree with it. I have to believe that based on everything I've seen, everything I've experienced, all the things people say to me, I think most of the world Raquel is just not this crazy, most of the world understands what a woman is. Most of the world understands that only women menstruate, most of the world understands only women can have babies. Most of the world understands that women have these unique lives, where we have puberty. Then we have menopause. And our lives are, and our bodies are changing all the time. And even the people like the men who transition even surgically, it's not easy it's hard to maintain that for them. Like it's a medical exercise for life. And a lot of them just can't keep it going.

I just feel like biology even has the last word biology just shrugs and says, well, we've always been here like this and biology doesn't care, you know, really. And I think most people understand that.

I mean, seriously, I think even the poorer you get, like I spent time in Africa and when you see nobody in the middle of a rainforest who just grows up in a village in some rainforest, somewhere in the tropics isn’t going to say, yeah, men and women don't exist. Come on. Everybody knows this. It's a fact. 

And I just feel like the Olympic Games, first, you have the doping and then you have all these corruption scandals. I mean, this is the nail and the coffin for them. If they don't do something quick, I really just have to believe that eventually, maybe at first everybody will applaud their inclusivity, but at the end of the day, it's going to destroy so much of what they've built in terms of a great reputation because we all love the Olympics. We all loved it. So how can they destroy their reputation? I don't know. I hope that they see and when we finished our petition, maybe more voices will speak up. 

Maybe they'll think twice because in the IOC consensus statement that they put out in 2015, allowing this, they left a back door, they said in that, item G in that document, said this is a living document, subject to change if further evidence suggests otherwise, something like that. So they have even left themselves a clause that gives themselves a way out to say, listen, we've come across this new study from Sweden, let's pause and have a longer conversation about this.

Raquel: Or it buys them time to put a clause, to say open conversation. And I maintain the policy for 10 years, 20 years. As long as I just say, I am open to new evidence, but then I never act on the new evidence. 

Linda: That's the thing. So what our Save Women's Sports petition is really asking them to act on that statement that they don't have enough evidence and it would be better for them, even if they would just pause and not insult women in this way. And maybe trans women have to wait their turn just like women had to. 

We had to wait our turn for, for decades for certain things. Why can't they wait for their turn to figure how we include their events, I want them to have a, an opportunity. There's no question.

It's just like what JK Rowling said. She even said it outright. I want them to be safe. Just like that. And Linda Blade, me, I want them to be able to participate. Yes. But not at the expense of women and girls, same exact thing. But you know what, no matter what JK Rowling said about being nice, she never said anything, anything threatening to them.

She said she wants them to be safe, but not at the expense of women and girls and that's her sin. And this is again, the IOC has to be brave and stand up, but they they're showing themselves to be absolute cowards. 

Raquel: You were talking about how most, the people in the population agree with women's rights I was just going to point out that material reality imposes itself, whether or not we do anything about it. You know, it's like science, biology and material reality, that happens regardless for politics. And the best example of this is the coronavirus. 

If you think about it, like the virus discriminates based on sex, not only in social ways, in the sense of like who are the people who are the working in the shops, who are the people who are the nurses having to take people who are the people in this position, low paid, but that are keeping the whole world running, but also in the sense that biologically the coronavirus discriminates based on sex. And it affects men in a way that is disproportionate to the way that it affects women. 

So it's like, there's all these things like something that we could never have envisioned six months ago. And it just hits you in the back of the head saying like, no biology is here and it is real.

And science is real and it doesn't matter how many slogans you create at the end of the day science and biology imposes itself. 

Linda: Exactly. And so that gives me a lot of hope because like I say, biology has been around billions of years. I mean, what, what makes us think we're so special we can suddenly just because we imagine we can change it, it doesn't work like that. Reality does not bend to our whims and our dreams. Like we still have to contend as human beings where biological species living on a biological planet and you cannot distort those basic biological principles for very long before biology will just crush you.

You can say trans women are women and biology, shrugs its shoulders says, well, if that's what you think, but you're wrong. I mean, it'll just continue on females will just be the ones continuing having babies. I mean, you can try to do the womb transplant, but then the men's hips, their bones aren't made to split apart like ours are to give birth. So what I guess, caesarean section.

Raquel: A lot of this energy should be put into trying to make sure that men can get birth through the urethra let's see what happens there. Let's see how that works. 

I have another question though, there are people let's try to sort of address this point because it's a criticism levelled at women who defend sex-based rights, there are a lot of people who say that by advocating for sex segregation in sports, we're just being like mean and unfair.

So what would you say to people who argue that trans people are only pursuing their human rights to sports participation? 

Linda: Well, that's really another argument that did win at the IOC level that somehow it's a human rights issue. but that my question is when they were making that decision inside the room who was advocating for women's human rights, because clearly this is a clash on the human rights level.

Like why would a trans woman, why would a male bodies human rights, even if they have a brain that's desperately needs to identify as a woman, why would that human right transcend or be any more important than the human rights of 50% of the world's population. And so I agree that it, they might think we're being mean, but let let's play this out a little longer because we talked about biology.

Okay. So what if the IOC just stays with the policy. Let's say all of Canadian sport now it becomes a law and now we have to accept all this. Okay, maybe one or two trans women first, the first one's in a women's race, just like those boys in Connecticut, they become the big deal. They become, they get all the attention, they win all the races and guess what? Then more boys will join. More men will join and pretty soon the entire race, the entire final will be male bodies and those same trans women that wanted all the attention and wanted to be special and seen as distinct. They're just going to be surrounded by males again. And they won't be happy because now they're not winning. They get no attention. All of the men in the race might have, let's say a dress on, or I don't care, but like whatever you wear or they all male wearing makeup, but then the best males come from the men's side. If they all are able to self-ID and it's a quick, easy Olympic medal and you can't tell me that's not going to happen.

Some country that's never won an Olympic medal may find the odd random man who wants to, who can self-ID and say, okay, go quickly win the medal. Because while there's still few men in the women's race, you can win a quick medal, but over two or three or four Olympics, it's going to be pure men who identify as women. And there will be zero women. So that doesn't allow trans people to identify into a women's arena because now they're just surrounded by more men. So they're not going to get what they want. 

So here's this the interesting thing. And I'm seeing this on Twitter. It's, it's this hallucination that you can identify into a group while wanting that group to disappear. They don't care. They say we're trying to erase their existence. No, they're erasing our existence. 

So when they succeed in doing that, doesn't matter that they call themselves a woman anymore. Because there won't be women around them anymore. Like even if you say like a bathroom, public bathroom, you make that all genders. Guess how many women are going to end up going in that bathroom? It's just all men again. 

So it might work for generation one and then it doesn't work anymore because it's all men around them again, you've destroyed all of women's sport and then they don't get what they want anyway, because now they aren't going to be special or recognised as anything special.

Raquel: What would be a sensible alternative in your view? What would be a sensible policy suggestion? that may allow both females and the right to sports participation because as you and I were mentioning it’s great. There's so many benefits participating in sports. So what could be some sort of, I don't want to say compromise -

Linda:  Very easy in my opinion.

So when you look at the Paralympics, so let's take amputation, right? When people compete, there's different categories, there might be like seven or eight levels of amputation that you can compete there. So there's different levels that have different labels based on what kind of amputation you've had that you can compete.

So when I go back to the gender side or the sex, let's do this really quickly. So people say, well, we should just have a middle category. So we have males with their testosterone levels, females with testosterone so in the middle you can have the women who took high testosterone, the men who took low testosterone. So those will be in the middle, but what I'm going to say next, the men who's reduced their testosterone, and this is what it showed in that study from Sweden, the men who reduce their testosterone are still better than women who increase their testosterone. 

You can do one of two things. You can say, either the women's category is restricted and everybody else is open category. So women who take testosterone to become trans men, they're in the open, or you do it like this, you have four categories, you have male just restricted, like male only, female only, trans women would be just below the male. Trans men would just be above the female in terms of testosterone allowable levels. 

And now you have four levels based on gender. So I guess, and I don't like to use the word cis, it's insulting, but I'll use it this way. cis women at the lower rung, as far as testosterone and, and they're female then trans men is the next category then trans women and then cis male.

And you could do it like that. And it would be absolutely fair. 

Raquel: Do you have hope for the future in regards to this issue? Do you see the tide turning? What gives you hope? 

Linda: Well, I have much hope because most people I talk to, as we've said all along, most people I talk to agree with my position, agree with biology, agree that it makes a difference. Agree that it's not fair. So I have great hope and I think it'll be rough for a little while because as, as you see the pushback on JK Rowling and you know that the conflict will be there for the next while, and maybe in the meantime, people like me will be, I'm sure they could be sanctions or something or whatever by the authorities.

I have great hope because as I said, biology shrugs at our ideas. I mean, at some point it's going to be obvious to everybody, even the ones who wanted to do this, it's going to be obvious to them that this wasn't the solution for them. And that sport needs to have distinct biological categories. 

We compete on the basis of biology and this is an ideology. So allowing gender ideology to actually dictate categories is like saying let's pick an athlete based on their religion. Let's pick an athlete based on their politics. 

The beauty of sport is you put all of your politics aside, you can have all people in the same race, like all girls or women in a race and they all might have a different idea about abortion or a different idea about which God they worship, or they have so many different ideas in their heads, but it doesn't matter. They're all just in a race because it's a biologically based race. So why should we be using an ideology to pick a category? It doesn't make sense. Then we might as well say Muslim girls over here, Christian girls over there. I mean, it's ridiculous. 

Raquel: I like how you mentioned, you can have ideas about religion in your head, but the beauty of sports is that you put all of those differences aside. 

Linda: That's the whole basis of the Olympic movement. That's why I can't believe they're allowing this to change. because they're actually literally saying now your ideology is a thing that matters. Not your biology. 

Raquel: What a sentence. I have one final question for you. So we both love sports. You love sports. I love playing sports as well but it looks like the environment in sports is actually very difficult at the moment. You are a coach. What would you say to a young girl interested in sports? Like a teenager. What would you say to a woman who was around the same age that you started? And she thinks how unfair this all is? What would you say to her? 

Linda: I think I would say to her, you should train anyway, because within your lifetime, the rule will be fair again. I think I need to be fair and say, I think I need to be honest, I should say, and, and tell the girl, you know, in the next five or ten years, there's going to be a struggle about who belongs in your category, but you're going to have to let people like me fight for you. 

And here's a big, important thing too. I see a lot of people asking for the women to boycott, blah, blah, blah. And maybe that becomes necessary. At the end of the day, girls will be forced out if boys are allowed in their sports anyway. But to expect the female athletes to speak out and to challenge the rules is asking too much because every single athlete, the top female athletes in the world, they need to shut up otherwise they lose their sponsorship. They're very fragile. Most athletes are quite poor, you only hear about the rich ones, but that most athletes are living almost at the poverty level. And they're just hoping for their big chance. So you're saying whatever sponsorship money, or maybe being selected to a team, like if you're politically incorrect, if you say anything, you're going to be having opportunities taken away and money taken away. And chances of making a big team taken away and even like photo opportunities and things like that. 

Most athletes are competing really close to the energy line. As I say, high performance sport is about energy management. So they're spending all their energy training and thinking about training and the minute they have to take on a political cause they actually will perform worse.

So my empathy is towards the girls and women in sport that we don't make them fight the fight. The rest of us have to fight for them because in the middle of their struggle, they don't have the energy or the resources to do this. And they will be crushed if they say anything. 

And so I have many women telling me privately, thank you for fighting because I just can't say anything. I can't, I would lose my position. I would lose everything. 

Here's another analogy, for women to boycott in sport is like saying this crazy man is trying to break into your house so you better sit out on the lawn to protest that, you better go out of your house, let him in and sit out there on the grass and let him go into your house, and that's your protest.

It doesn't change anything; it gives them what they want. So I think that's the other reason why I feel so adamant about fighting hard because they can't, the women athletes cannot do it. They can't.  

Raquel: So your advice to that little girl is like the next couple of years are going to be very tough but you have to hang in there.

Linda: You have to have faith, hang in there, keep training because someday the rule will change back and then it'll be fair again. And the part that will be hard is probably the women who are in university right now, because in the next 10 years, that's the prime of their competition life and it may just be a lot of men there if the policy goes forward and then they'll never have their chance. 

But for the little ones, the ones who are, let's say 12, 13, 14, those girls will probably be able to train hard, even though they'll have a lot of struggles, but maybe by the time they're grown women, the rule will have changed back again.

And you know what? We may actually have to quit the Olympics and have our own Olympics. Women did have our own Olympics from 1922 to 1934, we had our own Olympics. So we were talked into joining the male Olympic because the Olympic committee it drove them crazy that women were having their own Olympics. They wanted the women. 

Then finally that convinced them to take the women and Alice Milliat from France was the one that organised that. And she had to make the deal with the Olympic Committee to respect women in sport. 

This is a deception. This is basically a betrayal of the agreement made between the Women's Federation at the time in the 1920s and the IOC.

So if the IOC is going to violate the spirit of the agreement with the women's groups, maybe we're going to force ourselves. I don't know how we do it because it's huge money, but we might have to be forced to just have a women's only Olympics again and just forget it because if they're not going to treat women fairly, what are we going to do?

Raquel: Well, Linda, that's very powerful and that's very beautiful. Thank you for saying that. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with our audience?

Linda: I would just like to say thank you Raquel for this interview, please go again, I'll say it a third time to savewomenssports.com.

There's a petition to the IOC. Please sign it. It's just a signature. We need signatures. And we probably present that at the end of September, early October to the IOC to try to convince them right.

 But in the meantime, please follow women's sports, give female athletes your encouragement, even ask the newspapers to put more women's results in the newspapers because you notice, I think it's no mystery and it's no secret that in the newspapers, I know there's always fewer newspapers because of the online content, but the even online magazines, all you see is men's results. And that's a big thing. Like women's results should be there. And it's interesting, even lately I did a story for a Christian magazine all about this very topic Olympics and everything, and women's sports.

And instead of putting in their sports section, they put it in the international section because they don't want to mess up the men's sports section with this story, but we need to have these stories in the sports sections. Because men understand our situation, men who are sports fans understand that this isn't fair, but they're probably not even reading about it because it's not in the sports section.

So ask your magazines, whether it's online or ask your newspapers to please put stories about women in the sports section, but you know what? I I've had this conversation for a long time with newspapers. They say, well, women don't read the sports section. I said, yeah, because you don't put any information on women in there.

And one sports editor literally told me - it's not my job to champion women's sports - I said, listen, you're doing it for men all the time. So it's your job to champion men's sports? Like what does that even mean? But anyway, that's a different story. 

Raquel: If it was a female editor saying, well, actually I don't have to show men's sports that would be outrageous. 

Linda: Anyway, that's a whole other issue but I think women, I get it, like most women they'd rather read about other things, but I mean maybe as women, maybe people like me need to do more things that make sports interesting to read for women, because I think men like statistics and those kinds of like numbers stories a lot. I mean that they follow all of that stuff, but I also think that women also like numbers, but they have another dimension. They like to have the personal story. They like to have what's going on in this struggle. Maybe we are not writing the stories for women sports the way we should, so that women like to read about what's happening for female athletes, and maybe the something good that can come from this is that we find a better way to connect women to the female athlete’s stories. 

Raquel: That would be wonderful. Sports is wonderful. Well, thank you so much for everything that you do for women's sports and women's rights. And I imagine it must be very difficult. It sounds like it's a very frustrating experience, but it just sounds so brave and bold and principled to say, ‘this is my hill and I will die on it’ I think that that's just wonderful. So thank you. 

Linda: Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. 

  Goodbye. Thank you. Bye-bye.