U.K. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer told sports leagues in England that men should not be allowed to compete in women’s divisions.
“By protecting the female category, they can keep women’s competitive sport safe and fair and keep the dream alive for the young girls who dream of one day being elite sportswomen,” the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport Lucy Frazer told the Daily Mail. “We must get back to giving women a level playing field to compete. We need to give women a sporting chance.”
Frazer organized a meeting with sports representatives to urge them to prevent men from competing in the women’s division, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday. Frazer encouraged the England and Wales Cricket Board and the Football Association to change its current policies that allow men to compete in the women’s division under certain conditions.
“In competitive sport, biology matters. And where male strength, size and body shape gives athletes an indisputable edge, this should not be ignored,’ Frazer wrote in the Daily Mail. Other sports bodies at the meeting included the Rugby Football Union, British Cycling, and Swim England.
The meeting comes less than a week after the Cass Report, an independent review on gender-affirming care for minors and young adults commissioned by the NHS England. The report found “very limited evidence on the longer-term outcomes” associated with medicalized transition.
“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint,” Dr. Hilary Cass, who led the review, wrote in the introduction. “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
In response to the report, the NHS sent a letter to the seven trusts that host adult gender clinics in the U.K. informing them that they’re being investigated. The Cass Report states that six of the seven NHS adult clinics for gender-related care in England declined to participate in a study by the University of York.
“It is clear today that several sports authorities are not going far or fast enough. Among the many lessons of the Cass Review, it has shown us that inaction and a failure to confront the issues at stake cannot be an option,” Frazer wrote.