Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races last week. Yes, of course they are men. There were some anguished complaints from the various girls these two speedy lads defeated, but these were of course brushed aside in a country where women’s sporting events may one day soon consist entirely of men.

Already a Democratic party representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is insisting that the US powerlifting tournaments allow transgender women to compete, so that people who look very much like Geoff Capes, and have the same chromosomes as Geoff Capes, and the same bone structure and musculature, can compete against women. Meanwhile, the fastest female college sprinter in the US is CeCe Telfer, who, once again, is not what you or I or science would call a lady, and one of the world champions in women’s cycling is a chap called Rachel McKinnon, whom I have mentioned here before.

Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Martina Navratilova described it as ‘insane’ and ‘cheating’ that men who have transitioned should be allowed to compete against women, adding that ‘hundreds’ of trans athletes have ‘achieved honors as women which were beyond their capabilities as men’. The former tennis star added that few people were prepared to speak up about this issue because of the furore that would immediately descend upon them from the perpetually enraged trans lobby. Indeed, within a few hours of her article being published she was booted off the advisory board of a gay advocacy group and was being denounced left, right and center in the kind of furiously screeched terms that have become the hallmark of these perhaps not wholly balanced campaigners. Celebrating God-Given ... Dr. G.C. Dilsaver Best Price: $23.31 Buy New $23.37 (as of 09:45 EST - Details)

Those who support the rights of transgender women to compete in women’s sports often cite the only piece of research done on the issue which ‘proves’ that it is a myth that transgender women have an advantage over normal women. This study was published in 2015 and is cited every time the issue arises — but I have one or two problems with it, to tell you the truth. First, it concerned a total of just eight athletes, which is a smallish sample (no control group, either). Second, it was not carried out by a qualified geneticist or social scientist, but by a ‘medical physicist’ by the name of Joanna Harper. And third, Joanna Harper, once an athlete herself, was, um, how can I put this, not always called Joanna. She was raised as a boy and transitioned to being a fairly fast lady in her thirties. So she has skin in the game and we might surmise that she, or he, set out to prove a thesis, rather than, in good Popperian practice, trying to disprove it.

But none of these caveats cuts the remotest ice with the lobby groups or indeed the liberal media, who quote from her survey as if it were on a par with the work of Crick and Watson. And meanwhile, blokes keep winning everything. Sometimes they are blokes who have had some becoming breasts appended to them and put on a bit of lippy, sometimes they are blokes who seemingly make no effort at all to disguise the fact that they are blokes.

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