Commentary
As a response to our national embarrassment around the doping scandals of the 1980s, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) was established to ensure that cheating in sport would never recur. For two decades, CCES concentrated on its primary function: keeping banned substances out of sport. Then its leadership went woke, and CCES became a full-time advocacy group for male athletes who identify as women, relentlessly promoting their right to compete against women.
In 2016, CCES released a policy guideline paper for athletic organizations on trans inclusion in sport, written by an “expert working group” that included trans activists, but no biologist or female athletes. Not only did CCES recommend self-ID as the sole criterion for divisional eligibility—which wouldn’t impact men’s sport but would be devastating to women’s—the report recommended that athletes be permitted to shift gender self-identification from season to season, or from one sport to another. In spite of the guidelines’ rhetorical infelicities and lack of academic rigour, most Canadian sporting associations adopted the guidelines without demur….