Categorising someone as male by how they look is just identifying biology
Piers Morgan said:
“No, male biology. We're categorising what is male body or doesn't look feminine enough. No, no, no. It's all about femininity. It's about identifying male biology when we see it with our own eyes.”
The claim that visual assessment is simply 'reading biology' sounds like common sense to viewers who believe sex characteristics are always visibly obvious, and it positions the speaker as a plain-speaking realist against what they frame as ideological obfuscation.
What this describes is not biology; it is aesthetics. Chromosomes, hormones, and physiology are not visible to the naked eye, and the history of appearance-based sex verification in sport is not a proud one: it produced decades of humiliation, wrongful exclusion, and harassment, targeted most often at cisgender women from certain ethnic backgrounds whose bodies did not conform to a narrow European standard of femininity. Some women have naturally elevated testosterone, some are intersex, some simply have broad shoulders or a deep voice, and none of that tells you anything definitive about their chromosomal or hormonal profile. Reducing 'male biology' to 'doesn't look feminine enough' is not plain-speaking realism; it is exactly the kind of appearance policing that has already caused enormous harm, and the people who pay for it when it goes wrong are not the ones who looked obviously female all along.
Cisgender women who do not conform to conventional femininity norms, intersex women, and trans women, all of whom face scrutiny, harassment and exclusion on the basis of how they look rather than verified biology.