Competing in women's sport as a trans woman is cheating
Piers Morgan said:
“It is cheating. It is knowingly using a superior biology from birth to beat women who are born with female bodies. It is cheating.”
Comparing a biological advantage to doping sounds logical: both involve a physical edge that other competitors cannot match, and the word 'knowingly' implies deliberate rule-breaking, which is what cheating means to most people.
Cheating means breaking the rules, and a trans woman competing within the eligibility criteria set by her sport's governing body is not breaking any rule. The actual disagreement here is about whether those rules are correctly drawn, and that is a legitimate policy question, one that governing bodies, scientists, and athletes' groups are actively working through. But policy disagreement is not the same as moral accusation, and calling an individual athlete a cheat for competing under the rules as they currently stand is something quite different: it is a personal charge of dishonesty aimed at someone who had no hand in writing the rules and no power to change them. The practical consequence of that label is that real people, who have done nothing wrong under any standard that currently governs their sport, face harassment, abuse, and the end of athletic careers they have spent their lives building.
What I said at the time:
“Think that's very”
Trans athletes who are publicly labelled cheats for participating in sport under the rules as they exist, exposing them to harassment and reputational harm.