"In years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn..."

"There has been a watershed moment in the trans debate, sparked by the landmark decision about female athletes.
    "Sport, so focused on winning and losing, on rules and competition, can bring a reductive clarity to the complexities of life. Perhaps that is why the judgement this week of the World Athletics Council was so momentous. Put simply, council president Sebastian Coe had to choose between [allegedly] conflicting 'rights' and he decided that the right of those born women to compete fairly trumps the desire to be included in elite sport of those who have gone through male puberty but run or jump as women. 'We felt,' he said, 'that having transgender athletes competing at elite level would actually compromise the integrity of female competition.'
    "[S]port, with ... reductive clarity, is not so concerned with sensitivities. It is concerned with the irrefutable reality of the stopwatch and winner’s podium. And they starkly reveal the distortions that testosterone and its consequences for muscle, stature, strength and speed wreak on the track and field....
    "[T]he transgender rights fissure that opened up in sport echoes that in politics and society more widely. There, faced with increasing public concern, other leaders are increasingly being forced to choose as well. Equivocation is no longer enough. It was oddly fitting, for example, that Coe’s decision in athletics came on the very same day that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon left office – a titanic, once unassailable figure finally, if not exclusively, propelled into the political void by her support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.... That decision ... came hard on the heels of the devastating Cass Review which led to the closure of [London's] controversial Tavistock clinic ... [a]nd the decision at the end of last year by [UK] charities regulator to launch a statutory inquiry into Mermaids, the transgender campaign group....
    "[I]n years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn....[or, perhaps, clarified]... [I]t apparently turns out that the view that society cannot be ruled by social media’s cancel culture mob is widely held."

~ Harry de Quetteville, from his op-ed 'The Week the Tide Turned in the Gender War'