Hung up on gender

re: "New Zealand weightlifter selected as first transgender Olympian" (BP, June 21, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

It could not be unexpected to see an outburst of righteous shock and horror that New Zealand's Olympic's selectors have chosen a transgender athlete to compete in the women's weight lifting events at the games.

But how justified on either rational or moral grounds can such genuine outrage be? The lesson to be learned, and the Olympics and such like suitably revised to account for, is perhaps not that old-fashioned attitudes that segregate women into a carefully cocooned versions of the world in which men are men, and in which white men especially are white men, should be retained for no sensible or ethically defensible reason, but rather that we should get over being hung up on people's sex, whether at birth or later.

If ability to lift weight, or ability to do physics, or ability to run fast, or ability to paint great art, or ability to box, or ability to manage a business is what matters, shouldn't we stop putting males and females into separate categories? What next: the fastest white male runner in a category that keeps different colours neatly segregated along with sex differences lest someone get upset when they lose to a person of the wrong skin tone or sex organs?

 Felix Qui
 

_______________________________

The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

 
The text as edited was published in PostBag on June 22, 2021, under the title "Hung up on gender" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2136791/embassy-clarity