Olympic heptathlete and kinesiologist Linda Blade warns that radical gender activism is eroding women’s sports, citing 13 studies proving male-born athletes retain biological advantages even after testosterone suppression. She criticizes the IOC’s 2015 policy and CCES’s shift toward fluid gender classifications, comparing it to doping scandals like Ben Johnson’s. Blade predicts women’s sports could collapse within a decade as biological women self-exclude, advocating for female-only and open categories instead. Her book Unsporting challenges bureaucratic misinterpretations of laws like Bill C-16, framing inclusivity as a threat to fairness and safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh, hey guys, it's Sheila Gunread and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, Aptile, called The Gun Show.
However, you know what?
This is the internet, so you can watch or listen whenever you feel like.
That's the beauty of not being tethered to terrestrial TV or radio.
You can just basically watch or listen whenever you want at your own convenience.
Now, tonight my guest is someone whom I have been. dying to talk to because I have a daughter in contact sports.
It's Linda Blade.
She co-authored the new book, Unsporting, How Trans Activism and Science Denial Are Destroying Sport.
She co-authored this book with everybody's favorite Jewish grandma, Barbara Kay.
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Are re-watching the slow demise of women's sports?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
At this summer's Olympics, a genetic male will likely take home a gold in women's weightlifting.
It's not bigoted or intolerant to simply state the biological reality that human bodies, which have experienced male testosterone-inspired puberty, carry more muscle mass, have greater bone density, they have larger hearts inside their chests, and that leads to stronger cardiovascular systems.
It's the reason female-born athletes who take testosterone were once considered guilty of unfair doping because it's cheating.
Testosterone is a performance-enhancing substance.
This is simple science.
And to deny it by allowing transgender, female-identifying competitors to compete with or against biological women is to rob these female athletes of their work, their accomplishments, and future opportunities that come from their success.
But it's happening right now in mixed martial arts, in cycling, weightlifting, even contact sports.
Male-born competitors are stealing accolades and endangering the women they are competing against.
But if you say these things, you risk being canceled, fired, or losing funding for your sport.
You're damned if you do speak up and, well, damned if you don't.
That's why my guest tonight is so, so very brave.
As a career athlete and coach, Olympian and kinesiologist Linda Blade saw exactly what was happening to women's sports and she saw what was coming on the horizon and she had to speak up regardless of the consequences to her before it was too late.
So she co-authored the new book, Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial Are Destroying Sport with columnist Barbara Kaye.
Linda joins me in an interview we recorded yesterday morning to discuss the future of women's sport, if any, and to offer a way forward in which all athletes are able to compete on a level playing field.
So joining me now from BC, Linda's taking the time to, while she's on vacation to talk with me, is Linda Blade.
And Linda, I wanted to have you on the show for, well, for me, for personal reasons, but I think what are personal reasons for me are the same reasons that a lot of other mothers really appreciate your brand new book that you co-authored with Barbara Kay.
It's called Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial Are Destroying Sport.
And I'm proud to say that we at Rebel News are the publishers of your book.
Now, Linda, for people who don't know you, I know who you are.
And you've sort of been on my radar since I think about 2009.
Yeah.
But for people who don't know who you are, tell us a little bit about your background.
Yes, I was on Team Canada as a track and field athlete in the event called Hipathlon, which is combined events, just like men's decathlon.
I retired in sort of late 80s, early 90s.
Then I went to university, got my PhD in sport sciences, kinesiology, then became a coach.
And I've coached athletes in about 17 different sports across the board on their fundamental, you know, movement skills and helping them to become better athletes.
I've even coached some Olympic gold medalists, Jamie Saleh, David Pellchier, in the figure skating.
And so by 2014, I became the elected president of Athletics Alberta, which is the Alberta Track and Field Association.
And so since that time, I've been entering this whole bewildering world of policy, sport policy at the national level.
And that's, you know, we can talk about that.
Sure.
I guess that moves us into why did you write this book?
Like, why was this necessary?
I'm very glad you did.
But what prompted you to write this book?
And I guess, you know, even just voicing an opinion on these subjects can end up with you being canceled.
Your career is basically over for a lot of people who go against the narrative, but you took a step beyond just saying, hey, I've got some issues with this, but you wrote a book.
You put your ideas to paper.
Well, it's precisely because of the canceling that I wrote this book.
This is the book again.
I'll show it again.
You can get it on onsporting.com.
I wrote this book precisely because when I raised the issue that I was concerned about male bodies entering women's sports for safety reasons, obviously, in contact sports and for fairness reasons, I was basically shunned.
And, you know, it's that strange feeling around the table that you're not supposed to be saying something.
And when somebody, you know, when I get that feeling, I realize something's terribly wrong, especially when it's such an obvious issue.
And I just committed to speaking out as much as I could before it was too late.
Because really, if the rules of sport change to the point where somebody could be even in prison by saying the wrong thing about males and sport, I need to say this quickly before things get that bad.
Now, what were some of the responses when you first started raising concerns about, as you say, male bodies in women's sports?
Because you don't come at this at all from really an activist viewpoint whatsoever.
You come at this from an issue of fairness and science based on your own science background.
Your background is in how the human body works.
And so you have a very unique perspective on this, but yet you were treated as something less than an expert when you raised these, I guess, dissenting opinions.
Yes.
Well, because I am president of an association, I realized that it's our governing, my governance colleagues who are in governance, sport governance, that if we don't set the right policy, it's going to not just ruin sport for women and girls.
It's going to ruin sport for everybody.
Because imagine if there's a parent or volunteer, an official.
Most of our people at ground level, Sheila, are just volunteers.
And if we don't protect them and give them the right to distinguish what the rules are, distinguish between male and female on the field or on the track, we put them at risk and then they feel uncomfortable.
And our volunteer class could just walk away.
And we would actually have no capacity to conduct sport at ground level, which is going to hurt the boys and the girls.
And so I just felt like this was actually an existential threat to sport.
And if I get canceled, you know, Sheila, I've had my turn.
So I immediately saw that I'm of the age, you know, I'm almost 60 years of age.
I've actually had my turn.
I've been an athlete.
I've been on national teams.
I've been a coach, enjoyed coaching.
I've been in governance.
You know what?
If they cancel me now, I guess that's the price.
It's not a big price for me to pay, at least in terms of my career.
And I just felt like I was in a really, pretty good position to make this argument without a huge deal of threat to my, you know, my life and my career.
And I guess so, if not me, who?
I guess that's that's really the question I was asking myself.
And so around those policymaking tables, what was some of the pushback that you were hearing?
Yeah, first of all, the activist pushback is these aren't men.
They're really females inside a male body.
That's just utterly ridiculous.
You know, I mean, it may be true that somebody really honestly, fervently believes that they have grown up with a male body with all the advantages and really secretly inside they are female.
If they believe that, that's fine.
But we compete with our bodies.
We don't compete with our identities.
So it's really not even my business, Sheila.
Like it's not our business what somebody believes about themselves.
We don't classify sport on the basis of belief.
Like otherwise we would say, okay, if you're this religion, you compete in that category, another religion, or if you actually have, you know, a political party, you go over there and this other political party, you race over here.
We do not compete on the basis of our ideologies.
I mean, the beauty of sport is that, you know, we can put that baggage aside.
But sort of, so that's like the one thing that I was getting at, that it's not, even if you're really a female inside, I mean, it's not my business.
You have a male body.
Second thing is the people around the table were frightened.
I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were ignoring me and shunning me because they didn't want me to go there.
Don't go there.
It might hurt our funding.
It might cause, you know, our sport to be, you know, somehow demeaned or maligned by activists.
Maybe we might not be in line with what the government wants us to think.
So there was a lot of fear, I think, around the table.
Most of my colleagues were males, like at the top of the sport decision-making process.
And you know, I have noticed, I can't help but notice that a lot of times, because they're men, they just don't get the threat that it feels to be a woman and feel this like what happens if a man comes into our safe space in our single sex space.
And I mean, I'm not, you know, I've never been an activist.
I've just been a coach.
I just realized that there was something terribly wrong.
And they were afraid.
When people are afraid, there's something going on.
Yeah, I suppose they were afraid of being canceled.
And you really weren't.
No, I didn't care about that, but maybe I should.
But I mean, it's so much bigger than that, you know, and I think they were afraid that they wouldn't get funding for the sport.
If we don't get funding for our sports in Canada, we are really not, it's also an existential threat.
So I'm saying an existential threat from the purpose, from the point of policy and ground level.
And they're thinking as existential threat from the top, from the minister, from, you know, where they get their funding, the quiet cancellation that happens when you just don't get the grant.
Gender Balance Debate00:15:12
Right.
And I don't, I can't blame them actually for feeling like that, but I feel like you have to balance those threats and protect sport as best we can.
Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about the science of it all, because a lot of the pushback that we hear from the activists on the other side, because truly that's what it is, activism on the other side, whereas, you know, you take a trying to protect.
Yeah, you take a fairness viewpoint of it.
But on the other side, they do try to argue the science and they say, well, for example, with the case of like Fallon Fox, they will argue that even though Fox has gone through male puberty, carries male muscle mass, has male bone density, the fact that this person is now taking estrogen to suppress their male hormone hormones, that that somehow equals the playing field.
How do we argue against that?
Well, that goes straight to the into the responsibility of the International Olympic Committee, because in 2015, the International Olympic Committee bought the lie, in fact, perpetrated the lie, that if a male, a grown adult male athlete takes, you know, reduces their testosterone level, that that somehow brings the level, the playing field level to the female level, which is just absolutely not true.
The IOC themselves have for years expected solid scientific evidence for any new policy they make.
But on this case, immediately they just went with the culture and with the activists and without studying anything, just said, yeah, you take hormones, yeah, you're going to be the same as women.
But in fact, there have been 13 scientific studies that measure hormone, like the performance levels and muscle strength in males before they transition and then after they take the hormone like reduction hormone replacement therapy.
And in every single one of those cases, the advantage that they have, the male advantage and strength and many other variables has not diminished, has not diminished appreciably.
There is no evidence that it brings the male body into even level playing field with the female.
Listen, Sheila, female bodies are not just male minus the hormones.
I mean, you cannot, you cannot reduce, even if you take, like change the substances in your blood, it's not going to make your heart smaller.
It's not going to make your lungs smaller.
It's not going to diminish the size of your limbs, like the limb length and your height.
You're not suddenly going to be shorter.
I mean, you're not going to change the entire structure to look like a female.
It just doesn't happen.
Logically, this could not be true.
And so, that was like the first lie.
The first lies at hormones level of the playing field.
The second lie, Sheila, was that the IOC literally said the medical commission said, Well, there's not going to really be that many transitioning.
Just let a few into women's sports.
You know, it's not going to make a big difference.
And we are seeing now that that's absolutely not true because society is championing this.
Some for some reason, this movement has become popular.
A lot of males are self-identifying into women's sports.
And if you just take just even the two high school runners from Connecticut, between the two of them, for three years competing in the female high school division, they took 15 state records and they caused about 85 girls to miss opportunities, just two of them.
And if you have like Laurel Hubbard, for example, and now in the Olympics and women's weightlifting, who's the New Zealand male who transitioned at 35 and now in the Olympics, just think about it.
No matter what medal he gets, he, she, whatever medal he gets, then the person, everybody below him drops a notch.
So it does affect every single person in that field.
And it means that some woman in the world didn't get to compete because it's not an endless, you know, unlimited number in the Olympic category.
You get invited to the Olympic Games.
It means some woman in the world somewhere didn't get to compete because Laurel Hubbard is sitting there in the group.
So it does affect us every single time.
Now, I guess too, on the flip side of that, many of these professional sports bodies and amateur sports bodies used to recognize testosterone as a performance-enhancing drug.
And yet now we're allowing people who've experienced 35 years of testosterone coursing through their bodies.
And we think that's completely fair now.
It's preposterous and it's actually outrageous.
And the one governing body in Canada, the Canadian Center for Ethics and Sports, CCES, their only mandate, Sheila, the only mandate after the Ben Johnson affair and the cheating in the 80s, their only mandate was to make sure that Canadians don't dope.
And now they're promoting this.
They are the prime association group in Canada promoting male bodies self-identifying into women's sports, male bodies that have had full, like 20 plus years of, if you think there are females in a male body, Then they have had 20 years of testosterone doping and advantages built up that are now suddenly supposed to be like we're just supposed to say welcome, welcome to the group, and they've been cheating.
I guess if you're going to say that yeah, doping is cheating, then they've actually had 20 years of cheating that they're that we're just supposed to pretend like that, somehow even one year.
In fact, the CCS position is they shouldn't be uh, forced to take hormones or surgery or anything at all.
In fact, CCE says they can be a male For one season in one sport, and female for another season in another sport, and then they can change their mind because you know, gender is fluid.
So they can go back and forth between like they could be a male hockey player one season, and then they could be like a female sprinter the next season.
And like, where does this end?
This is ridiculous.
How do we even police sport?
No, that's the thing.
Like these bodies, their one job is to make the playing field fair.
And this is anything but fair for female sports.
I want to ask you, where are the feminists in all of this?
Because I noticed that you are, whether it's purposefully or otherwise, using a little bit of modern feminist language when you say women's only spaces.
And you know what?
This is where I agree with the more radical of the modern feminists.
I do believe there should be women's only spaces.
And they are largely silent on this or pushing this.
And I don't understand.
I don't understand how they reconcile that in their minds.
Well, there's two kinds of feminists that you're going to run into on this issue.
There's the intersectional feminists who believe in, you know, like third or fourth wave feminism, where they want to believe that men and women are equal.
And so sports maybe is a platform to show that we can just kind of all be equal and share the same space.
And then there's the more radical feminists, which means it's not extreme feminist.
By that, the radical feminist means the root of feminism, radical being the root.
And those more like wave two, like the World War II, after World War II, we believed in equal pay for equal work, that women should be allowed in the workspace and in public spaces, in government.
So I guess, you know, I had to study all that just because, I mean, I was a coach and I didn't even, I didn't even understand what was going on.
I'm just coaching all my life and in the trenches with my head down.
And then when this hit me, I thought, well, okay, why aren't some women supporting me and why are others supporting me?
And so it just, I think it turns out that there's the more modern feminists want to believe this.
It's a fairy tale, actually, that there's no difference between male bodies and female bodies.
And then the more traditional feminists, which are the radical feminists, believe that, you know, we have to have distinct recognition, have sex, single sex spaces, whether it's in prisons, in women's shelters.
Like you can't put a male rapist into a women's prison.
I'm sorry.
He's going to end up raping people.
That's the way he does it, right?
And so yet our government, through Bill C-16, is justifying even that.
So I'm just saying that there's just, there's a purpose for having single space, sex spaces for females to be safe, for life to be fair, and for us to have parity in society and have equal standing and have security to thrive as women and with all the skills that we have.
We bring skill sets, men bring skill sets.
I mean, I love to death my father, my husband, my son.
Like, I love the men in my life.
I'm not against them, but I also realize they're men and I'm a woman and there's differences.
And let's celebrate that.
Like, why do we have to pretend like we're just one big blob of a humanity?
I mean, not a single person in this country, I dare you to find a single person in this country that came about by any other way than the joining of two gametes, a sperm and an egg, male and female, and then they made another person.
Find me the person that came about any other way than that.
And I will maybe change my mind.
But until then, we are biological beings.
Now, you just touched on Bill C16.
And there is some pretty serious threats to people like yourself who speak out against this radical, I will call it radical gender ideology because I think that's really what it is.
Do you feel like that sort of thing is looming over the head of people like you that could serve to silence you through the court system?
So, when I look back at what the politicians were saying, Sheila, during the Bill C-16 debate, they made it very clear that there was a difference between biological sex and gender identity.
And let's face it, our charter, National Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, does emphasize that we can't be discriminated on the basis of our sex, which is biology.
And then these newer bills were about gender expression and gender identity.
And so I, not a single politician at that time that I was looking at in parliament was talking about the fact that gender should completely replace biological sex.
They were saying these two things were being held in balance.
So when you say like somebody needs to, like the law says, you can't discriminate on the basis of gender identity or gender expression, fine.
But not bullying somebody does not mean that you include the wrong sex body in a space that's going to be harmful to the other sex.
These two things have to be held in balance.
And this is what laws are.
They're trying to find the balance.
So when they passed that law, I honestly didn't think that there was a single politician who thought, oh, that'd be a great idea, put a rapist in a female prison.
No, no.
But I think what's happening is the middle management and the Woochesters and everybody in the middle is interpreting it that way.
So like, for example, in sports, we can say if a boy shows up, let's say a high school boy shows up in a dress and wants to run a race, you can still run with the guys.
We have already resolved that issue.
We have no bullying policy in sport.
We will not bully.
We will respect the gender expression, gender identity, but we will also stick to the sex-based rules.
This is easy to implement.
It's not like we are somehow breaking the law.
We are holding the law in balance.
You know, and it's funny because even these days to watch your child play sports, you have to go through an anti-bullying course.
So it's not like we're completely against anti-bullying.
Most of us are forced to participate in these anti-bullying programs, even if you've never bullied anybody in your life.
You still have to do it.
So I mean, it's not like sport doesn't take bullying seriously, but this is not the same.
This is really not the same.
I wanted to ask you, I guess if we don't rein this in, and that'll be my last question.
How do we reign it in?
But if we don't reign it in, what are the consequences for women's sport going forward?
Like, what's the timeline?
How long do we have left before there's no such thing as women's sports?
I say we have about five to 10 years and then women's sports will not exist because, and let's face it, I'm going to say that it's going to hurt women and trans-identifying women.
So males who identify as women.
Because think about it this way, Sheila.
Once the whole final, the entire podium in every competition is there's enough males now who self-identified into women's sports that the real female athletes who are born female don't have a chance, they will walk away quietly.
Because I know this, a lot of females would rather not complain.
They just walk away, disappear.
So they will self-exclude from the sport category.
What's going to be left at that point is a bunch of males in the women final.
And once these activists are seeing that they're surrounded by other males just like themselves in the final, they will no longer feel special or unique or they will no longer feel that they're being affirmed with the females.
The very.
You know they enter women's sports specifically to for a social affirmation.
Uh, it's not because they want to compete, because we offer them third categories and they say no, they want to be with the women, because they feel they need to be seen with women right to as a form of social expression.
So the minute everybody disappears, all the, all the female born athletes disappear the, the field will be left.
It'll be like the men's a final, the men's b final, and there will be no women.
And you know what?
These people will no longer feel affirmed and they'll probably just end up walking away too, because they're not getting what they need, they're not getting the social affirmation they need.
So it's only the first few people, like Laurel Hubbard, who will feel like they're so special and they're being platformed and profiled with all the women and the.
Eventually it'll just be all men and they won't feel special anymore.
And then so what I feel like is why go through that cycle, why destroy the entire thing?
And then we'd have to rebuild women's sport anyway in 10 or 20 years to start over again.
What so it's worth defending now and the and you alluded to.
What is the solution?
Yes and, and the solution really is.
When we bring this up again.
I'll show the book one last time.
Critical Competitive Advantage00:03:40
We bring this up in the book um, on sporting um, we basically advocate that there should be an open category for all all different types of like, anybody who's not a female and a female only category.
So female and open.
And actually this is how sport works right now.
If you look at the Nhl, Nfl and Nba all the professional male sports are actually open sports.
If a woman was good enough, she could be an Nfl player, she could be an Nhl player.
They are open, but of course, magically no women ever qualify because the male body has quite a few inherent advantages.
So i'm just saying that we should just stick with what we have male like.
We should have an open category, keep the binary, keep it open.
So let's, even if you're a female who identifies as a man and you're taking extra hormones, well then go into the open category, but the baseline should be female specific, born female, not doping.
And then everybody else can go into the open category.
And and and the and it's that operates on the principle of absence of competitive competitive advantage.
So whenever you add a new person to a category in sport, the one thing they cannot bring with them is a competitive advantage.
So, like you know, if you have a sprinter suddenly join, like even the men's team, but then he has a fantastic new running shoe which has been happening lately or, like a distance runner, a brand new running shoe that nobody else has, well then you know there needs to be a rule about that, because that person brings something extra special which is a competitive advantage above what everybody else has access to.
So if we're saying there's this new kind of person called a trans person and they're trying to come into a category, we need to critically ask, is there physically a competitive advantage?
And if there is, they need to go, stay out of that category and go to the one where they don't bring the competitive advantage.
It's just logic and when anybody joining the men in the open category, they're not going to be bringing to the men a competitive advantage.
So it actually is.
You can maximize um access and it's full inclusivity because everybody gets to compete, but you just compete according to those principles.
Well Linda, I want to thank you so much for uh taking the time to talk with me today and I want to thank you for your level-headed approach to all of this because there's so much Emotion injected into this.
And you, you know, you just present the facts and the science of it all.
And I really appreciate that.
And lovely talking, my friend.
Thank you so much.
And good luck with the book.
It's been a real blessing to a mom like me with a daughter in contact sports.
Well, tell her good luck.
And thank you very much for having me.
And have a great summer, everybody.
We can get through this.
If you're a mom like me with a daughter in contact sports, Linda and Barbara's new book is an absolute must read.
It'll scare you, but it'll give you hope for the future.
And again, you can get Linda Blade and Barbara Kay's brand new book at unsporting.com.
The book, again, is Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial Are Destroying Sport.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here or, you know, wherever I am next week.