• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Fair Play For Women

Fair Play For Women

  • Prison
  • Sport
  • GRA
  • Language
  • Changing rooms
  • Resources ▼
    • Take action! Here’s how
    • Key facts
    • UK law
    • Science
    • Sex vs gender
    • Consultation submissions
    • Materials
  • About Us ▼
    • Review of 2022
    • Our aim
    • Our beliefs
    • Our spokeswoman
    • Our history and achievements
    • Our supporters
    • News
      • Newspapers
      • TV Interviews
      • Radio interviews
    • Contact
    • Donate

Science and statistics

Key Facts

All science & statistics resources

The biology of the human body

There is much debate about how society changes, and how the law must reform to keep up. However, human biology has not changed. The sex of a baby is determined at the moment of conception, and can be identified in utero. Being male or female is coded in our DNA and in every cell of our bodies. We are generally very good at recognising who is male and who is female. Pathologists and archaeologists can determine the sex of a body from its bones. Some activists talk about a sex spectrum, but this is nonsense. Some human characteristics are on a spectrum – height and weight, for example. Others such as hair, eye and skin colour have a range of possibilities. Sex is a simple binary. All humans are born of a female, having been made from a small gamete (sperm) from a male which fertilises a large gamete (egg) in a female.

It may seem surprising that this needs to be said. Trans activists like to suggest that sex is not a simple binary. They refer to “sex assigned at birth”, as if it’s an arbitrary decision, or based on guesswork. They talk about “intersex and non-binary people” as if they are neither male nor female. The fact is that a baby’s sex is observed at birth by looking at its genitals, which are its secondary sex organs. (Internal sex organs involved in reproduction are the primary sex organs). This is true for 99.98% of babies. A tiny percentage of babies are born with a disorder of sex development (DSD), also known as intersex, which makes their secondary genitals abnormal, and hence at birth their sex is hard to read. Nowadays, this can be resolved with a simple chromosome test. Most babies with a DSD or intersex condition are obviously male or female at birth. Read more about chromosomes, biological sex and gender, and DSDs.

Male and female bodies are very different. This matters, especially in sport.  Biological sex differences are many and significant. A recent book by Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women, documents some of the ways society has failed to take proper account of these differences, for example in product design and in healthcare.

Studies of the transgender population

Fair Play For Women has compiled several studies to help people to understand the UK transgender population by age and sex. Because they are often presented as a particularly oppressed group, we have also researched their status both as victims and as perpetrators of crime, and compared this with the general population. You may be surprised to know that male-to-female transitioners (“transwomen”) are less at risk of violence than women. As a group transwomen’s offending rates are much the same as those of men, though worse in sex offending and violent crimes. This means that while not every trans person presents a risk, as a group they are no less risky to women than men are. In our society, men are expected to stay out of women-only spaces, despite the fact that most men are not offenders, because some are. Our research indicates that the same is true of transwomen. The much-cited suicide risk among transgender youth, used to suggest they are a particularly vulnerable group whose needs must be prioritised, is also unreliable.

All science & statistics resources

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Biological sex
  • Children
  • Gender Identity
  • Male violence
  • Scottish GRA reforms
  • Silencing women
  • Policy guidance

Our materials

  • Our factsheets
  • Our short films and animations
  • Our memes
  • Our research

Our latest articles

  • British Cycling bows to the inevitable
  • Meeting the United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
  • A sign of the turning tide in sport
  • Males can be lawfully excluded from female-only jobs
  • Athletics and swimming restore fair competition for women and girls

Archives

Footer

Prisons, crime and protecting women

  • The facts about transgender prisoners
  • Prisons timeline – how did we get here?
  • Karen White & prison review
  • Sex attacks in female prisons
  • Refuge shelters deeply worried
  • How do women in prison feel about sharing with transgender prisoners?
  • Can you believe what you read about sexual and violent crimes?
  • The judicial review of prisons policy
  • Factsheets

Sport and the human body

  • A progress report on the fight to restore fairness in female sport
  • Sport timeline: how did we get here?
  • Biological sex differences
  • Chromosomes, sex and gender
  • The science and statistics behind the transgender debate
  • Testosterone suppression in “elite athletes” – what do we know?
  • Safeguarding in sport still matters
  • Male inclusion leads to female exclusion
  • What you can do

Making policy and the law

  • Scottish government is forcing sex self-ID on whole of UK.
  • The Equality Act 2010 and women’s rights
  • GRA reform
  • Advice and guidance for policy makers
  • Changing room policy advice
  • What can I do now?
  • Take Action: Say NO to letting Sex Self-ID in through the back door.
  • Public opinion on the tension between women’s rights and trans demands

© 2023 · Fair Play For Women

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt out if you wish. Read More

Accept Decline Cookie Settings
I consent to the use of following cookies:
Cookie Declaration About Cookies
Necessary (2) Marketing (1) Analytics (4) Preferences (0) Unclassified (4)
Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
wpl_user_preference fairplayforwomen.com WP GDPR Cookie Consent Preferences 1 year HTTP
YSC youtube.com YouTube session cookie. 52 years HTTP
Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE youtube.com YouTube cookie. 6 months HTTP
Analytics cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_ga fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics long-time unique user tracking identifier. 2 years HTTP
_gid fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics short-time unique user tracking identifier. 1 days HTTP
vuid vimeo.com Vimeo tracking cookie 2 years HTTP
IDE doubleclick.net Google advertising cookie used for user tracking and ad targeting purposes. 2 years HTTP
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Unclassified cookies are cookies that we are in the process of classifying, together with the providers of individual cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_gat_UA-109881507-1 fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
GASessionCookie fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
rtc linkedin.com --- Session ---
_wpfuuid fairplayforwomen.com --- 11 years ---
Cookies are small text files that can be used by websites to make a user's experience more efficient. The law states that we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site. For all other types of cookies we need your permission. This site uses different types of cookies. Some cookies are placed by third party services that appear on our pages.
Cookie Settings