Changing sex is a golf handicap
By Lewine Mair and Ben Fenton
BRITAIN’S leading women amateur golfers may start slipping their birth certificates into their golf bags. Their governing body has introduced a gender qualification.
The Ladies’ Golf Union now requires all entrants to official competitions to be “amateur golfers who were females at birth”. This follows several worrying incidents at clubs. Last year, some women members at Horsley Lodge club, near Derby, complained that their scratch-competition champion, Helen Talmage, a machine operator, had an unfair advantage because she had been born a man and had a sex-change operation at 19.
Judy Cousins, of Stoke Poges club, in Bucks, fathered two children before her change of gender led her into the higher ranks of women’s amateur golf until her death from Parkinson’s disease. The LGU, which consulted the British Olympic Association before wording its new clause, said yesterday that it was “merely falling into line”. The United States Ladies Golf Association introduced a similar rule in 1989.
Elaine Mackie, the LGU secretary, said: “This kind of thing is more prevalent these days and something needed to be done. To ignore it would be unfair to other competitors.” However, Joan Rothschild, a former president of the English Ladies’ Golf Association, said: “You can’t allow someone to play as a woman and then, when she gets down to a low handicap, expect her to disappear.”
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