What’s Socrates got to do with the male advantage making women’s sport a place where no sensible parent would want to steer their daughters towards?

Well quite a lot, if we want the sorority of female athletes to feel at home in the women’s category across a wide spectrum of sports in which sex matters, as it clearly does. Two things to note on the Greek philosopher, one general, one fundamental to Duncan’s excellent book, a work both easy to read and very well written:

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates advocates equality on grounds that women are equal to men in terms of making a country strong and just.

He notes that the sexes are different in a number of ways, including strength (nature, biology). Women who are capable, just as men who are capable, should have equal access to decision-making forums.

Socrates advocates a meritocracy: he proposes that a healthy society affords roles to people based on their virtues and not on their social standing or gender. Then and for 99+% of the 2500 or so years since, gender has meant sex. To most people it still does because that position reflects reality for the vast majority of humans, the term ‘gender identity’ a requirement that ought not to alter the original meaning of gender.

Until very recently, the definition I find in various dictionaries in my office, dating from the 1920s through to this millennium, includes “a sex, male or female”, mirroring biological reality: everyone is born either male or female, regardless of feelings, how anyone identifies or wishes to live their life or even where DSD (Difference in Sexual Development) applies.

In sport, all of that matters because males develop flushed with testosterone - and there’s a reason why that’s a banned substance in sport outside naturally occurring levels and supplies.

Socratic questioning

It's a way of holding reasonable conversation backed by critical thinking and negotiation based on logic, fact and truth is the red thread that links all argument in Duncan’s book. He cites sources that describe a Socratic approach to debate as “a method of inquiry that seeks to explore complex ideas, concepts and beliefs by asking questions that challenge assumptions, clarify meaning, and reveal underlying principles".

• Socrates and the Gender Debate: How Ideology Fails the Test of Common Sense by by Andrew Duncan ... audible read by Laura Dexter

By way of explanation, here’s a brief trawl of what we're talking about, starting with an example from the Paralympics in Paris this month:

"Personal life - Petrillo was previously married to a woman. They share two children, a son and a daughter."

And that is the only line under "Personal Life" on the Wikipedia page of Valentina Petrillo, a trans-athlete/para-athlete from Italy who is a biological male and the biological father of said children.