The hounding of Laura Woods reveals the sickness of the gender cult

Defending women’s sports. Objecting to male violence against women. That is all it takes nowadays to get gender ideologues to see red mist. Just look at the relentless hounding of ITV presenter Laura Woods, after she questioned the inclusion of biologically male boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting in the women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.

When Woods tweeted an article yesterday by the Telegraph’s Oliver Brown, which accused the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of compromising women’s safety, she was immediately inundated with torrents of foul abuse. She says she has been ‘called a racist, a bigot, a sexist, as well as various insults – cunt, slag, etc’. She has even received ‘calls for my employers to sack me, threats to my home’. More disturbing still, Woods, who is pregnant, was also sent ‘numerous death threats to myself and my unborn child’.

Woods did not say anything derogatory about Khelif or Yu-ting. She said nothing that could possibly have been construed as transphobic or disrespectful to people with disorders of sexual development (which the two male boxers are believed to suffer from). All she did was tweet ‘Good article, Oli’ and share the Telegraph piece, which lays out how and why the IOC allowed two boxers who had both previously failed gender tests into the women’s contests. This not only made a mockery of fair competition – it also put female boxers at serious risk of injury, as male boxers have twice as much punching power as their female counterparts.

The hounding of Laura Woods, for speaking up for women’s safety, is a mask-off moment for the cult of gender ideology. The grim misogyny of this movement is now plain for all to see.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.