Moira Deeming Spouts Falsities About Trans Women In Sports At Liberal Conference

Victorian MP Moira Deeming has made multiple false claims while speaking in favour of a motion restricting trans women from participating in women’s sports.

During the Victorian Liberal Party’s annual conference over the weekend, Deeming spoke to a motion calling for the Federal Liberal Party “to protect sport for women and girls to play in competition or fellowship”.

It comes as trans women around the world are being excluded from participating in women’s sports, with President Trump passing an executive order in February cutting federal funding from educational institutions that allow trans women and girls to compete in female sports.

The Football Association of the UK has also banned trans women from participating in women’s sports, following this year’s UK Supreme Court ruling legally defining women as “biological women”.

“Sport is divided into male and female categories for very good scientific reasons,” Deeming told the conference.

“As a sex class, men are taller, faster and stronger than women. They have bigger bones, longer limbs, wider hand spans, wider shoulders and more narrow pelvises, they have larger and denser muscles with a higher proportion of faster twitch fibres and larger hearts and lungs.”

Bafflingly, she also claimed that every world record set by a woman in athletics had been broken by a teenage boy, a claim repeated on the website of noted far-right extremist group, Binary Australia.

“Even from a very young age, boys perform better in terms of speed, power and strength,” she said.

“Regardless of opinions on the gender identity debate, the fact is, at least in Victoria, sex and gender identity are still separate and distinct protective attributes in Victorian anti-discrimination law and medical regulatory laws, because they’re not interchangeable in circumstances such as sport,” she said.

It is unclear where Deeming cited this information from.

Following a successful defamation suite against former Liberal leader John Pesutto, Deeming was readmitted into the Victorian Liberals last year after she refused to denounce an anti-trans rally she helped organise when it was crashed by Neo-Nazis.

Are we really having this conversation again?

Currently, there is no federal legislation dictating the rights of trans people to compete in sports in accordance with their gender.

Sport Australia notes that trans people are often discriminated against and underrepresented in sport, with individual sports like swimming and rugby constructing strict policies limiting trans women’s participation in elite female categories.

Trans women in the AFL, for example, must prove that their testosterone levels have been in the female range for at least two years, as well as supply records of their height, weight, bench press, squat, 20m sprint time, vertical jump, match raw GPS data from three Australian Football matches, and 2km run time over at least two years.

Although much of the current research lacks sufficient participants and includes few long-term studies, researchers overwhelmingly warn against precautionary bans on trans athletes.

In a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2024, researchers conducted physical fitness tests in 69 cis and trans volunteers who took part in some type of athletics at least three times a week, with the trans participants all having completed at least one year of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Although trans women had larger lungs than cis women and scored higher on abilities like grip strength, they also displayed less lower body strength, were unable to jump as high, and had a lower maximum rate of oxygen consumption than both cis women and cis men.

Lead researcher Dr. Yannis Pitsiladis said that the main takeaway from the work is that trans people’s bodies after medical transition are inherently different from those of cis people, and cannot be considered equivalent to others who were assigned the same sex at birth.

“It follows that research conducted comparing biological men to biological women is almost irrelevant in this debate and evidence from such comparisons should not be used to inform policy as is the case by many “armchair professors” advocating the default ban position,” Dr Pitsiladis told OutSports.

Trans women in sport is becoming an increasingly hot topic in mainstream conservative circles, with many gender-critical activists pushing the Liberal Party to take a stronger stance on the issue.

The motion “to protect sport for women and girls” passed at the conference, although it’s understood some members voted against it.