Features

Olympic leaders say there’s no such thing as male advantage in sport. Here’s a simple question for them: if that were true, why not just scrap sex-based categories of men and women altogether? We all know why. Men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women. In my sport of swimming, men are on average 11 per cent quicker than women. In boxing, their punches are 160 per cent more powerful. Such advantages mean that, on gender transition, mediocre male athletes are rocketing up the rankings, winning prizes and taking women’s places for one simple reason: whatever their feelings and life choices, they are biologically male. So, faster, higher, stronger – but not better. Different. Human biology dictates it. In sport, sex matters.

I have a friend who describes me as an ‘uptight boring old straight heterosexual’ – simply because I don’t use porn or prostitutes, don’t swing both ways and have no interest in orgies and dogging, or any desire to be tied up and flogged by some fat dominatrix in a ‘torture den’ in Pimlico. He is always on the lookout for a new kink or a fresh fetish to try, and one of his latest passions is autogynephilia – that is, experiencing sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. This means he can find a woman sexually attractive only when he thinks not of her but of himself as that woman. He used to call himself a transvestite; now he calls himself an autogynephile. ‘Do you feel anything?

The Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, were once something of a side-show compared with the more famous Sicilian mafia. Now they are the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Last month, European police arrested more than 130 ’Ndrangheta members in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in a coordinated swoop codenamed ‘Eureka’. Almost all have been charged with drug-dealing, money-laundering or crimes of violence. The mafia wife never asks about her husband’s work any more than he would dare criticise her cooking The ’Ndrangheta traditionally specialised in kidnapping, operating in the inaccessible region of Aspromonte, the toe of Italy, for centuries out of reach of the forces of law and order.

This spring, San Diego Zoo’s Wildlife Alliance proudly announced the arrival of Trey, a newborn colt. Trey is a Przewalski’s horse – the last wild horse species on the planet, and one of the least pronounceable (say ‘zhuh-varl-skis’ and you’ll be close). It was another small conservation victory. But Trey is particularly unusual, because this little pony is a clone. Isn’t it too late for our battered ecosystems to start mucking around with cloning? Trey is genetically identical to Kuporovic, a stallion whose cells were cryonically preserved in 1980. He’s also a genetic twin of Kurt, the first ever cloned Przewalski’s horse, born in 2020. This is big news in the cloning world: until now, cloning has only produced one individual from an endangered species.

After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss my book on Rwanda. It was not to be. The day before, I got a call from the Benin journalist due to chair the event. He sounded rattled. The restaurant owner, he said, had been receiving complaints from pro-government Rwandan groups in Brussels, along with threatening emails and anonymous calls from Rwanda itself.