I thank my colleague Tess White for bringing such an important debate to Parliament, and I whole-heartedly associate myself with the statements that Michelle Thomson and Tess White made in their speeches.

I cannot remember a point when I was growing up when sport was not a major factor. In primary school, I played in badminton competitions for Juniper Green, represented Edinburgh in school competitions and travelled to Wales to play for the Lothians.

At university, I had to choose between playing hockey and playing badminton. I chose hockey, and I threw myself into playing in the 1990s—I have given my age away there. At that time at the University of Edinburgh, there were only three women’s teams. It was great fun—you could always find me and my pals at Peffermill, playing or umpiring, and I made friends and memories for life.

After I graduated from university, sport—especially hockey—continued to play a pivotal role in my life. I balanced a busy corporate career with all my sport, including Watsonians hockey, where I was the Watsonian Hockey Club president and manager of the under-16s and under-18s teams. I became the east district youth team manager and then east district president.

I also umpired all through that time, which included umpiring men’s and women’s hockey at the top of the Scottish game; there were not that many women umpiring men’s hockey. Now, as injury and age catch up with me, and when time permits, I assess budding new umpires.

All that gave me life experiences and friendships that span decades and continents. I would not change a thing about my experience, and I hope that other girls and woman can have the same positive experiences that I did. That is why I wanted to speak in the debate: to highlight the unfairness that many now face in female sports.

We will all have either seen or heard about some of the controversies surrounding that issue during the Olympics, and then again in the Paralympics. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the women’s boxing in Paris, with the controversy over the gender eligibility of two competitors. Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting were cleared to compete at the Paris Olympics, despite being disqualified from last year’s world championships after they were said to have failed gender eligibility tests. Both fighters won Olympic gold medals. I think that we can all agree that that has shone a damning light on an issue that clearly needs addressing. As Tess White explained in far more detail, males of equal weight and size punch 160 per cent harder on to a less dense bone structure. Therefore, biological sex is a crucial factor in ensuring that female athletes are not disadvantaged or put at risk.

In 2023, British Cycling banned transgender women from competing in the female category of competitive events, tightening its rules around participation in order to safeguard the fairness of the sport. The new rules, which came into effect at the end of 2023, divided cyclists into female and open categories. The female category remains for those with sex assigned female at birth and transgender men who are yet to begin hormone therapy. The open category is for male athletes, transgender women and men, non-binary individuals and those whose sex was assigned male at birth.

Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, has voiced his views about the transgender debate. Last March, in accordance with his long-stated belief that biology trumps gender, he banned athletes who had gone through male puberty from the female category in world championships and Olympic games, in order to preserve fairness in athletics.

However, the problem exists not only at the elite levels of sport. On the journey to elite sport, women will be at a constant disadvantage as they strive to win against males who are biologically stronger and taller and have increased muscle mass. Those men will take podium places from those women and their spaces in teams, excluding many women and girls from taking part at all.

We cannot escape the biological reality. It is vital that we stand up for single-sex categories in sport across all levels, from grass-roots to elite level. That should be protected. You cannot settle for protecting the 0.01 per cent at the top if you then ask every other woman and girl to accept being placed at a disadvantage. That is why I am backing Tess White’s motion, and why I will always champion single-sex categories in sport.