Is men fighting women really a new sport?

Last weekend, the first formal inter-gender mixed martial arts cagefighting contest – post Enlightenment, at least – took place in front of a paying audience in the city of Czestochowa, in Poland.

Remarkably, the fight went to a second round. Many well aimed blows were landed by Piotrek Lisowski on his female opponent Ula Siekacz. But the referee eventually called things off when he had her pinned helplessly to the floor with his knees and was thumping her in the face.

A second fight, between Michal Przybylowicz and Wiktoria Domzlaska was stopped in the first round when the female fighter had no answer to a vicious early Przybylowicz onslaught.

If the playing field isn’t level, then what’s being served up isn’t anything like sport

Is this really the way we want sport to go? Or, better question: as we become increasingly culturally squeamish about noticing there are, er, differences between the sexes – not least, inherent physiological differences – is there anything we can do to stop sport going this way?

The grotesque fights described above were truly ‘cis’ battles of the sexes.