Last week, the English Football Association (FA) finally remembered why women’s football exists – and it’s not to let men who identify as women ‘validate’ their identities.
In a short statement on its website, the FA confirmed that, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision on gender, it ‘will be changing [its] policy’ on men in women’s football. ‘Transgender women will no longer be able to play in women’s football in England’, it said. The decision will come into effect from 1 June.
This is welcome news. You don’t need a degree in biology to know that male and female bodies differ greatly, and that this translates into a massive advantage in strength and speed for men of all ages. Yet for the past 10 years, the FA, like almost every other sports governing body in the UK and internationally, allowed trans-identifying men to play in women’s teams. It has often seemed as if women didn’t matter.
This wasn’t the first time the FA had betrayed women. During the First World War, women’s football became as popular as the men’s game, drawing huge crowds. After the war, the FA banned it from all FA-affiliated pitches, forcing women to find other places to play. That ban lasted 50 years. The FA certainly knew who the women were then.
Today, all the talk is about encouraging more women to play football. Over the past 15 years or so, more than £250million of public money has been spent bringing more women and teenage girls into the game. Unfortunately, some of those ‘women’ have been men, yet neither the FA nor Sport England seemed to care.
Campaigners who challenged this obvious inequity were told ‘it’s only a few’, as if to say that a bit of unfairness doesn’t matter. It was never clear how many male players would be unacceptable, or at what point women’s needs might start to count. The FA insisted transwomen were women – even though they were the only women whose testosterone needed to be suppressed. Is there any other small group of ‘women’ for whom a sports body would fight so hard? For whom it would make itself look so foolish, would resist all reason and would discipline those who called it out?
Players, coaches and parents who questioned the fairness of males playing against women were quickly shut down. Last year, in two different FA regions, a couple of 17-year-old girls were suspended for questioning the presence of a male player on the opposing team. Naturally, they were concerned not just about fairness but also their own safety. If you tackle or are tackled by someone much heavier and stronger, you’re the one who ends up on the ground. Those girls saw a man on the pitch and were rightly worried about the potential consequences. For daring to say so, they were sanctioned. No wonder so many trans players claim their teammates welcome them. Anyone who doesn’t is off the team.
It was always lawful to exclude men from a women’s category in sport, including those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. The Supreme Court has only clarified what the law already says. But the FA clearly didn’t care – it was determined to recognise the womanhood of the trans-identifying men. The result was a policy that made sense to no one other than true believers that transwomen are women.
It’s possible that legal challenges could have put a stop to this sooner. A brave woman might have been able to win a discrimination case, because men were getting fair play and women were not. But bringing a case is hard and expensive, and it often ends a career. A trans-identifying male player could also have brought a case asking why he and not the many ‘other women’ had been required to demonstrate testosterone suppression. After all, there is no basis for such a requirement in law.
Or the FA could have seen sense sooner. Did no one dare to say that its rules, which were such a departure from common sense, were indefensible? Everyone in authority must have been thinking it. The Supreme Court judgment has merely provided convenient cover to pull a policy that was increasingly embarrassing, and which was probably making the insurers and lawyers queasy.
Many news reports about the FA decision have centred on the plight of the ‘transwomen who now can’t play the game they love’. Women are asked whether they have sympathy for these poor unfortunates. I have yet to hear a single interview where a trans-identifying man is asked whether he has sympathy for female players who have been denied fair and safe football for years, and who’ve been bullied and silenced if they dared to object.
For an organisation that supports the annual Rainbow Laces campaign, ditching its allegiance to trans activism can’t have come easy. But, in doing so, the FA has at least started to rectify some of the damage it has inflicted on women’s and girls football. As they say, better late than never.
Fiona McAnena is director of campaigns at the human-rights charity, Sex Matters.
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