Trans by Helen Joyce

Author:Helen Joyce [Joyce, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861540501
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

9

Folding Like Deckchairs

How gender self-identification threatens to destroy women’s sports

In 2019, the BBC published a heart-warming piece on its website about Kelly Morgan, a rugby player who – as the title of the piece had it – ‘play[s] with a smile on my face’. Anyone who read on would have learnt some more striking facts. Morgan, who plays for Port Harlequin Ladies Club in Wales, had broken the coach’s ankle during a game of touch rugby – though he seemed remarkably sanguine about it, quipping that Morgan would be a ‘good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training’. The risks Morgan posed to other players were a matter of humour to the club’s captain, too. She laughingly recalled Morgan folding a player on an opposing team ‘like a deckchair’.

The reason Morgan – born Nicholas Gareth Morgan, and a fixture on East Wales boys’ teams as a teenager until being injured – could play for a women’s team was that World Rugby, like most sporting authorities, had followed the lead of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in allowing males to compete as women once they had suppressed their testosterone for a year. Morgan, who had started on oestrogen eighteen months before the BBC piece, was therefore entitled to compete as a woman.

The BBC article was read with alarm by rugby’s medical and scientific experts – and referees, who bear some legal responsibility for keeping the game safe. As they shared their concerns, top administrators started to worry that they had sleepwalked behind the IOC into an indefensible position. As Heyneke Meyer, a former coach of the South African team, once said: ‘Ballroom dancing is a contact sport; rugby is a collision sport.’ Those collisions can lead to brain injuries and, occasionally, broken necks – and courts have held referees and administrators liable. If the consequences of trans inclusion went beyond female players being folded like deckchairs and on to neck-snapping, pleading that everyone else was doing it too would hardly cut it in court.

The issues posed by allowing males to compete as females had already started to become visible. One example is Laurel Hubbard, a forty-two-year-old New Zealander who competed in men’s weightlifting when younger with modest success. In 2019 Hubbard won gold in the women’s division at the Pacific Games, defeating two teenage Samoans. ‘This fa’afafine, or male, should never have been allowed by the Pacific Games Council President to lift with the women,’ said the Samoan prime minister (who can hardly be accused of prejudice against gender non-conforming people: he is patron of the Samoan Fa’afafine Association). ‘It’s not easy for the female athletes to train all year long to compete, and yet we allow these stupid things to happen. The reality is that gold medal belongs to Samoa.’

To understand how sports got here, you must first understand how competitions came to be sex-segregated. For a long time they were all male-only. A few women engaged in genteel

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