Cowardly RFU bows to bigotry
Another hit to Trans Rights as the RFU bans transgender women from taking part in women's rugby due to pressure from a bigoted minority
England's Rugby Football Union (RFU) yesterday voted in favour of restricting the participation of transgender people in the domestic game. The RFU have now recommended that only those recorded as female at birth are to be allowed to play in the women’s category of both Rugby League and Union. In 2020 World Rugby banned trans women from competing in the sport, citing a potential risk for injury to competitors. The RFU stood opposed to World Rugby stating that there wasn't enough evidence to prove any additional risk past the usual risks that come with playing the sport. To my knowledge there has been no additional evidence published since this decision. So why the change in opinion? Quite frankly, pure transphobia and sexism led not by fact or reason but by a bigoted minority who could not care less about women’s sport and only care about furthering their own hateful agendas.
So, let’s lay out the facts here. For a trans woman to compete at any level of rugby in England, she must have stabilised testosterone under 5noml/L for 12 months. This is below what the majority of cis women produce. This of course takes time to reduce, so you’re looking at over 2 years worth of medical transition before she can participate. After this stage there is little to no evidence that a testosterone advantage is retained. Happy to be corrected about this by the RFU’s findings if they are to make them public.
“But what about male puberty!”, I hear you shout for some weird reason. Yes, there is some evidence of retained muscle mass from puberty. The paper that is central to this evidence however specifically mentions that the study is not at all to athletes though, especially high-performance athletes. Outside of this one point, data sets on Trans participation in sport is extremely limited. The RFU had committed to funding or taking part in these studies but have now completely committed to a ban before any of these studies have even been attempted.
Up until the recent decision, RFU trans inclusion laws had a caveat that risk be managed case-by-case. If a trans player posed an overt risk to others, coaches or refs could veto their participation in a game. This was a flawed system, but it was working, and the veto had not yet been used. The initial proposal was that the RFU would 'monitor' trans-women over 5'7” or 90kg. When this was announced, many players pointed out that this is inclusive of the majority of Women’s Rugby players. Size does not mean you are skillful in this game, we have seen that many times through the years, most notably with 5’7” Shane Williams playing 87 times for Wales and being their leading try-scorer.
Size isn’t everything
Size also does not correlate to safety. How many times have you seen the 6’4” brick shithouse on the opposite team get taken down at the knees by your 5’0” scrumhalf? Most injuries in the grassroots game happen because of poor tackling technique and nothing more. Thanks to a lack of coaches, the first tackle many players take is in-game, and it’s not an easy learning process. Players of vastly different sizes and strengths tackle each other on a weekly basis. Craig Casey can share the field with Will Skelton and nobody bats an eye, but as soon as a Trans-Woman is involved, suddenly it’s too dangerous. The percentage differences in muscle mass are worlds apart with most players, but that information only seems relevant when trans women are playing the game they love, not anybody else. This argument isn’t used with trans men, NBs, cis men or women, so why is it relevant here?
Transphobic “activists” would have you believe that cis-men are flocking to their local doctor for two years worth of hormone therapy and testing so that they can play alongside and against women (because all men are automatically stronger and better than women of course?), and that the sport is riddled with testosterone filled fake trans people who are keeping women out of the game. In reality, there are currently only six trans women playing rugby in England. If all of them got together for the day they wouldn’t even be able to play as a Rugby 7s team. You’ll see these “activists” bandy about a figure of around seventy Trans people. This figure includes trans men (Who are seemingly always forgotten about in these arguments) and NB people who play multiple different codes. It’s a deliberate misrepresentation of figures that’s only done to further their bigoted agenda.
The measures used up until very recently are flawed, but for the most part they work. There has not been a hint of publicly available evidence showing that there is a higher rate of injury caused by the inclusion of the six trans players who currently play in the Women’s Code in England. No red cards, no disciplinaries, no injuries, nothing. The concerns being raised are problems cis women have always faced and will continue to face, trans inclusion or none. The RFU are either withholding valuable scientific data or basing the decision on bigots saying, “What if?”, which means this decision is either wildly bigoted or grossly ignorant.
These 'precautionary measures' are nothing but a draconian response to a non-issue being overblown by bigots that hold nothing but outright hatred by people just trying to live their lives and play the games that they love. And let’s be clear, these “activists” couldn’t care less about Women’s Rugby. Recently Andy Goode tweeted support for the banning of transgender people from women’s rugby. It was the first tweet he’d ever made about women’s rugby in the eleven years that he’d been on Twitter. Look around at every tweet of support for those in the Trans community that play rugby and you’ll see multiple people within minutes quote tweet the original post with nothing but falsehoods, sexism, and hatred. They all view women as delicate little flowers who can’t stand up to the might and power of a man. If you're so keen to support women in sports, donate to your local women's team. Spend the time you use quote tweeting Squidge Rugby training young children to play the game. Most women’s rugby teams struggle to get the funding to stay afloat, and even if they can, they rarely have the coaching staff to help them reach their full potential. They deserve to play rugby as much as anyone else does. Trust me, they'll appreciate the help much more than a witch-hunt of six people who have experienced enough hatred for a lifetime.
Trans people face enough pain and hardship already. Each day they are required to justify their own existence and fight just to be themselves in a public setting is exhausting. The abuse that they receive from a ridiculously vocal and over-represented people is abhorrent. Continually they are used as a scapegoat in our society by those who seek to profit off of the focus being on Trans people living their lives rather than on the corrupt becoming more even more corrupt. We’ve seen this already this week with Tory leadership candidate Rishi Sunak voicing his support for Transphobes by calling their existence “nonsense” to draw attention away from his failing leadership campaign. Trans people in the last week alone have seen their access to healthcare completely slashed and the sole youth gender clinic under the NHS closed down. Enough is enough. Trans people are society’s most targeted and vilified group. Amongst the population they hold the highest depression, suicide, and hate crime rates by far. How is banning them from communities that have chosen to take them in, where they are loved and valued, doing the right thing?