Allowing male players into women’s football is bad enough but FA has compounded problem
This week we heard that in cricket, the top female players will get fairness but the other 99 per cent will not. The England and Wales Cricket Board said as much when it announced its two-tier policy, which it said “strikes an appropriate balance by ensuring fairness in the elite game while ensuring inclusivity at a recreational level”.
In other words, unfairness for all the non-elite women, which is most of them.
Then it was reported that a 17-year-old girl who is probably autistic is being disciplined by the Football Association for asking a male player in a women’s football match whether he was a man.
The distraught youngster has been called to a disciplinary hearing to answer two charges of breaching the FA Code of Conduct, one for Improper Conduct (including foul and abusive language) and one for Improper Conduct aggravated by Gender Reassignment. The penalty is a possible 12-match ban and a fine. She was told admitting the offence might mean a six-match ban.
Allowing male players into women’s football is bad enough but the FA has compounded the problem by making it a disciplinary matter to question it. This girl asked politely because she saw a male player on the pitch. Now she is being dragged through a humiliating process which would unsettle anyone, but which for her is truly daunting. But the process is the punishment, and this is all pour encourager les autres.
Who will dare raise any concerns about a trans player when they know the probable consequences, the price they will be made to pay? In this case, the football team with the trans players (there was more than one) has allegedly made eight different complaints to the FA in the past three years. That is a lot of policing but eventually women will get the message. And the FA can go on saying there are no problems with its policy.
Other sports have similar policies, saying everyone must accept a person in their declared gender, and that questioning it could be a disciplinary matter. Some even suggest you could be in trouble for using the wrong pronouns. That is to say, if you see a man and refer to him as “he” when he wants to be a “she”, you could be kicked out.
This is a free-speech problem as well as a sport problem. There is no law that says you must pretend to see a woman when you see a man. It may be polite to play along, but when your own safety is at risk, in a contact sport like football, is it really acceptable for the governing body to demand compliance with someone else’s beliefs about their inner essence of womanhood? As long as women are compelled to keep quiet or face sanctions, sports bodies can keep pretending that there is no objection to putting male feelings before fairness and safety for women and girls in sport.