Trans rugby won’t make for a level playing field
As the mother of two girls who wouldn’t recognise a cauliflower ear if I served Graham Rowntree’s head en croute, I am nonetheless furious to learn that the Rugby Football Union has made the insane and unsafe decision to allow transgender women to play women’s rugby in England.
I say furious, but not in the modern death-threats-onsocial-media sense, just the bog-standard definition, nothing exceptional. Then again, this whole anguished imbroglio is all about definitions and exceptionalism. Last week, World Rugby became the first international sports body to ban trans women from the women’s game, having found that those born biologically male are “stronger by 25 per cent, 30 per cent more powerful, 40 per cent heavier and about 15 per cent faster than biological females”. That was the common sense conclusion.
Put simply, transgender women have a lifelong physical edge that not only puts them at an (un) sporting advantage, but could prove dangerous in a rough contact sport like rugby. Trans activists argue that anything other than full, across-the-board acceptance in every discipline is de facto transphobic. Nonsense: I am not in the slightest transphobic, and (note, I said “and”, not “but”…) I can see that, in sport, there needs to be a differentiation based on biology alone.
Transgender women could construe that as unjust. Having fought so many battles on their journey, the right to play the sport they love might feel like just another hurdle to conquer in a bid to achieve parity. But the rugby pitch is not society.
Socio-economic equality ought to be a given, and we are making progress towards that goal. Sport, however, is governed by a very different set of rules. There are winners and losers. Those who are not good enough get dropped, end of. It’s not personal. Ask any coach, and they will tell you there’s no room for sentiment.
It is imperative that like competes against like – which is why sports have leagues. It is also why the RFU must urgently reconsider its decision before someone literally gets hurt.
Sport must be conducted with scrupulous fairness. There will always be athletes, be they trans women or not, who miss out. That makes for personal disappointment. But to interpret ineligibility as exclusion would be to wilfully misunderstand the very nature of competition.