England’s Football Association (FA) will ban transgender footballers from women’s football. The announcement followed the recent Supreme Court decision that ‘women are female’ i.e. that ‘transwomen’ (i.e. men) are not counted as ‘biological women’ under the terms of the Equality Act (2010) are therefore not eligible to use women-only spaces.
According to campaigns director at Sex Matters, Fiona McAnena
This is welcome but long overdue. The FA has had ample evidence of the harms to women and girls caused by its nonsensical policy of letting men who identify as women play in women’s teams.
The decision marks a reversal of an earlier, low-key policy of allowing ‘transwomen’ to play in the sport on a ‘case-by-case’ basis. The FA now grudgingly accepts it will revise its
current policy, which allows transgender women to participate in the women’s game … supported by expert legal advice.
This follows a similar decision in Scottish soccer, with other sporting authorities expected to clarify their own rules in future.
The case for excluding competitors from a contact sport who passed through male adolescence involved safety and fairness concerns—not to mention common sense and biological reality.
