Fair play
The Australian Football League (AFL) has agreed for the first time to allow a transgender footballer to play women’s football at state level.
Hannah Mouncey, 28, who previously played at local level in Canberra, hopes to take to the field in the state of Victoria this season.
The AFL said it wanted everyone to be able to play Australian rules football.
Before she began her gender transition in 2015, Mouncey played for the Australian men’s handball team.
The AFL’s decision means she can now partake in any of its affiliated state leagues during the 2018 season.
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Australian rules football consists of two teams of 18 players and takes place on an oval-shaped field.
Players can position themselves anywhere on the field and may use any part of their bodies to move the ball, making it a more physical-contact sport, more similar to rugby.
Rugby is like US football, a full-contact sport, and very violent. Hannah Mouncey is 6’3″ and 220 pounds.
But it would have been called an act of actual violence to not let her play in a women’s team; you know, like being an elderly lady being punched by a 6ft. tall, well-built, 20-something transwoman is an act of actual violence against the transwoman. Why? Because SHUT UP! That’s why.
Acolyte:
There are probably plenty of natural-born non-trans “6ft. tall, well-built, 20-something” women already playing womens’ AFL. It goes with the territory. Big women tend to go for sports where they have a natural advantage. But above-average weight does not give the advantage in AFL that it does in the Rugby codes. And incidentally, while punching is illegal in both, and can get an infringing player sent off or worse, it happens more in Rugby than in AFL.
An ex-man now woman most likely has a female androgen-oestrogen balance as well.
It should be no big deal.
An “ex-man” is not a woman, and a woman is not an “ex-man” or a “non-man.”
Current hormone balances are not going to have any effect on previously developed muscle mass or bone density or fast twitch muscle fibers etc, etc. Male bodies are different than female bodies. Male human beings do indeed have a strength advantage over female human beings. That is why we divide sports by sex. Even a 6 foot tall, 220 pound woman at the top her game cannot compete, strength wise, against a comparable male bodies person.
I picked one AFL women’s team at random – Adelaide Crows.
Their roster for this year (45 players) is mostly composed of very fit looking, but lean, women in the range 160-175cm (weights are not listed). Heights go as low as 155cm and there are a couple at 185cm. Only four are over 180cm. It’s hard to judge from upper body shots alone, but I suspect only a couple would be in the 90kg+ range. Most I would have picked as being in the 55-75kg range, maybe 80ish for a few.
A trans women who has made the transition early in life (pre-teen or early teens) may well have the bulk and musculature typical of a women. However, a trans women who has made the transition in their mid-20’s and who has trained hard for a number of years is likely to be carrying greater mass, more and denser muscle and denser bone structure than a women, despite currently having a more typical hormone profile. That’s assuming of course that they have actually undergone hormonal transition. The article doesn’t actually specify.
Consider Laurel Hubbard, the transgender weightlifter who recently represented NZ. Despite being an average male weight lifter, she easily displaced NZ’s top woman weight lifter from her class in the NZ team and won two silvers at the world champs, although not performing at their personal best. A lot of the female athletes in the competition felt it was far from a level playing field.
It’s a very difficult issue. The spectrum of human development is very broad and inclusivity/equality and all that. Some of these formerly male athletes do still look physically male alongside the women they are competing against.
It’s a bit like some of the calls I’ve seen to do away with women’s sport all together and have unisex teams. In some sports that may work. In highly physical sports, even the best of female athletes will be at a distinct disadvantage and will struggle to be selected.
@Omar
Men and women do not have the same physical build.** Hormone treatment does not make a mans shoulders less broad,change the make up of the muscles (even if reduced) . Please also check a diagram for the difference between a male and female skeleton (men’s bones are also denser ) Neither does hormone treatment alter the 40% extra lung capacity that men have.
There are plenty of examples of trans identified males taking women’s spaces in sports and there’s one word for it-cheating.
Women’s sport has only just started to be taken seriously and now this. Every time you see a trans id male in a team line up or on the winning podium there’s a woman or girl that was denied that place .
** I don’t think that men are physically superior to women but they are stronger and women are more flexible and nimble than men. Funny I’ve yet to see a trans id male try women’s gymnastics . I wonder why?
The AFWL is kicking the can down the road on this one. It will be up to the national teams if they pick up Mouncey as a player. They will be weighing up Mouncey’s appeal to male spectators. Women athletes’ perceived fuckability is hugely important here, where men are men and women are constantly saying “are you fucking kidding?” In the unlikely event transphobia doesn’t kill Mouncey’s career, a big strong player who causes massive injuries to other players is not going to be very popular with the people putting money up for said players. So much to have to work through.
The women’s AFL is a really big deal here. It’s been a huge win for women’s sport and has taken years to achieve. There’s been so much support it’s making money. Televised games are being watched in record numbers, stadiums are full. It’s proving that men will watch women’s sport even if the players are not wearing lingerie. We have gone from women’s sport barely rating a mention to it being treated with the same gravitas as men’s sport. I am so disappointed it’s already embroiled in “trans women are REAL women, you are transphobic”. I can see why Mouncey wants in – here’s a chance to be a leader in a national sport. So much easier than spending 40+ years working towards a mixed gender league. I want the women in the league to have their chance to shine and build up, not get hijacked.
When trans people first started telling their stories about wanting to change their gender presentation, I was really sympathetic. I saw it as a massive challenge to gender stereotypes. Well, now I don’t anymore. It’s just embedding gender stereotypes deeper and deeper. Transphobia – the reaction to a trans person of “ew, you are icky”- is conflated with any discussion of women’s rights or how women are affected. How did we go from “gender is a performance based on an imposed sexist structure” to “gender is an innate feeling and no disagreement is allowed”?
learie, I’m not overly interested in watching sport, but will occasionally catch some football (the round one) on tv. I’ve noticed that the women’s games tend to have less stoppages for foul play, less fouling and diving, little by way of histrionics by fouled players, almost no arguing with the ref, and so on. The womens’ teams therefore have more free-flowing games, the ball is in play for longer, and – and here I’m talking only about the professional game at professional League and international level – with the skill levels of the women comparable to those of many, maybe most, of the male professionals the focus is on footballing skill rather than brute strength and cheating, making the games far better to watch than the mens’.
I was wondering if you see any similar differences in the way that women play ARF compared to the men?
Can we start segregating sports by weight class instead of gender? This is getting stupid.
BKiSA, that suggestion was made a while back in relation to kids rugby (Union and League). The problem with age group gradients was that every now and then you’d get a tween aged Pacifica lad who was the size of a large adult. The more typically sized kids didn’t stand a chance against them. Issue with pushing a kid that age up to where most players were the same physical size was that players who are five years or so older have a different, more aggressive, approach to play, are more mature, better able to withstand the knocks and have denser muscle. Not a straight forward solution even then.
Equestrian events appear to be about the only ones where both men and women can compete on equal terms. (Guess why.) Motor sports demand a high level of aggression from competitors, and so favour men.
I used to be a keen social tennis player, and we had ‘mixed doubles’ and men playing singles against women quite frequently. But as a spectator (via TV) I generally prefer the womens’ championships (eg Wimbledon) over the mens’, because mens’ tennis has evolved away from long rallies towards being a power game, where aces are relatively frequent.
So it looks to me from the above discussion that individuals who have a sex change will have to play as one of their previous sex, or not at all. And we can hardly have separate classes for ‘ex-women’ and ‘ex-men’ as they are too infrequent in the population generally..
#2, Omar:
https://twitter.com/reasonmusic55/status/963757046393901056
In response to this one, with even more skillz:
https://twitter.com/WorldAndScience/status/963684389166243842
Rrr:
Yes, https://twitter.com/reasonmusic55/status/963757046393901056 is a beauty all right. But the bloke who threw the punch deserves the penalty, not the one who faked being knocked off his feet.
I reckon the day will come when all players have to wear body cameras, like cops do in some police forces.
And how often will they turn out to be “temporarily malfunctioning”, like seems to happen rather frequently with police body cams?
Team handball, Mouncey’s pre-transition sport, is less a contact sport than basketball, let alone rugby/australian. I don’t think that athletic ambition is really going to drive a lot of transitioning.
Anyone else remember Renee Richards?
The issue of early-life vs. late-life transitioning is a big one, on this subject. Someone who was put on hormone blockers at 10 or 12, then transitioned fully at 18, is going to be far more akin to their transitioned sex overall. Someone who gets to 21, then resolves their body dysphoria as being trans, is going to be far more aligned with their birth sex, regardless of surgeries and hormone treatments.
Nothing exposes the belief in word-magic at the root of gender ideology like the insistence that people with innate physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers who think or feel some unspecified way about themselves be allowed to compete in sporting events that are reserved for people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers specifically to compensate for biological differences. The whole argument seems solely based on the idea that the former group becomes the same as the latter if we call them by the same name.
Why people who think/feel some unspecified way would need separate sporting events from people who think/feel some other equally unspecified way is unclear to say the least. And even if one managed to come up with a reason, it would no longer be true that people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers were automatically qualified to compete, and we would need some kind of screening process to make sure that only people who really did think/feel the required ways about themselves were allowed to participate.
Anyone else remember Renee Richards?
Yes, and Jethrine Bodine, Jethro’s twin sister…
AoS@7
The women players compare to the men’s teams of the 70’s; rough round the edges, part timers who play with passion. My partner says the play is actually a bit less free flowing, because they don’t kick as long and haven’t got the experience and training the men do in setting up game plans etc but they’re so focussed and giving it all they’ve got, it’s really enjoyable to watch.
Mouncey should be playing in mixed gender sports. Sports are segregated by sex for a reason. Women have worked hard to build up their sports, without the funding and support reserved for men’s sports.
I remember Renee Richards. Barely. I was very young. :) She says now she had an edge over her competitors. Duh. Samoan rugby players have an edge over their competitors, but at least it’s in the rules.
Iknklast @#13::
(WHISTLE..!!) Infringement..! Player’s body cam not working..!!
Free kick..!