So much for the risk of significant injury

Oct 14th, 2020 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

But won’t somebody please think of the trans ladies?

Transgender women will still be allowed to play women’s rugby at all non-international levels of the game in England for the foreseeable future, the Guardian can reveal, after the Rugby Football Union decided that more evidence was needed before implementing any ban.

More evidence! More evidence needed to figure out whether or not male bodies are a danger to female bodies in playing a very rough contact sport! It’s all up in the air; we just don’t know; must collect more evidence, and more and more and more and more. We suspect there may never be enough evidence to convince us.

The RFU’s position is sharply at odds with World Rugby, which last week ruled that trans women could no longer play elite women’s rugby after a major review of the latest science concluded that the risk of “significant injury” was “too great’”.

However, the RFU’s view, which is understood to be supported by several other countries, is that more work is needed to assess whether there are safe ways to allow trans women to keep playing the sport they love.

Understood to be?? By whom?! What an absolutely crap bit of writing for a major newspaper. Thumb on the scale much?

And then that “to allow trans women to keep playing the sport they love” – what about allowing women to keep playing the sport they love? Why all this maudlin concern for the feelings of men who call themselves women coupled with brutal indifference to the feelings of women? It just never stops rattling my brain, this abrupt and complete replacement of women as the subordinated sex class with men who want to role play women.

The RFU’s decision means that trans women can continue playing women’s club rugby in England for now, provided their concentration of testosterone in serum has been less than 5 nmol/L continuously for at least 12 months. However, they are no longer eligible for selection for the Olympics or the Six Nations, competitions governed by World Rugby rules.

Or, rather, the RFU’s decision means that women cannot continue playing women’s club rugby in England without the risk of having to play against one or more men. This “inclusion” of trans women means either the exclusion of or danger to actual women. Giving women’s stuff to men entails taking that stuff away from women. Along with the danger there is also the fact that any man on a women’s team equals a woman who is not on that team – in other words the men who call themselves women will be taking places away from women. That’s not how this is supposed to work.

The RFU’s decision was greeted with disappointment by the women’s rights group Fair Play for Women. “Everyone knows that in a rough sport like rugby it is dangerous for males to play against females,” said the campaigning group’s Nicola Williams said. “And if it’s not safe, it can never be fair either. The science is clear. Growing up male will give transgender athletes a lifelong edge that simply cannot be fully reversed by a period of testosterone suppression.”

The RFU is simply punching women in the face. It’s disgusting.

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