Last week the ICC made a change to their gender eligibility rules, banning anybody from playing women’s international cricket if they have “been through any form of male puberty, regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken”.
The ruling effectively ends the international career of Canada’s Danielle McGahey, and while she as the first and only international transgender cricketer is the sole person directly affected by the ban, the decision will undoubtedly also dampen the spirits of trans cricket fans – players and non-players alike – and embolden the increasingly fervent online transphobe community.
The anti-trans reaction to this ICC ruling can broadly be split into two camps: the outright and openly bigoted, and the group of people I think it’s more interesting to investigate further. There are those who will stop themselves short of the most blatantly, aggressively transphobic behaviour but will broadly align themselves on the same side.
“I am not at all transphobic. I’m happy to use anyone’s preferred pronouns! I just think for safety women should only play against biological females!”
“I support anyone’s right to be trans, but not their right to play international cricket. Or professional cricket. Or probably amateur cricket really that hardly sounds fair either.”
The descent into rabid, more openly bigoted transphobia will often begin with the latter and slide with time into more extreme positions. This is evidenced in the behaviour demonstrated by some of Britain’s formerly beloved writers. JK Rowling in 2020 would tweet that she loved her trans sisters but felt that the freedom to talk about sex based rights was important, and JK Rowling in 2023 tweets the word “no” next to an image saying “Trans Women Are Women”.
Transphobes don’t open their pitch with ideas like “trans women are not women” as these are not really popular outside of their online inner-circles – your regular man on the street, frankly, doesn’t give a shit.
You are instead invited to accept more moderate ideas like “I have no problem with trans women, but we need to make sure safeguarding is in place to protect nefarious actors from pretending to be trans in order to gain access to women-only spaces”.
Once you’ve accepted this premise then the lines begin to blur. The hypothetical trans people and nefarious actors start to become used interchangeably, and the previously agreed foundation that the discussion is based just on the nefarious actors (who, just to be clear, do not exist) becomes deliberately forgotten.
Transphobes will pick a few, contentious battlegrounds like public toilet access or women’s sports with the intent of appealing to these ‘moderates’ with objections that are easy enough to agree with on the surface. It doesn’t matter that these situations are vanishingly rare, or already safeguarded against, or not rooted in any sort of fact or science; the objective is to steer public discussion to a place where it is more socially acceptable to come down on the anti-trans side of the fence.
Once you’ve spent weeks ensuring all media discussion about “the trans issue” is delivered solely through the lens of ‘perverts pretending to be women to gain access to public toilets’ you’ve already succeeded at muddying the waters enough that the trans woman and the nefarious actor (who again, is not real!) are forever conflated
.The size of the moderate wing props up the bigoted wing, emboldening them to be openly and unashamedly hateful, and increasing the pool of potential marks who can become sucked into the whirlpool until they, too, spend 18 hours a day frothing at the mouth online about strangers’ genitals.
This is how we arrive at this ICC ruling and real lack of a widespread backlash. Transphobes have in large parts succeeded at starting from the nefarious actor and working up. “It should not be possible for a man to falsely declare themselves a woman and compete in women’s sports” is the gateway drug to a more explicitly transphobic “women shouldn’t have to play sports against biological males”.
It was, of course, already the case that men can’t just start playing women’s cricket. In cricket, as with most other sports, there is a requirement for trans athletes to transition over a number of years, to undergo hormone therapy, and to – sometimes invasively – have testosterone levels monitored and controlled. The idea that any cisgender man would choose to – or frankly even be able to – dishonestly go through this process in order to be the big fish in the women’s cricketing pond is farcical. It’s hard enough for trans women to access gender-affirming care and involves endless scrutiny and intrusive questioning – let alone the daily transphobia they face for being visibly trans. Are we expected to believe anyone would go through this just to be slightly more successful at sports?
There is a latent sexism underpinning this as well. The idea that your average bloke could pad up and dominate the Heyhoe-Flint Trophy is laughable, and patronisingly underestimates the levels of skill, talent, and dedication in the professional game. “But a half decent male pro could just switch genders and dominate the women’s game!” buddy, I wish male cricketers thought enough about the women’s game to consider it worth dominating.
The evidence of there being residual physical advantages after transitioning are all but non-existent. Trans women do not end up unfairly dominating women’s sports wherever they can compete. If a cis woman is playing against a trans woman with a dangerous physical advantage the issue is that one of them is playing the wrong standard of cricket and this would be exactly the same issue if both players were cis.
Then at the bottom of it all you have poor Danielle McGahey, whose international career is over just a couple of months after it began. Who, again, is left by the ICC opened up to abuse for daring to be a trans woman who plays cricket. The outcry about invisible nefarious actors ends up hurting her the most. Her enormous advantages from being assigned male at birth allowed her an unglamorous one-week international career where she averaged less than 20 and didn’t even bowl at 95mph once.
In a lot of ways, that isn’t even the point either. It wouldn’t have mattered if she were actually really good. She’s a woman playing women’s sport and that’s all there is to it. One day a trans person will overcome the enormous social obstacles (stigma, lack of health resources, bigotry, inbuilt biases, body dysmorphia and various mental health issues that are far more common among trans people) to rise to the top of their sport, and when they do that person should be applauded and celebrated.
The trick that transphobes have successfully pulled off is in convincing the moderate person who believes that trans women are women, and that women play women’s sport, that there’s an invisible middle step that means A can’t lead to B. We have to keep pushing back against this.
Written by Will (@ohlookitswill_) with some additions from Ildikó (your main daisy admin yelling about transphobia)
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