Because of a trans-inclusive policy, we were forced to tolerate behaviour from a man that we never would have accepted anywhere else.
I’ve played football since I was a little girl. Back then there were no girls’ teams, so I played with the boys. It wasn’t always easy; there were unpleasant comments, mostly from dads on the sidelines.
I took a long break but I got back into football as an adult when I joined a local team in Wales. On my very first session I noticed there was a man training with us. I wasn’t going to let it stop me getting back into playing, but over time his behaviour made me very uncomfortable. He would approach younger girls to ask them to tie his hair up, behaved in an obsessive and stalker-like manner and made uncomfortable and inappropriate comments. He had a warning over his behaviour. He would still take individuals’ phone numbers from the team WhatsApp group and send unsolicited private messages. The final straw was when he showed sexual images to a player’s child. He was asked to leave the club.
In a women-only space, this sort of stuff just isn’t an issue: we don’t worry that female players will be sexually inappropriate around our children. But because this man had been accepted onto the team “as a woman”, we were forced to tolerate behaviour we never would have tolerated anywhere else. If he’d been a stranger in the pub, we could have walked away. Instead, if we wanted to play women’s football we had to put up with his presence being imposed on us in the name of “being kind”.
On top of this, men are faster and stronger, and they hit much harder when tackling. Unless you’ve played against both women and men, you won’t grasp how vast the difference is. I wrote to the Football Association of Wales about how its “trans inclusive” policy was putting women in uncomfortable positions and outright danger. But I got nowhere. Eventually I moved to a team across the border in England, where women’s football is genuinely female-only. Now I can just enjoy playing football.