Women in football are being censured for recognising sex for what it is - Tracey Smith

The FA instigated a national serious case panel during which the young woman (who is thought to be autistic) wept as she was grilled for three hours about her apparently ‘transphobic’ remarks made during a match against a ‘trans-inclusive’ so-called women’s team.

The plight of a young woman receiving such a disproportionate punishment for speaking about what she saw as an objective truth is the tip of a larger iceberg in football and in other sports.

In the FA alone, it is estimated that there are over 70 males playing in the women’s leagues at every level, all being permitted to do so due to an effective policy of self-ID being operated by the FA which is allowing anyone who identifies as a female to play in the team that ‘matches their gender’ identity. This is without any consideration of the girls and women being disadvantaged, at best, and put in grave danger, at worst, by being forced to play against players with far greater physical advantage.

In South Yorkshire, we have our own story of a male identifying as a woman causing a season-ending serious knee injury to an opposing player.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the unedifying spectacle of the Zambian footballer, Barbra Banda, being awarded BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year, despite previously failing a ‘gender eligibility test’ at the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.

The FA claims that this issue is ‘complex’, we see it very differently. We see a sport in which women are being censured for recognising sex for what it is, and in the case of football, this can result in serious injury for a girl or woman forced into tackling an opposing player of greater physical advantage.

When sports associations talk about making policies for transgender people for elite sports, it’s too easy for them to forget that elite sport only exists because of participation at grassroots level by tens of thousands of participants across the country.

Without players in the local leagues, there would not be Lionesses winning the European cup. To ignore the impact of unfairness in grassroots football, the FA is cutting off the supply chain. But it was the FA which, in 1921, banned women from playing football on its pitches for almost 50 years.

It seems for women to have a right to play our own sport is something we must continue to fight for. We want the sport to continue to be open to females at all levels to play, fairly, like it was before 1921 when it was a hugely popular spectator sport, as it is becoming again. Is banning a girl from the game she loves because she questions whether a male should be on the pitch with her a way to ensure this or are we in danger of going back to the ‘bad old days’?

Tracey Smith, the Sheffield Gender Critical Network.