Your friend may dominate you but she’d have trouble at a professional level against male athletes. Didn’t the Matilda’s lose like 6-0 to an under 16’s boys team?!
Physical ability isn’t just refined to sex either, look at age groups for kids. Again it’s the reason we have under 12’s, 14’s and 16’s. It’s why they don’t let kids get drafted until a certain age. There would be some kids that could play at 16 but there is a blanket rule in place, not a case by case exemption.
As you said there are outliers but you can’t have a solution that will please everyone as there simply isn’t one. Because of that you have to take the factual, scientific route. Unless you want to have a completely open competition, where there isn’t a men’s or women’s league and it’s just the best of the best - something I actually wouldn’t be against. But we don’t have that so they can’t mix.
Personally, I think Hannah being knocked back had quite a lot do to with her being transgender and even more to do with the AFL’s obsession with their ‘image’ and marketing.
Hannah’s a big girl, tall and strong, but let me tell you, when I played VWFL I played against some big, strong girls who took no crap and would knock you for six if you got in their way. It was a tough, hard competition that was, in many ways, reminiscent of the way footy was played in the 70s and 80s. Not one of us would have batted an eyelid at Hannah being in the comp or her size and height.
But the AFLW has been very carefully staged managed and the girls at all… what I I would call acceptably female. Even barring a few tatts here and there, they are acceptably female. Lots of long hair, pretty faces and lots of slim but sporty builds. None of the big, solid girls I played with. None of the… well, I think they’d be the first ones to call themselves butch dykes… that I played with. The AFL wants to have women’s football so they looked good, so they look progressive but they don’t want an image that makes men recoil and go, “Ugh, what a bunch of butch dykes. I’m not watching that!”
The AFL want the pretty image of women’s football that appeals to men. Not the kind of girls I played with, with their short cropped hair and their occasional missing teeth and their muscles and big solid builds. (Not that there weren’t the slim but sporty, long haired girls playing but they weren’t the only type of girl playing. There was as much of a range of builds as you see in men’s football).
That was the bit that intrigued me. “No you can’t play this coming year due to your size verses the other females, however, you can apply again next time”.
It is all about the timing of the decision, which left no time for an appeal, let alone finding out whether appeal avenues were available and financial resources to appeal.
It is not being presented as a health issue, but unfair advantage. Does the AFL have any other standards related to physique or stamina in male players?
They were saying on TR that the rules (Olympic I think) are that she needed to be on hormone treatment for at least 4 years and it hasn’t been that long.
Will some please explain to me how she can play under the same rules in Canberra AFL approved but then the AFL says she cannot play in the AFLW League? It makes no sense. Just bullsh1t!
Could be a mix of three reasons why she can play in the ACT, connected to AFL powers over drafting and playing in ACT , plus different ACT laws on equal opportunity and human rights. IIRC, the ACT was one of the first governments to bring in a human rights bill.
To her credit she seems comfortable with the decision and happy to wait until next year. Would be tough living in society as a transgender person, let alone going public like this.
Hope she plays for essendon one day and dominates.
Incorrect.
“Under the new rules, a man transitioning to a woman must undergo hormone therapy and demonstrate that the total level of male testosterone in the athlete’s blood has been below 10 nanomols per liter for at least a year prior to competing.”