An inclusive environment for all participants

On it goes.

The England and Wales Cricket Board is reviewing its transgender policy before its £20m semi-professional women’s competition starts next year.

Under ECB rules the eligibility of players in women’s domestic cricket is determined by a player’s own self-identified gender, with no medical requirement for those who have transitioned from male to female to lower their testosterone levels.

In other words it’s entirely verbal and unilateral. Player says he’s a woman, he’s a woman, end of story. Shut up you there in the back. Player says he’s a woman, player gets to play on women’s team. That’s inkloooosive. It’s also totally fair because women can do exactly the same thing.

However, Claire Connor, the managing director of women’s cricket, hinted that the policy could be tweaked at the elite level so that any trans woman playing in the ECB’s new eight-team competition would have to bring her testosterone down in line with International Olympic Committee guidelines.

But muscles, skeleton, lung capacity, speed? Pfffff. None of your business, and don’t you want to be inkloooosive? You bitch?

“The ECB’s currently isn’t a medically driven policy. It’s a more socially inclusive policy and we will be reviewing that over the coming months,” said Connor…

To put it another way, the ECB’s current policy is social rather than physical. But sport is physical. The issue isn’t medical so much as it is physical, and the ECB is just blithely ignoring the physical differences between female bodies and male bodies. Being “socially inclusive” is a good in many contexts, but not all of them. Look at ballet for instance. Professional ballet isn’t “inclusive,” because it places enormous physical demands on the dancers, and only those who can meet the demands get to perform before a paying audience. That’s how that works. Sport works the same way, and because humans are sexually dimorphic, it is only fair to divide sports accordingly. The ECB is weirdly pretending to be unaware of any of that.

The ECB later said it reviewed all its policies on an annual basis. “Our position on transgender participation will be reviewed as part of our ongoing commitment to regularly review all governance policies,” a spokesperson added. “In our current policy, the eligibility of players is based on one’s own self-identified gender, with no medical requirement. We are unlikely to make any unilateral changes to this stance. We are proud that this model promotes an inclusive environment for all participants in domestic and recreational cricket.”

But it doesn’t. It promotes an environment that excludes women for the sake of men who say they are women. That’s not an inclusive environment for all participants.

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