Blazing a trail
The BBC celebrates a male rugby player who has moved to a women’s team:
Kelly Morgan is a trailblazer.
Born Nicholas Gareth Morgan, she played representative rugby for east Wales as a teenager.
Then he spent ten years “wrestling with gender identity” and now is playing with (and against) the wims.
Transgender women participating in female sport is a divisive subject, and one not confined to Welsh rugby.
Brushing it off with “divisive” is lazy and cowardly. The BBC might as well say it’s “divisive” for men to punch women in the face whenever they get annoyed.
Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) guidelines – which are “fully committed to the principles of equality” – state Kelly can play providing her blood-measured testosterone levels are within a certain range.
They can say they’re fully committed to the principles of equality all they like, but that doesn’t make it true, and letting people with male bodies trample over women has nothing to do with any “principles of equality.” It has to do with letting men get what they want while women get stomped.
Kelly has been taking estrogen for 18 months. Kelly still has a male body.
At nearly 6ft she stands out among her team-mates, and club captain Jessica Minty-Madley recounts a time she folded an opponent “like a deckchair”.
I guess Minty-Madley is ok with that because the folded one was an opponent? But that’s called “cheating” and it’s frowned on.
But coach Wayne Mansell notes: “I’ve seen Kelly struggling more than a lot of the girls with the demands our of training.”
That said, Kelly, 33, accepts transgender women may have an advantage in terms of size and strength.
“I do feel guilty, but what can you do?” she says. “I don’t go out to hurt anybody. I just want to play rugby.”
What can you do? What can you do? WHAT CAN YOU DO? You can refrain from cheating, that’s what. You can grasp that you feel guilty for a reason and stop doing the bad thing you’re doing that makes you feel guilty. Play mixed-sex non-professional rugby if there is such a thing, or play on a men’s team if there isn’t, but don’t make women pay the price for your desire to play rugby while pretending to be a woman.
Brian Minty, who founded the team four years ago, says: “I’ve always taken rugby as a totally inclusive sport and we’re happy to welcome Kelly to the club.”
Inclusive how? Anyone can be on the team, no matter what the level of skill or fitness or preparation? Toddlers can play alongside huge adult men?
“Inclusive” in this context ought to mean no arbitrary barriers – no exclusion for race or class or sexual orientation or political allegiance or immigration status and the like. But if you have a women’s team, as they do, it’s not arbitrary to exclude men from the women’s team. Possession of a male body is not an arbitrary attribute in this context.
“One of the main things Kelly does is give confidence to the other people around her. We’ve got a number of people who’ve only just started playing.”
He can’t resist a joke, though, adding: “She’s going to be a good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training.”
Oh hahahahahahahaha that is hilarious, it’s funny the way Trump’s jokes are funny. Hahahahahaha he might injure the women hahahahahaha what could be funnier than that.
Minty-Madley says Kelly is not treated differently to other members of the squad.
“Kelly has become completely and utterly absorbed into the team,” she says.
“She’s one of us. She comes in, trains hard, plays hard and parties hard with us afterwards.
“She folded a girl like a deckchair during a game, which was quite funny, but they’re still friends.”
So funny. So very hilariously uproariously funny.
Mansell sees Kelly as a great addition to his squad.
“Straight away we just saw there was a load of ability there,” he says.
“Some days are good, some days are bad, but at the end of the day can you really exclude people?”
Can you really exclude men from playing on women’s teams? Yes of course you can, and you have to.
If transwomen are women, why can’t Kelly be a trailblazer by being the first woman to play on a men’s team?
Everybody wins!
Ah, but you see, if Kelly played on a male team, there is a high likelihood that Kelly wouldn’t win. That’s really what this is all about, winning.
And whoever said “Cheaters never win” was so, so, so wrong.
Okay, so _almost_ everybody wins.
Gotta love the passive voice to remove personal agency, a tried and tested tactic by tactics everywhere. “A wrong thing happened, oh well” as if Kelly had no hand in enrolling on the women’s team. Maybe he enrolled on the male team originally, but then a genie popped out and revealed that he had actually signed on for the female team? And maybe there’s a geas in place, making the membership magically binding?? Kelly might be the victim of mystical forces here!
And what a blow for inclusivity and those “principles of equality” that would be.
(It really would be a stand for those things if trans-identified males played on male teams. But it wouldn’t feed the autogynephilic fantasy, so they’re not gonna do it.)
I mean a positive blow–a blow for, not against–in case that’s not clear(?)
Many contact sports Rugby and Football (soccer) amongst them forbid girls and women playing with males (i.e. in male leagues) for their own safety precisely because male players are bigger, faster and stronger.
In New Zealand there have recently been examples in both codes where a girl playing in a mixed sex youth grade for a school team has been told they can’t play in a competition, because safety. In one case the team persisted in playing her and they were told if they won they would not receive any competition points.
So, females are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The reality is that a few females would be competitive in mixed teams at social and club level either because of their skill or unusual strength/size. Most women are not going to compete with a similarly graded cohort of males and especially not at representative level. New Zealand has some fantastic female rugby players for instance. They’d smash me. But could they cut it in the All Blacks? No.
An example. The latest stats I could find for the All Blacks was an average height of 191cm and weight of 103.9kg. The Black Ferns, 171cm and 80.9kg. What those stats don’t show is that the average physique of the women looks more like a player from the 1950’s. Big, strong and fit, but like an amateur who trains in their spare time (which until a year or two ago was the case). The women have visible body fat. Some of them a lot. The male players – visible body fat is now a rarity. The male players have a speed and musculature that wouldn’t be out of place in an American Football team. As a comparison, the 1955 All Blacks (amateurs) weighed in at an average of 87.2kg and around 180cm tall.
The other thing these stats don’t show is that in the men’s team there is very little variation between the tallest and the shortest, the lightest and the heaviest. The two smallest men in the current team, by a large margin, would be average height and weight (above) in the women’s team. Most are close to or above 180cm and are between 90 and 110kg. In the woman’s team the heaviest player weighs over twice as much as the lightest player (125kg vs 58kg) and the height range is 155 to 183 cm (tallest not being the heaviest).