Ken Maclaren: Sport New Zealand’s Transgender Policy - Inclusion Over Fairness and Safety

What a depressing read and document Sport New Zealand’s ‘Guiding Principles for the Inclusion of Transgender People in Community Sport’ is.  

Underwritten by their proposed 'overarching principle' that ‘Every New Zealander has the right to participate in Sport and to be treated with respect, empathy and positive regard. Transgender people can take part in sports in the gender they identify with.’

I have no real issue with the first line, other than every participant also has the obligation to treat sport with respect, empathy and positive regard. By trying to ‘muscling in’ on categories to which they don’t and can’t belong too, trans women (men pretending to be women) treat every other participant, coach, volunteer and sport itself disrespectfully, with no empathy and with negative regard.

Community sport (the vast majority of sport in New Zealand) is being instructed that the feelings of transgender participants override sport’s basic premise, that fairness matters.

The science on the participation of transgender women and girls (biological males) in women’s sport is extremely clear. They have an unfair advantage whenever they take part in women’s sport. They do not lose that advantage with testosterone suppression.

The depressing part is that Sport NZ’s CEO Raylene Castle, Minister of Sport, Grant Robertson and anyone who has a modicum of understanding of sport also know the science and beyond a shadow of a doubt know full well they are sacrificing women and girl’s sport on the altar of inclusion.

Sport has numerous protected categories both for fairness and for safety. Sport has weight categories, age categories as well as girls and boys and women and men.  

Some sport is open to both genders at a young age then separates for obvious reasons before puberty. A small number of sports are gender neutral throughout e.g. equestrian events, because the sports decided that for them gender separation isn’t an issue.

For every trans girl (biological boy) or trans woman (biological man) included in a result or sports team a girl or woman loses her place. What the Sport New Zealand Guidelines are in fact saying are that the feelings of the trans participants matters more than the rights of all the girls and women who are pushed out of their sport. The report is telling these women and girls that for them fairness doesn’t matter.

The report claims that it’s about community sport and not elite sport. This is irrelevant. No athlete takes up sport and gets picked for a national team. All sports participants start at a community level. It’s at a community level that the first sporting steps are taken.

Lisa Carrington, Valerie Adams, Ruby Tui, Emma Twigg and many more truly great New Zealand Sportswomen all started life at community sport and worked their way to the top of their game in women’s sport as a result of many, many years of hard work, training, successes and disappointments.

How many places being taken by biological boys in girls’ teams will be too many?

How many girls will be put off sport for life because of the unfairness of boys taking their places?

How many biological boys in a girls’ team is going to be enough for real girls’ teams not to want to join in?

How many times will your daughters need to say ‘Mum they’ve got a boy in their team, it’s not fair?’ before sports bodies agree and make a stand.

Including trans women and girls isn’t inclusive at any level. It’s exclusive, it’s excluding all those women and girls whose place in sport is being taken by biological males. Every James who decides he’s now Jemima and taking part in sport is taking a deserving girl or woman’s spot.

How ironic in a year and a nation where women’s sport has so many figureheads and inspirational teams and individuals that the body set up to ‘look after’ all sport is in fact doing the opposite.

How ironic that just a few years ago the same Sport New Zealand was looking at it’s strategy for women and girls women-and-girls-govt-strategy.pdf (sportnz.org.nz) ‘Enabling women and girls to realise their potential in and through sport and active recreation’.

You will have noticed that there’s no mention of transmen. Jemima’s who change to James don’t cause unfairness in men’s and boy’s sport that happens the other way round.

It’s telling that in the Tokyo Olympics there was a ‘transman’ the former Rebbeca Quinn in the Canadian team. Now known as Quinn and having had a double mastectomy (and presumably not taken any of the hormones that would have prohibited her participation), Quinn was a member of the Canadian Women’s soccer team. The reality being that if there was a men’s soccer team, Quinn wouldn’t have been good enough.

Going back to the Olympics and New Zealand’s shameful first. Selecting Laurel Hubbard wasn’t ‘stunning and brave’. It was ridiculous.

Bear in mind that there’s not one person on the selection panel or in the New Zealand Olympic Committee who didn’t know that Laurel Hubbard had an unfair advantage in any women’s lifting competition. It was an outrageous joke on our sporting heritage.

According to all rules and policies of the International Olympic Committee, the New Zealand Olympic Committee and NZ Weightlifting Laurel Hubbard ticked all the boxes necessary to warrant and deserve selection.

Had Laurel been a biological woman, she should have been picked to the same standards as any other deserving athlete.

In my view despite those rules and policies, the selectors should have refused to pick Laurel. If only they’d had the ‘balls’ (groan) to not pick Laurel. I’ve no doubt that Laurel could and would have appealed and quite probably the selection decision would have been overturned at a legal step in the appeals process. However, a very important point would have been made.  It shouldn’t be up to genuine women competing out there to make this point as happened at the Pacific Games in 2019. If you scroll down on the link below, you’ll find that picture of the two Samoan lifters who placed second and third, but should have been first and second, on the podium with Laurel Hubbard. Transgender weightlifter Hubbard beats home favourites after driving incident (insidethegames.biz)

High profile women, current women athletes and others who speak out on this, are bullied, ‘cancelled’ and lose money. Today’s young women at sport in all levels need their place in girls and women’s sport protected. Women and girls shouldn’t be driven out of their own category by biological boys and men no matter how they feel. Fairness matters in sport at all levels.

Reading through the document it’s clear that the intention is all clubs and participants accept without question the ‘guidelines’ from Sport New Zealand.

In the long term this would prove to be a disaster for much of our community sports clubs and codes that make up the vast majority of the sporting landscape of New Zealand.

Push back is needed. Sports Codes should follow the example of Boxing New Zealand and be honest, clear cut and leave no room for ambiguity. ‘Boxing New Zealand will stand firm on the gender rules we have at present. We have two gender categories: one is male, one is female. Boxing New Zealand will not allow any cross-gender participation in either biological sex category in competition Boxing.’

Sport New Zealand promote themselves as a guardian (kaitiaki) of sport in our country. This policy is exactly the opposite. It’s an assault on sport itself.

Sport New Zealand are acting like a dentist who recommends you mouth wash with a sugar laden fizzy drink every night to protect your teeth. Of course no dentist would ever do this, we shouldn’t and mustn’t accept Sport New Zealand’s transgender guidelines. Sport of today and the future needs us to push back.

I’m, Ken Maclaren. I’m a sixty one year old bloke and have a background in sport of more than fifty years. I first went for a run with my Dad in 1971 and have been involved in endurance sport ever since. Over those fifty years I started out in a local club and school team. Twenty years later I competed for Great Britain and Wales for a few years. Now I swim with my pals and jog slowly round the local sports park and occasionally take part in community sport.  For twenty five years I coached athletes of all ages and both genders. In future months I’ll be blogging HERE on ways in which sport can push back against this insanity.