Bigots target Community AFL's inclusive policies

A barrage of articles have been released today claiming so-called “biological women” in their 40s and 50s have been forced to compete against transgender women in community AFL competitions.

The articles seem to originate from Caroline Marcus at Sky News, whose Twitter timeline is currently full of retweets from known anti-trans campaigners.

Unlike what those with anti-trans beliefs like Caroline Marcus wish to portray, Community sport is not a free-for-all of contact and aggression. It is a community endeavor, where games are played in a friendly manner among community members, all wishing to have a good time. To attempt to exclude transgender women from that is to make an obvious attempt at removing transgender women from aspects of society.

Sky News and its affiliate Murdoch Press are trying to paint transgender women who wish to participate in community games as being unusually aggressive or dangerous.

It’s quite telling that in both their articles, Caroline Marcus and Josh Alston from Sky News and Daily Mail, respectively, failed to substantiate their fearmongering with actual evidence. Despite their alarmist fearmongering, they were not able to produce a single example of cisgender women being injured by transgender women in these competitions. This is despite these sports having incredibly high injury rates. Instead, they resort to citing an injury from a completely unrelated incident involving a man, using it as a speculative basis to suggest that women could potentially face similar risks.

This tactic is as transparent as it is disingenuous.

There are risks of injuries when you play contact sports, but portraying transgender women as being uniquely violent/aggressive or dangerous is bigotry, plain and simple.

It's worth noting the glaring contradiction in the arguments put forth by those opposing the inclusion of transgender women in community sports. Many of these critics claim, on one hand, that they have "no problem with transgender women". However the language that Queensland player Tracy Diprose uses in her quote for the Daily Mail “You can dress like a woman, you can act like a woman” is plainly bigoted and makes transgender identity out to be a kind of play/performance and not authentic.

This disingenuous stance reveals the underlying prejudice at play. If someone truly has no problem with transgender women, then they should also support their right to participate fully in all aspects of life, including community sports. To claim otherwise is to reveal that the issue isn't about fairness or safety at all—it's about discomfort with transgender women being visible and active in these spaces.

However, as with all bigotry-based arguments, it’s important to reiterate the facts. Biomedical factors related to puberty (i.e. lung size, bone density, hip-to-knee joint angle) do not predict athletic performance.

This kind of rhetoric is a thinly veiled attempt to dress up prejudice as a reasonable concern, but they continue to fail to stand up to scrutiny.