Trangender inclusive sports guidelines had positive impact for community

RNZ News

24-07-2025

Rugby NZ says the guidelines had been valuable to the organisation.
Photo:
©creativenature / 123RF
The removal of guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people in community sport will further alienate people from participating, a member of a health advocacy group says.
Rugby NZ says it's been using the advice and found it very helpful and valuable.
The government has ordered Sport New Zealand to
scrap its work on guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people
in community sport.
It has also removed the document from its website.
First published in 2022, the guidelines do not dictate what individual organisations can decide about participation but they have been available on Sport NZ's website, providing advice based on health research and testimony from those with lived experience.
Last year then-minister for sport Chris Bishop asked Sport NZ to review the guidelines for "safety and fairness" and update the principles.
The current Minister for Sport and Recreation Mark Mitchell said the government has decided to leave decision making to individual sporting codes and there was nothing wrong with the content in the guidelines.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was about consistency and safety.
Member of the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa, student nurse and football player, Avery Zavoda, told
Checkpoint
she was incredibly disappointed to hear the guidelines were being scrapped altogether.
"I feel like the previous advice from Sport NZ was robust and it helped smaller sport clubs and organisations with their inclusion policies as well as also providing guidelines around bullying, discrimination and harassment. I was really sad to see that all of those had been removed now," Zavoda said.
Sports Minister Mark Mitchell.
Photo:
RNZ / Mark Papalii
The
"overarching principle" of the document
was inclusion.
"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," the document said.
The guiding principles were based around:
The principles were not mandatory and were not rules or criteria, as Sport NZ noted it would not be possible to provide a one-size-fits-all approach across every code.
Despite not being mandatory, Zavoda said the guidelines were beneficial to small clubs who may not have the resources to do their own research into best practice guidelines.
"It's taking away a tool that community sport organisations can use to know that they are doing the right thing by their community."
Zavoda said she struggled to find a social football team and organisation running the tournaments that would be respectful.
"I know many other people have struggled as well. Even though there... was guidance from Sport NZ about our inclusion.
"I certainly feel that those guidelines had an impact, I felt like there was more that could be done, taking steps forward rather than now taking steps back and I know that this decision will lead to the feelings of many trans and non-binary people to further feel alienated from being able to play sport - a critical key in health."
National's coalition with New Zealand First contains a commitment to "ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender".
Asked about NZ First saying scrapping the guidelines aligns with the party standing up for "safety and fairness" in sport Zavoda said: "This is not elite sport, it's not about an advantage, you're playing casual community sport, like the kind that you or I should be able to go to, and in that community sport you have a diverse range of physiques, builds and that's across both trans and cisgender people."
RNZ also spoke to Lenny, who said the point of community sport is to have fun and the removal of the guidelines just excludes people.
"I know it's a divisive thing, transgender people in sport, but all we want to do is be the people that we want to be and be allowed to do that."
Lenny said the experience of playing sport as a child was unpleasant.
"Going on a sports field, feeling completely overwhelmed and isolated around all these screaming boys just being boys and...I would just stand around on the field not knowing what to do and trying to avoid everybody, so it's not a fun experience."
Waikato University's Holly Thorpe, who helped draft the guidelines, said they were written because sports clubs wanted some help.
"Sport NZ and our community sports clubs and organisations all want inclusion, they want everybody in New Zealand society to have access to supportive, inclusive, safe environments to participate.
"This decision today is not a step towards that."
Labour's rainbow issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert has labelled the decision a step backwards and said "this government keeps on kicking people down", and the Human Rights Commission has called this a "sad day".
Green Party spokesperson for Takatāpui and Rainbow communities Benjamin Doyle said the directive showed the coalition had once again failed rainbow communities.
NZ Rugby says it had been using the advice and found it very helpful and valuable.
NZ Rugby's head of participation for community rugby, Mike Hester, told
Checkpoint
moving forward, the organisation will be guided by values and also by the voices of its participants.
"They provided quite a lot of useful advice around how to understand the issue, how to... improve the awareness of some of the challenges that go in the space, so some of that advice was really useful and I think others in the sector have found it useful to help guide their thinking in this space."
The guidelines had confirmed a lot of the issues NZ Rugby needed to think about as it moved forward with a community position.
Asked if it was important people could play on a team that aligns with their gender, Hester said a key part of community sport was being able to access it and participate in a way that was important to each individual.
"We would always feel inclusion is a really important value in rugby, it's a game for all shapes and sizes, everybody's welcome" he said.
Ensuring safe participation was also something Rugby NZ would need to think about moving forward, he said.
Hester was asked if Sports NZ saw allowing people to play with a team that aligns with their gender as inclusion over fairness, as suggested by NZ First leader Winston Peters.
"When we spoke to our communities about this matter over the last couple of years, the themes that came through, particularly from participants in the women's category... what was really prominent was inclusion and safety," Hester said.
"Fairness was less prominent for them because in the community space it's actually about other motivations to participate."