Latest news with #FrancescaNeedham
Daily Mail
02-05-2025
- Sport
- Daily Mail
Transgender footballer who broke knee of female opponent and scored five goals in one match - as FA bans trans players from women's game
A transgender footballer was accused of leaving a female player with a season-ending injury, illustrating the consequences of the FA's now-abandoned policy of inclusion. Trans woman Francesca Needham was said to have accidentally broken the knee of an opponent who blocked her shot during a match in October 2023. But rival players are said to have feared for their safety in matches against her, and at least four teams in the Sheffield women's league boycotted games in response. One coach told The Telegraph at the time: 'Five minutes into our game it was obvious Francesca was biologically male. 'A lot of my harder-tackling players were bouncing off this person.' Ms Needham, 32, agreed to withdraw from games for Rossington Main FC Ladies following the incident – but said she was considering legal action. Last summer she was said to have played three friendlies for another local team and scored five goals in an 8-4 win. The FA was said to have discussed finding her a team at 'a higher level' under its former transgender policy, which dealt with individuals on a case-by-case basis. In contrast, two teenage footballers were sanctioned by the FA for asking whether trans women opponents were men. A 17-year-old was found guilty of discrimination and banned for six games for asking a player, 'Are you a man? – and an 18-year-old received the same punishment for telling a referee an opponent was 'obviously a man'. It comes as transgender women will no longer be able to play in women's football in England from June 1 after the Supreme Court ruling. The FA said it had updated its policy in light of last month's ruling that the words 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex. The governing body's transgender inclusion policy had been updated just prior to that ruling in London on April 16, and continued to allow transgender women to play in women's football provided they reduced testosterone levels. Those rule changes gave the FA ultimate discretion on permitting a trans woman to play, with consideration given to safety and fairness issues. Now though, the FA has gone further and barred transgender women from the women's game after acting on legal advice. An FA spokesperson said: 'We understand that this will be difficult for people who simply want to play the game they love in the gender by which they identify. 'We are contacting the registered transgender women currently playing to explain the changes and how they can continue to stay involved in the game.'
Telegraph
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Supreme Court message for sport is clear – transgender inclusion lunacy must end
It should never have required the highest court in the land to affirm that a man with a certificate cannot be a woman. But now that the Supreme Court verdict has been delivered, unanimously ruling that sex is defined by biology, the time has come to mount a decisive challenge to the sports governing bodies who continue to pretend that it is a matter of mere paperwork. For too long, this dangerous delusion has inflicted myriad outrages upon the nation's women, from a male in the Cambridge University women's Boat Race squad, to an all-male women's pool final, to a 17-year-old girl finding herself banned from six football matches for asking a male opponent, 'Are you a man?' Such absurdities are highlighted in the summary of the court's ruling in favour of For Women Scotland, describing how misinterpretations of the 2010 Equality Act have led to 'incoherence and impracticability' in the 'operations of provisions relating to women's fair participation in sport'. The language is legalistic, but the message is stark, acknowledging the cowardice of the sports authorities who have permitted men to injure women and enter female changing rooms purely by producing a Gender Recognition Certificate that can be bought for £6. FA must provide answers It feels a fitting moment to demand answers from the Football Association, whose policy on transgender inclusion represents Exhibit A in this lunacy. Quietly revised last month, without any public statement, it reads as if the recent dramatic rollback of gender ideology never happened. It enables male players to compete as women in the amateur game just so long as they can show, once a year, that their testosterone levels are below five nanomoles per litre – even when the upper limit of the average female range is 2.4. It presumes that the immutability of human biology can somehow be negotiated 'through dialogue'. It even manages to be ambiguous about women's entitlement to their own changing facilities, deflecting any decision to individual clubs. The dereliction of the most simple duty of care beggars belief. In September 2023, the FA was confronted with the case of Francesca Needham, a trans-identifying male accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent in a Sheffield women's league. Four teams refused to play against Needham's team in protest. Over 70 MPs and members of the House of Lords wrote that it was 'unthinkable' for an adult male to be allowed to play against women. Lord Triesman, the FA's former chairman, sharply criticised the organisation he once led, stressing how football was 'by far' the largest sport not to be defending the integrity of the female category. Still the FA refused to act, prioritising the views of a few noisy trans lobbyists above those of half the population. If you want the starkest example of its egregious stance, look at 'Appendix 2' to its policy, which asks those in the men's game to sign a waiver stating that they accept the 'increased injury risk' arising from sex differences, while presenting no equivalent question in the women's game. It leaves women to face such risk without their knowledge, never mind consent. The potential for unfairness could not be more clearly spelt out: 'I acknowledge and agree that I am voluntarily assuming the risk that I might suffer loss, injury, death or other damage as a result of my participation in the men's game.' And yet the expectation is that women will just tolerate it regardless. So ludicrous is the policy that it imagines men can play against women, provided their skill level is sufficiently mediocre. 'If match observation does not suggest that the player represents a risk to the safety and/or fair competition, the player will be granted eligibility,' it says. Ross Tucker, the sports scientist who has persuaded World Rugby to keep the women's game solely for women – how that could ever be deemed a contentious position in a brutal contact sport? – is savage in his condemnation. 'The FA policy is shambolic,' he says. 'Convoluted and illogical, it is a shrine to cowardice, intellectual dishonesty and its attitude towards women's sport. Imagine telling heavyweights they can fight middleweight boxers, because they're not all that good. 'It's fair to fight down – just don't be too strong or powerful.' It's preposterous. And the FA is doing it to women.' Widespread change needed Football is not the only major sport still to be indulging the activists. While the England and Wales Cricket Board has blocked males from masquerading as female in the elite division, it has signed off on self-ID in the grass-roots game, the level at which power disparities between men and women are most pronounced. This, apparently, is the compromise necessary in what it calls a 'complex area'. Except the Supreme Court did not detect much complexity. 'Sex has its biological meaning throughout this legislation,' it says of the Equality Act. ''Woman' always and only means a biological female of any age.' It required years of courageous campaigning by For Women Scotland for this to be expressed by some of the UK's most senior judges, just as it took months for The Telegraph to achieve a ruling by IPSO, the press regulator, that it was legitimate to use the term 'biological male' when discussing sport's transgender scandal. Now the matter is even more clear-cut, with the truth that men are not women finally enshrined in law. To think, sports have so long tiptoed around this conclusion for fear that it was too 'toxic'. Well, they are officially out of excuses.
