New guidelines for transgender participation unveiled by UK sports councils

I'm well aware how hard it is to get girls into sport - and as one of the first competitive girls in my discipline almost all of my early training was mixed. I was comfortably beating the other women in my local clubs so trained against men who were sensible enough to make the matches tactically useful for both of us.

My DD is 6 and if she didn't play boys (tennis) she'd have no one to play - actually she's physically stronger and taller than the boys her own age, which is not uncommon at this age.

I'm really pleased with this, particularly as it covers grassroots amateur sport too. That's really important, not just because future elite competitors come up through grassroots teams, but also from a safety perspective. People who are new to a sport or don't have a good base level of fitness are much more likely to get injured or cause injury to others, because they don't know how to manoeuvre safely (see Roller Derby for example). That injury risk only gets bigger if you put men and women on the same field.

Not quite sure how this will play out for non-competitive events like group rides / sportives, but I think it clearly makes the point that single-sex events are legal, rather than that inclusion should be the priority. That should make it easier to defend wanting to run a single-sex event.

I can't see that tennis is more "contact" than fencing...

If people aren't being stupidly competitive about grassroots sport it should not be an issue - mixed doubles exists after all.

If a person wants to be super competitive, play on the "open/men's" team, if they can't play sensibly with the women's team then they get dropped and encouraged to play at their own level.

There is no fun competing at a level too low for you. I'd have no fun competing against U13/U15s or in a novice competition, U17s are a different challenge (less technically/tactically sophisticated but physically capable and probably faster than me), U20s are like seniors and I'm right at the bottom of the masters age group where the older masters (O60) are all about tactical cunning and bamboozling the young..

You know how hard it is to get girls and women into sport and then to stay in sport ?

There has been several studies done on this

And at no point was there ever a conclusion that having boys and men playing any sport with women and girls was a good idea

It’s blizzare that it’s being put forward here as a good idea

The issue will be drawing the line of where grassroots meets competitive - so tennis leagues - maybe the firsts have to obey "competitive" guidance but 2nd team and below can be open.

But elite athletes generally come up through the ranks of grass roots sports.

I think it would be better to distinguish between competitive and social sport.

Tennis is for sure a contact sport at any level

Ever been hit by a ball travelling at maybe 50 mph ?

Hard enough to get women and girls to stay in tennis without having men playing in their leagues

This feels like really good news. While I share the frustration that it's taken so long and so much effort to state the obvious, I think this is a really important thing to happen. It feels like the first time that an official organisation has quite clearly stated, and clearly evidenced, that there is a conflict here, and that there is need for a careful, process to work out a resolution, balancing safety, fairness and inclusion. I appreciate they haven't made it clear that is must be in that order, but I think once you start a conversation about balancing those, it becomes obvious that it must be.

I think World Rugby got there first, but I suppose their work opened the door to this, and I hope that this now opens the door for nuanced conversations in individual sports which have until now been completely shut down by the usual howling that any discussion is a hate crime. And hopefully opens up space in other environments too - 'no debate' is no more...

Very interesting insights above into the slowness of the insurance industry @NiceGerbil I hope we don't have to wait for cases where women have been injured or killed for them to catch up. That's what I've been frightened of until now.

Watching the Baroness' webinar on Friday, I really agreed with Helen Joyce's anger at the failure of official bodies to engage with this issue and step up to acknowledge that conflicts exist and need to be worked through. I've found it really worrying wondering how we can find a way forward. This feels like a very important first step.

In fencing, to an extent a combat/contact sport, women and men have always trained together and smaller tournaments might well be mixed. Was at a mixed competition the other week, it worked well although it had no ranking consequences. In general there are no safety concerns with experienced fencers unless there is previous bad feeling between them other than a very few, usually less skilled individuals who would be a problem in a single sex competition.

When I started out even serious UKcompetitions were mixed, until the numbers increased sufficiently to sustain women only events, so there's a lot of experience on the "safety" side as well as a decent amount of data to suggest how competitive fairness would pan out...

As ever, reality is a TERF

I have no issue with full inclusion at grassroots level sports for non contact type sports (tennis, badminton, table tennis) or even contact sports where males and females regularly train together (fencing). I have even less issue with mass participation running events. The issue will be drawing the line of where grassroots meets competitive - so tennis leagues - maybe the firsts have to obey "competitive" guidance but 2nd team and below can be open.

Perhaps mixed team events should become more of a thing in grassroots sports where there are no pressing safety concerns. This might well add competitive opportunities for women in sports where there are fewer women - might easier to field a mixed than a women's team!

The basic underlying unwritten message I get from that statement, though, is:

Males are males, males remain male despite 'transitioning' and males will always remain male.

Which I think is perhaps quite helpful to anyone who has been dazzled by rainbow theory in the past few years.

I think it's excellent. The option of an open category anyone can enter and female makes sense, there probably won't be enough trans people for a third group although that may change. It means trans women are less likely to win things as they only have an advantage over females but giving transwomen a competitive advantage was never supposed to be the point of the exercise, it was to let them compete.

I genuinely cannot understand why they don't compete in the male category but under their new female names, female clothes, etc. We'd soon get used to seeing the odd female name in the list of males.

That's what our local boys' football team does. Stern warnings to the other boys not to take the piss and to remember that 'Ollie' was now 'Katie'. Job done. The worst that seems to happen is that they sometimes yell the wrong name when passing. That strikes me as proper inclusivity.

I wonder if Alison McGovern knew this was coming out, hence her careful waffling on WH yesterday with frequent repetition of the word “safety”.

This gives me cause for optimism.

Any sports org including males in any female contact sport will be open to cases if/when there are injuries

And presumably as they have been warned about safety, if TW are included with women the person making that decision will have to be very clear on how they arrived at that decision.

Any sports org including males in any female contact sport will be open to cases if/when there are injuries.

That is huge! I am also very impressed that that this was happening seems to have flown beneath the radar - I'm sure if it'd been known that the sports bodies were looking into this it would never have happened.

It's so refreshing to see people being sensible and pragmatic and basing decisions on robust data rather than who shouts loudest.

I think the report is well written, and has taken a good look at the latest research. Reading the Guardian and the BBC they've done their best to discredit it - for example the Guardian quickly says that trans groups insist the research indicates that trans women do not retain any advantage - but then the article notes that the report author refutes that. However, even they are unable to get away from the core fact that inclusion of transwomen in female sport is unfair.

At first I was annoyed at pushing it on to individual sports to decide but then I read it properly, and it says each sport must decide on inclusion, fairness or safety. With clear information on what each of those means. So actually it is up to individual sports, and I'm interested to see which one prioritise inclusion over fairness or safety.

Also you could have a protected female category and then male or mixed categories e.g in cycling