Legal action over Rugby Union's ban on transwomen playing competitive women's rugby

[zanahoria]

The Rugby Football Union have been rocked by a legal challenge against their ban on transgender women from female contact rugby.

The governing body’s council narrowly voted to ban trans women “assigned male at birth” in a bid to “prioritise fairness of competition and safety of players” in July this year.

But Telegraph Sport can reveal transgender player Julie Curtiss has issued the RFU with a pre-action protocol letter - a legal document written to resolve a dispute before court proceedings are commenced - following the controversial decision.

The legal challenge - which the RFU says it will 'robustly defend' - is being brought by London-based law firm Russell Cooke on behalf of Curtiss, one of the seven registered trans women in England who is no longer eligible to play following the ban.

www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2022/09/03/exclusive-rfu-hit-legal-action-transgender-women-ban/

No longer eligible to play in the wrong category, to be precise. Good on the RFU for standing firm.

🥴doesn’t the Equality Act specifically exempt womens sports from having to include TW? Without even having to go through the “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” test?

What grounds do they even have to challenge it?

Oh I see the legal reasoning now! It’s quite amazing, because I doubt the drafters of the Equality Act ever imagined for a second that someone would challenge the idea that it’s necessary for fairness and safety to keep men out of women’s rugby.

well, the best of luck to the RFU, and I hope the 52 year old will learn to accept women’s boundaries gracefully.

More sunlight. It's like they never learn.

If you were trying to not get all trans women bared from sports surely the last thing you'd do is get the available evidence put on court record. From what I know from listening to Emma Hilton and Ross Tucker, the evidence that World Rugby used was quite robust

Bloody hell the comments are absolutely blistering. Rare to see such unedited rage allowed!

Aren't there specifically sport exceptions in the Gender Recognition Act as well?

Who is funding this legal action?

I agree! Those readers are fuming. Absolutely no quarter given. They're not having it - no 'cis', no 'assigned at birth', no TWAW. And all of them totally seeing through the BS.

Wait til they find out that surgery isn't even necessary. Rare, in fact.

Crowdfunding for £5k. Forty percent raised so far.

I doubt this will go anywhere.

I saw this. she'll get demolished. I wonder what crack legal team she'll assemble from this law firm 'Russell Cooke'? my money is on at least a bench for for this non-binary ex Mermaids grifter.

uk.linkedin.com/in/lui-asquith-b31650169

• bench role.

And I used to think the worst that could happen to you when the wind changed was your face getting stuck…

Fitting, given that, that this lot are trying - albeit using adult mechanisms - toddler tactics to get what they want. No thought, apparently, for the consequences of their not winning - because it’s going to be looked to not simply by other sports, but by other countries. It’s very difficult to shut it down with “boo, TERF Island, don’t want to be like them” when you’re in fact openly & unambiguously saying “boo, facts & science, ignore them! MEN’S WANTS ARE PARAMOUNT, FUCK WOMEN’S NEEDS!”

Perhaps they expected the letter would make RFUW roll over. If so, oops.

Winds change, tides turn: Mother Nature quietly works away.

Well they should have bloody well anticipated it! It's absolute madness that for the best part of 20 years we've been bumbling along with a "well, most people are fairly decent" approach to the law.

It's like saying "surely no one would ever actually KILL another person? We don't need an actual law against that, do we?"

The important thing missing is that they need to stop calling the male game Men's Rugby. It's for everyone born with a Y chromosome regardless of their gender identity. It needs to be very clear that Julie and her fellow transwomen rugby players are totally welcome in any such team where their standard of play and skill qualify them for selection. Obviously they may not qualify for the top teams but there will be teams at some level where they can happily play on a level playing field with others. Inclusivity is important and so is protecting the integrity, fairness and safety of the women's game. Achieving the latter means that some adjustments need to be made to the culture and practice of the game formerly referred to as being for men.

they need to stop calling the male game Men's Rugby.

I disagree. No better to start to erase the word men than it is to erase the word women.

What needs to happen is that the pretence that some men are women needs to stop and reality needs to be reasserted. The words women and men refer to sex, as they have done for a very long time. If men want to assert that they are no longer men, then they need to come up with a different word, that doesn’t include any implication that they have joined the female sex.

What really annoys me is that the letter has requested figures on how many women have been hurt by transgender players. As though you'd need a substantial number for it to be significant.

I work in a heavily regulated area, making kids clothing. In the nineties around seven children were recorded as having had sever accidents due to drawcords on their clothing, the figures covered the entire of Europe. So draw cords are now banned on kids tops.

Can you imagine if the regulator had an insinuated that those seven kids were an anomaly and didn't really matter?

That should be 'severe', not sever!

I’m so pleased about this legal action. No doubt Julie will get their arse handed to them in a public court of law. I look forward to it. I hope it’s live-streamed.

I still don't understand why this is 'difficult' and they need a robust reasons.

Inclusion of transwomen in womens sports should have fallen at the first hurdle because they are men not women. Sports bodies need to come out and say they made a mistake and are going back to the start and keeping sport single sex, no debate, no worrying about being seen to be 'kind'.

Yes...

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/19

Always attempting to make out that women are supportive of this madness and that silence is a sign of support rather than fear of consequences.

"I would have been content to walk away from this debate were it not for th support of cisgendered female players - including some current England women's players - who have reached out to me and said they are appalled by this decision. I'm willing to have my position changed if the RFU can demonstrate that this change has genuinely been driven by female players who are genuinely asking for it"

It's a wonder that sports bodies /teams don't survey their members on an anonymous basis (so nobody can be shamed). I've no doubt that the support for female only competition would be overwhelming.

The comments are brilliant shame we can’t comment in the same unfiltered way here.

This court case is needed to test that law. Sunlight.