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Original poster

Boys being pushed into girls’ football league

105 replies

PriOn1 · 03/03/2024 09:56

I found this article on Twitter and find it rather odd. It’s about a boy who wants to play in a girls’ football league. It doesn’t say that the boy “identifies as a girl” or anything similar. From the way it reads, he’s a boy who wants to play in the girls’ league because it’s easier.

What I don’t understand is the reaction of the Football Association, who seem to be insisting he must be allowed to play.

So I found myself wondering whether they missed out the fact that he claims to be a girl, or whether it might be more nuanced. For example, if there are already boys in the girl’s league who do claim to be female, does it then become discriminatory to exclude other boys?

Any thoughts or enlightenment? I shall now go off to search for other sources of information…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13149771/west-riding-girls-football-league-boy-footbal-association.html#comments

Top girls' league faces being shut down by Football Association

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a row has broken out between the FA and officials running a female league in Yorkshire after parents complained their son had not been allowed to join.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13149771/west-riding-girls-football-league-boy-footbal-association.html#comments

OP posts:
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6
Snowypeaks · 04/03/2024 16:03

I'm glad the parents are being more reasonable than was reported but I don't see why WRGirlsFL think it's their job to find a solution for this boy. Surely that's for the parents to sort out!

PuttingDownRoots · 04/03/2024 16:14

As a side point... I am aware of several women playing at the local American Football club here in Yorkshire

SinnerBoy · 04/03/2024 16:27

PuttingDownRoots

Really? Well, every day is a school day on MN!

MyLadyDisdainlsYetLiving · 04/03/2024 17:20

99doshredballoons · 04/03/2024 15:22

Sorry to hear that, bet there are a lot of similar stories.

Some schools, if they have the resources, do have lots of teams at different levels. Eg. A team to E team. With the objective that everyone gets games and all are included. No judgements. Sadly with lack of sport investment in schools these days, these schools are few and far between. Tragic how little sport / drama / art / music schools do these days. Sport and drama especially don’t cost a lot, it must be resources and motivation.

Edited
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I do think schools are in a different position than volunteer clubs. IMHO schools should be encouraging a healthy and positive attitude to exercise within the limits of each pupils ability, and focus on playing for fun, the benefits of teamwork etc. By all means separate the good players from the duffers during class time so everyone can enjoy it at their level, so the team a to e sounds fine as long as it’s handled tactfully, but make the serious competitive attitudes a side interest. Whereas volunteer clubs for the sports will naturally tend towards the competitive and focus on the ambitious and gifted players. I can see that a volunteer club would need a lot of resources in order to support both a serious team and also a “for fun” group, whether it’s football or trampolining or anything else.

i remember thinking at the time that you wouldn’t discourage a non-academic student from browsing the books in the library at lunchtime just in case they bumped into the students cramming for Oxbridge. The sense of humiliation and injustice had burned bright for nearly fifty years!

GrumpyPanda · 05/03/2024 12:33

itsnotabouthepasta · 04/03/2024 12:41

They’re just kids, some of them don’t want to be a professional footballer, they just want to see their friends and have a kick about and this is the type of things that gets them out of having a pastime and into their rooms, saying they can’t do sport, they’re rubbish etc

@stayathomer I actually think this is a wider issue that needs to be addressed across all sports actually. There seem to be very few sports/physical activities that you can just do for fun, rather than being pushed into a competitive role without any input.

My daughter quit gymnastics for that reason. She liked doing it, but being tested every 8 weeks so they could spot those with potential just became really disheartening. Same as swimming - she stopped doing it because she had no interest in swimming butterfly stroke - something that was only invented for competitions.

Unfortunately, I think there seems to be a huge drop off in sport from teenage onwards where its impossible to be in a "formal" environment without the "formality" - does that make sense?

ParkRun of course tried to circumvent this, and swimming, I know you can go into leisure pools, but what about other sports like Judo, gymnastics, anything which you wouldn't necessarily do on your own without others, but more for the social/physical activity side of things than a competitive aspect

@itsnotabouthepasta

I suspect gymnastics is hopeless. With respect to martial arts, traditional martial arts actually are non-competitive. For example, there's classical judo as well as sports (Olympic) judo - I've a dedicated judoka friend practicing this as well as a couple of really obscure old-school sword styles. Hard to find classical judo for kids I imagine. A better option would be aikido which us widely taught including kids and youth classes and with the exception of one specific style called Tomiki aikido doesn't involve any competition.

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