'How can we ever trust them again?' - The far-reaching effects of the ECB's transgender ban

When Jamie Hughes came out as a trans woman, she thought she would never play cricket again.

“I never thought that playing cricket would be a safe environment for someone under the trans umbrella,” she says. “I played for a team in the lowest division of the Leicestershire leagues before I came out. As my gender journey went on, it didn’t feel like a safe space for me.”

That changed when Hughes found Birmingham Unicorns CC, an LGBTQ+ inclusive club. “When I joined the team last year, I was always welcomed within the women’s team as well [as the mixed team]. The expectation was to play for the women’s team as a trans person this summer. Everybody has been welcoming and lovely, and very supportive.”

Now, after the ECB banned trans women from playing in women’s recreational teams, Hughes won’t be allowed to play for the women’s team at Unicorns.

The ban has crashed through the grassroots game, and overnight barred trans women from being part of the teams they’d been training and socialising with over the winter, and in some cases for years before. It was enforced after a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court, which stated that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, restricting who can access single-sex spaces.

As a result, sports governing bodies, including the FA and England Netball, overhauled their gender eligibility policies to exclude trans women from playing on women’s sides at recreational level. While some, like England Hockey, provided interim periods where their old guidance would stand until the new rules came in, the ECB announced an immediate ban two weeks after the ruling, slamming the door for trans players gearing up for the season.

“I spoke to one player who has played at her current club for seven or eight years, and has been a trans woman for over 30 years,” says Lachlan Smith, founder of Out4Cricket, an advocacy and education organisation that works to make cricket more inclusive for the LGBTQ+ community. “She captained their T20 team. Then she woke up on the Thursday, the regulations changed, the ban came in on the Friday morning, and her league season started that evening. She felt like she had no alternative but to write to her committee and resign.

“The committee said, ‘Why are you resigning?’ And she said, ‘Because I’m a trans woman’. No one at her club knew she was trans. This is nuts.”

Another player affected is Suzi James, 74, who has played on the women’s team at Gunnersbury CC as a trans woman since 2008. Having played an active role in the club – which holds an important place in the history of the women’s recreational game as the oldest women’s club in the country – James no longer plays for them since the ban.

“My teammates are all gutted,” she told the Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly podcast. “They said, ‘You’ll always be a Gunn’, but I can’t go along and just watch because I’m not part of that club… I’ve heard of a young trans player who has been told she’s no longer in the club and she’s completely withdrawn. We’ve been contacted to say we should talk to her because she’s in a bad way mentally.”

While the ban has left James feeling “cut off” from the club she’s been a part of for almost 20 years, Hughes still has an avenue to play through Birmingham Unicorns. Mixed-gender ‘friendly’ matches don’t fall under the ECB’s remit, and all genders are welcome to play. But it’s far from a perfect solution.

“It feels like on one hand I haven’t lost anything but at the same time I’ve lost everything,” she says. “I’m lucky that I’m geographically located near the Unicorns and I have this opportunity, because not everyone else does. I was welcomed into the women’s side with the intention to play this summer. But now I’ll never get that opportunity to play as my authentic self with the other women on the team.”

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“It’s important to note that you are allowed to exclude trans women from these facilities, but you are not obliged to do it.”

The ECB’s ban was among the quickest and most stringent across all the governing bodies who updated their gender eligibility criteria following the Supreme Court ruling.

A spokesperson for the ECB clarified that the policy was changed based on legal advice by two independent KC’s who informed them that legal action was likely if they didn’t act. The speed of the ban, they said, was to minimise legal risk and provide clarity ahead of the start of the season. However, they have faced criticism for not waiting long enough for lawyers to interpret exactly what the ruling means for recreational sport.

Following the ruling, former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption warned that the decision was being misinterpreted. “That’s the main point, which I think has been misunderstood about this judgment,” he said, speaking on BBC Radio 4. “I think it’s quite important to note that you are allowed to exclude trans women from these facilities, but you are not obliged to do it.

“So, for example, the authorities of a sport such as women’s boxing, women’s football, are allowed to limit it to biological women. They were not in breach of the discrimination rules of the [Equality] Act. But the judgment does not mean that the sporting authorities have got to limit women’s boxing or women’s football to biological women.”

His interpretation was different to that of Baroness Falkner, chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who said, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision, that trans women would no longer be allowed to take part in women’s sports.

“I don’t think Baroness Falkner is right to say that you can’t have trans women in women’s sport,” said Sumption. “Simply that, if you decide not to have them, you aren’t breaking the law.”

To illustrate just how divided the legal community is on what the ruling requires, former Supreme Court president Lady Hale also said that it “has been misinterpreted”, speaking a month after the ruling was handed down.

It’s worth briefly unpicking the Supreme Court ruling itself. The court was asked to give an interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act on how the words ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ are defined in the legislation. The ruling was that those words refer to a biological (cis) woman and biological sex. In practice, this allows single-sex spaces to exclude trans women from spaces marked as ‘women only’.

Subsequent to the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued an interim update: “Trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use women’s facilities… as this will mean they are no longer single-sex facilities.”

However, it also stated that guidance about how the ruling would affect competitive sports would be issued separately at a later date. The ECB’s ban was announced before this guidance was issued.

The crux of the argument is about facilities, and is separate from the performance-based question behind bans on transgender women competing on women’s teams at professional level. At its centre is the debate over trans women’s access to women’s changing rooms, and being allowed to compete on teams which are officially branded as ‘women’s’.

Explained: What the ICC’s new gender eligibility rules mean for trans women

Changing-room access has long been one of the cornerstones of the argument against trans women being allowed to compete on women’s sports teams. Accounts from cis women who feel uncomfortable or threatened by the presence of a trans woman in this environment are a particularly polarising part of the debate. The most high-profile case of this in sport has been conservative activist Riley Gaines, who labelled sharing a changing room with Lia Thomas, a trans woman, while both competed in American college swimming competitions, as “humiliating”. Just last week, Gaines was accused of bullying trans athletes by seven-time Olympic gold medal winning gymnast Simone Biles.

While the extent to which those concerns over shared spaces come from a genuine fear for personal safety rather than a reflexive transphobic fear should be interrogated, it’s also important to note that it’s not a universal perspective for cis women using communal changing rooms. Facilities which have historically been available in cricket for women to use add another layer to the debate.

“We’re talking about a sport that really has never provided safe spaces for their players,” says Hampshire CCC leg-spinner, Nancy Harman. “Yet now they’ve decided that matters, and that it solely matters about cis women sharing with trans women. Not only does it open up how they’re going to police that and know whether someone’s trans or not, but it’s ignorant to the reality of grassroots cricket.

“As a female cricketer, I know a lot of women who have reached a professional level and have always played men’s cricket. We were often under-18 girls using men’s changing rooms, or we didn’t have a changing room at all. I wasn’t necessarily uncomfortable, but then maybe there were men there who were uncomfortable.

“The governing body never forced clubs to make that any different, and yet when it comes to trans women sharing with cis women, that’s a massive issue. Why pick this hill to die on when there’s actually a much wider issue about providing facilities?”

“It isn’t trans people in cis environments who are the issue,” says Jamie Hughes. “It’s cis-gendered male violence, that’s been overlooked time and time again. The one common theme is that women, whether they’re cis or trans, don’t feel comfortable around cis-het males.”

Last year, police chiefs in the UK warned that violence against women and girls amounts to a national emergency, with two million women estimated to be victims of male violence each year. Results of a study from UCLA state that transgender people are up to four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than cis people.

While the ban is in place to protect cis women’s rights to single-sex spaces, there are also concerns about how it could encroach on their own rights.

“It’s going to harm all women, not just trans women,” says Hughes. “If you don’t fit the narrow Western beauty standards as a cis woman, you’re going to come under scrutiny. Are they going to say, ‘We need to see your birth certificate’? A trans woman with a Gender Recognition Certificate – their birth certificate says female. It doesn’t work.”

How the policy will be enforced is something advocacy groups are urgently seeking answers to.

“I keep saying to them [ECB], how is this going to be enforced?” says Lachlan Smith. “If this is challenged on a cricket pitch, and someone wants to challenge whether someone is trans or not, how is that going to be investigated? And the ECB have said they don’t have an answer yet for that.”

The organisation Smith chairs, Out4Cricket, has been involved in advising the ECB on their gender eligibility policies over the last two years. Founded by Smith – who also set up Birmingham Unicorns in 2020 – and Leo Skyner, who was previously chair of Graces, the LGBTQ+ inclusive cricket club in London, they’ve worked with county clubs, the PCA and Lord’s Taverners to both grow the numbers of LGTBQ+ people involved in cricket, and help the sport understand the barriers they face.

They were consulted by the ECB last year on guidance which the charity Gendered Intelligence drew up on trans inclusion in the recreational game – which has been shelved before publication following the Supreme Court ruling.

“The guidance that was being produced by Gendered Intelligence was based on the previous policy, which was the social model where you could effectively play wherever you identified as playing,” says Smith. “That’s a model that we think has worked quite well. But we just don’t have the evidence. That was one of the reasons we wanted to do this research, to better understand the community now.”

With the advice Out4Cricket provided to the ECB last year now redundant under the new policy, their focus has shifted to finding answers to holes in the framework.

“One of the questions we’ve been getting is, how many people does this affect? The ECB has no idea. We still have no idea. It could be anywhere between 40 and 50 or 500, we haven’t a clue.”

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“Nobody has had an advantage over anyone, especially at this level. Most trans women are ordinary people caught up in this political act.”

The loudest aspect of the debate over trans women’s participation in female sports is the assumed strength advantage they hold over cis women, especially those who have gone through a male puberty.

Fears around the danger posed by players who identified as male until adulthood, before coming out as trans, on women’s teams – many of which will contain ‘aged-up’ players from club youth sections – are particularly emotive. In The Telegraph earlier this year, the coach of a girls’ team in Hampshire voiced concerns over the potential serious injuries her players could have suffered when facing a trans player in an adult game. “The umpire said to me if that player hadn’t gone off, he would have ended the match, because it wasn’t safe,” said the coach.

In 2023, the ICC announced they were banning players who had been through male puberty from participating on women’s teams in international matches and competitions. A statement said the decision was based on the “protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion”.

ALSO READ: Trans women are not a threat to the integrity of women’s international cricket

Last year, the ECB followed suit with its guidance for the elite game in England, banning trans players from participating in what they define as Tier One and Two levels of women’s competitions. While several boards fell in line with the ICC policy, Cricket Australia still allows trans women to participate in their competitions.

Notably, the ECB’s policy regarding the recreational game contains no reference to player safety, nor does any part of the Supreme Court ruling. But the perception that trans women operating below the professional level still hold an inherent advantage, thus posing a threat to cis women and girls, was a central part of the campaigns run by organisations prior to the ban.

Professor Alun Williams, Professor of Sport and Exercise Genomics at Manchester Metropolitan University, understands those concerns. “Purely from a physical point of view, the typical differences between men and women in muscle mass and things like that are pretty consistent whether you look at very highly trained people at the elite end of sport, or the general population,” he says. “If you introduce trans gender participation in the women’s game, in principle you are increasing the likelihood of the risk of injuries and of even bigger differences in those physical abilities.

“Physically, those differences [between males and females in sport] are calculated on mean values, but there are clearly overlaps in height, limb lengths, cardiovascular function, muscle strength and everything. The fittest, fastest strongest women are much fitter, stronger and faster than many men. But by not having separate categories, what you are doing is potentially having the upper end of the male range of physical characteristics coming into the female category.

“It’s equally possible that a trans woman might be shorter or weaker in the male category, and then sit perfectly in the middle of the female range or even below average. Some people propose a solution to this is doing things on a case-by-case basis.”

Before the blanket ban was put down, the ECB’s policy for the recreational game was indeed a case-by-case basis. There was no official policy on how this would be implemented, and there is little information on how safety concerns caused by mismatches at a recreational level should be handled.

“Cricket always has an element of danger because it’s a hard ball being hit,” says Hughes. “But myself and the trans players in my team, we are not the pace bowlers, or the fastest bowlers, we do not hit the ball the hardest. There are cis-gender women who are far better cricketers than us on the team who have just as much capability of harming people with the ball or the bat as we do. People like myself have no aspirations of ever playing professional cricket. It’s social, it’s good fitness, it’s good for your mental wellbeing.”

Her experience is echoed by Suzi James: “Nobody has had an advantage over anyone, especially at this level,” she says. “I usually bat down the order and rarely get a bowl. And most trans women are like me, they’re ordinary people caught up in this political act.”

Mismatches at grassroots level are not primarily based on sex, and safety concerns in those cases generate far less controversy, even though they are more common. Last month Richmond CC 4th XI were bowled out for 2 by North London CC 3rds and fell to a 424-run defeat in the Middlesex League. An availability crisis meant Richmond were fielding a depleted team which included players and teenagers who did not usually play cricket. Three players were reported to have suffered injuries, including a broken finger and a ball to the face. There was no attempt to stop the match based on safety concerns.

A secondary argument on the limitations of the inherent advantage theory concerns the effects of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or gender-affirming hormone treatments. For trans women, these are hormones prescribed like oestrogen, as well as suppression of male hormones, in order to change physical characteristics to fall more in line with a perceived feminine body-type.

“When you start hormone therapy, that’s always going to work against you,” says Hughes. “You’re always going to become weaker and slower because that’s just the way that the hormone therapy works, particularly if you’re starting off at a level where you’re not particularly athletic or strong. You’re never going to have that biological advantage.”

Williams disputes that HRT has a dramatic effect on reducing the physical differences between trans women who take them and cis women. “The skeleton doesn’t change,” he says. “Its plausible bone density might change a little but if anything that’s health-related rather than performance. Height differences and limb length don’t change. Things that do change a bit include muscle mass and strength, but probably only by a fraction.

“The one thing that does change almost completely and rapidly is hemoglobin concentration. With lowering of testosterone, that level [of hemoglobin] comes down to a typical female range within weeks. That’s the element that contributes to endurance sports and the ability to recover between shorter and more intense bouts of exercise. Overall, the physical differences do not get removed, but some elements are more removed than others.”

There are also fears that the ban will have implications for cis women wrongly accused of being trans purely on the basis of their performance. Ste Gillies chairs Leeds Kites CC, another LGBTQ+ inclusive cricket club which fields teams of mixed gender and ability. “I’d argue that any attempt to police it is not only transphobic, it’s inherently misogynistic,” they say. “‘She’s a bit good, she must be a man’ – that’s horrible. I think a lot of people have these set of beliefs that a person can change their gender at the drop of a hat and can start bowling and smash sixes everywhere. That’s just not the case.”

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“I want to represent an organisation that is doing everything it can to make the game as inclusive as possible.”

One of the most pressing conflicts stemming from the ban is what it means for the ECB’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies, which have already been bruised by persistent scandals.

On his first day as ECB chair in 2022, Richard Thompson set out his vision for cricket to be “the most inclusive sport in the country – accessible to all regardless of race, gender, class or disability”. He doubled-down on that aspiration when launching the board’s Inspiring Generations strategy for the next four years, writing that becoming the nation’s most inclusive team sport is “our north star”.

By amending a policy to exclude a vulnerable community, and more quickly than other sports updated their own policies, the ECB significantly weakens its claims to that title. Members of other vulnerable communities now fear trickle-down effects from the ban will seep through to them.

“For a lot of people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, sport has been a bit of a let-down,” says Smith. “To build that trust up, get people out there playing, coming to games, getting involved, takes time. The point we’ve tried to make to them [ECB] is that it only takes one f*** up and you can destroy that trust overnight. There are people in the broader community now who are thinking, is cricket really the game for me? If we’re excluding trans women now, then what’s my space in the sport?”

His thoughts are echoed by Ste Gillies, who summarises the mood among the Leeds Kites community. “There’s a feeling that we’ve been betrayed by the ECB on this policy,” they say. “I’ve spent the last 18-24 months hearing from the ECB how they want to make cricket the most inclusive sport in the country. Then they turn around and bring in a policy that explicitly excludes a group of people, and it’s a blanket ban with no exceptions.

“What do we do? How do we trust them ever again? The complete lack of consultation and any sort of queer or trans voices in this decision process has really hurt us.”

Being part of a team as an LGBTQ+ person that doesn’t afford trans women the same opportunities can create an internal conflict, says Hampshire’s Nancy Harman.

“It makes me uncomfortable to think that the game I love is being made unavailable to trans women based purely on the fact that they’re trans,” she says. “That’s why I’m challenging the ECB. I want to represent an organisation that is doing everything it can to make the game as inclusive as possible.

“I work with the PCA to do EDI stuff and talks around the country, so it’s a dilemma because I understand as a professional player I represent the ECB, and I want to represent a board that is committed to going further than just a ban, and making actions that are more positive on the inclusivity side of things.”

The ban raises questions about how the ECB will navigate Pride Month in June. They have scheduled extensive events, including marching in London and Cardiff as they do every year, and rolling out the Rainbow Laces campaign in collaboration with Stonewall, which they have done for eight years. Their relationship with Stonewall is a potential sticking point.

Following the announcement of the ban, a Stonewall spokesperson labelled the decisions from sporting governing bodies as “incredibly disappointing, as several of them have been long term and vocal supporters of our Rainbow Laces campaign”.

For Smith, as a gay man participating in Pride events to promote cricket as a safe and inclusionary space for LGBTQ+ people, as he does every year, will be complicated.

“I find it deeply uncomfortable,” he says. “It’s so conflicting because I still want to feel comfortable playing the sport, and for other gay men to as well. I don’t want them to walk away but I get it if they do. It feels difficult to genuinely promote a campaign like Rainbow Laces knowing that there are plenty of people excluded from sport at the moment.”

The continuation of the Rainbow Laces campaign is also a source of anger for Hughes. “I’m not interested in seeing a rainbow-washing campaign this summer,” she says. “You can’t claim that cricket is ever going to be an inclusive sport after that decision. I went to Test matches at Edgbaston in previous years, and it always felt great hearing and seeing the messages around the ground about inclusion and cricket being for everyone. It always felt fairly genuine, but I just do not want to see any of that this year.”

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“I think that some people will just play on in defiance.”

Two weeks after the ban came into effect, Out4Cricket hosted an LGTBQ+ inclusion conference in Derby. Representatives from LGBTQ+ clubs attended, as did the ECB. The issue of the trans ban dominated discussion.

“It was a pretty tense and emotional discussion,” says Smith. “Credit to the ECB for turning up, including a senior executive. They did listen, and while not everyone was satisfied with the answers, I think it was important that they were there listening to the community’s concerns.

“They have offered us a conversation with [ECB CEO] Richard Gould and [EDI committee chair] Kate Aldridge. We’ve said, can we park it for the moment and speak to the community to understand what they want?”

In the days that followed the conference, a petition on behalf of the LGBTQ+ cricket community was drafted and addressed to Gould. It states that the ban has sent a message that trans people are not welcome on cricket fields and expresses their disappointment that the ECB did not consult the community. While the wording of the document is not yet finalised, it asks for the ban to be overturned and for a more collaborative approach to making cricket an inclusive space for the LGBTQ+ community.

While there’s little hope of overturning the policy with the Supreme Court ruling in place, ensuring the avenues for trans women to play are kept open is now a priority. One option is to re-organise some women’s competitions like soft-ball leagues to a series of friendly matches, which would allow teams with trans women on them to compete. One county is reportedly considering changing their constitution to a ‘women and trans women league’. The wording would allow the league to fall outside of the parameters which now limit trans access to women-only spaces. For some trans players, the ultimate act of opposing the ban is to defy it.

“I think that some people will just play on in defiance [in women’s teams],” says Smith. “I’ve spoken to a couple of people who are thinking of doing that. There are others I know who have withdrawn because they’re worried they’re going to end up on the front page of the Daily Mail if they’re ‘found out’.”

Trans people will continue to play sport and exist in every aspect of society as they always have. The ban, however, makes it harder to do that while being true to themselves, and to feel accepted by the game as a whole.

“What we can’t do is go back into the shadows,” says Hughes. “We need to be seen. We need to show the general public that we’re just humans trying to live our lives like everybody else.”

This article was originally published in Issue 88 of Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine, available to buy here.

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