Mick Hartley

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph has long been an eloquent critic of these pathetic sports bodies that have spent the last few years pandering to the trans lobby, and finding excuses for why they can't manage to protect women's sport. No surprise then that he's not overwhelmed by the latest FA concession:

Hallelujah. The national game has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a position of upholding fairness for half the population, but at long last it has seen the light.

When a trans-identifying male was accused in 2023 of causing a season-ending injury to a female opponent, the Football Association did nothing. When women massed outside Wembley last autumn in protest at a teenager being banned for six matches for asking a player “Are you a man?”, it refused to act. But with the aftershocks of last month’s seismic Supreme Court ruling that men cannot be women still rippling across the land, it ultimately had nowhere else to turn.

The FA left no doubt that it took this decision, banning men from playing women’s football at all levels, with extreme reluctance. Even in the short statement it issued, there was no reference to the women and girls disadvantaged for years by its genuflecting to the fallacy that people could be whatever sex they purported to be.

There was certainly no mention of the girl punished last year for stating biological reality, or of the many courageous women who have been publicly vilified for opposing the gender ideology it so keenly embraced. So forgive me for not offering a toast today to FA chief executive Mark Bullingham, for his soaring moral leadership.

What was fascinating was the domino effect. One by one they fell: first the FA, which belatedly realised that the Supreme Court verdict meant it had to comply with the law, and then, within hours, England Netball and the England and Wales Cricket Board, who were saved by football’s abrupt about-turn from any need to make a stand on their own.

Even on this long-awaited day, with three major sports accepting the imperative to exclude males from the female category from the grass roots to the elite, the language was pitifully lily-livered.

“Complex”, the FA called it. What exactly is complex about banning males – forget the label “biological males” in this instance, given the Supreme Court’s clarity that there is no other kind – from competing against females in a contact sport?

The only reason it was ever presented as some fiendish dilemma is because the FA, in common with many supine governing bodies, was more interested in pandering to Stonewall lobbyists and militant trans activists than in defending the truth. While the 2010 Equality Act was crystal clear in declaring that sports should be single-sex wherever a physical advantage existed, it has taken until 2025 for the FA to recognise what was staring it in the face. It is unforgivable.

For sports read the overwhelming majority of the establishment – the NHS, the BBC, the Civil Service, schools and universities – who all bent the knee to Stonewall. It's a long walk back…