We heard last week about round-the-world sailor Tracy Edwards, who was confronted at a performance of Maiden Voyage, a play about her exploits, by cast members making an appeal for a trans-inclusive charity – a clear insult directed at Edwards' support for women's sport. She's interviewed in today's Telegraph by Oliver Brown:
At 27 years old, Tracy Edwards achieved something so monumental, so wildly improbable, that it has been celebrated ever since as a watershed in women’s empowerment.
First this troubled tearaway, whose father died when she was 10 and who was suspended from school 26 times, was accepted into the Whitbread Round the World Race only as the cook. Just four years later, she found herself the skipper and navigator, steering a patched-up 58ft yacht through the icebergs of the Southern Ocean. Maiden, the boat was called: an apt name for a vessel carrying the first all-female crew to circle the globe. And to think, the entire project had been derided by one male sailing journalist as a “tinful of tarts”.
Lovely.
Although she is uneasy with adulation – “I find compliments hard and my daughter, definitely the grown-up in our relationship, tells me off for it,” she says – she has grown used to the attention, even gracing the Hollywood red carpets when a 2018 documentary about her defining voyage was nominated for an Oscar.
It was in this spirit that she attended this month’s musical about Maiden at the Southwark Playhouse. But what should have been a fulfilling, flattering evening turned instead into an ambush from which she has still not quite recovered. For no sooner was the final song performed than one of the young actresses, wearing the pink shorts that Edwards and her crew-mates in 1989 made their signature, hijacked the curtain-call to read awkwardly from a piece of paper, urging the audience to donate to the “LGBTQIA+ inclusion charity, working to make sports a welcoming place for everyone”.
The gesture was anything but altruistic in its intentions, designed primarily as a rebuke to Edwards’ gender-critical – or, as she prefers to describe it, “sex-realist” – perspective that men have no place in women’s sport.
“I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, as if somebody had drugged me,” she reflects. “While I can be this feisty, aggressive woman if I’m pushed, I am mostly someone who doesn’t like confrontation and who doesn’t go out of her way to find it. The whole protest was so uncomfortable, thrown together at the last minute. You could see the actress’s hands were shaking. I’m so disappointed in them. That might sound patronising, but it’s not meant to. I’m disappointed that they spent months reading those words, being those people, and that they still didn’t get it. That’s sad.”
The actresses appeared oblivious to the supreme irony that, having spent 90 minutes singing and dancing in tribute to women who had toiled so fiercely to assert their rights, they then trampled all over these same rights by endorsing Pride Sports, a charity lobbying for biological males to be accepted in female competition.
It was far from the only absurdity in this row. Edwards became a symbol of sporting bravery, overcoming the terror of the high seas and the chauvinism of male opponents convinced that her boat would sink before it even rounded The Needles off the Isle of Wight, but some of those honouring her feats on stage were frightened simply to be in the same room as her, for fear of being exposed to views they deemed transphobic.
Two members of the production team, she reveals, resigned over Edwards’ gender-critical beliefs before the opening night. Certain crew members, she was told, were worried about being introduced to her at the after-party. “Truly,” she says, “there aren’t enough eye-rolls in the world. It was just the vindictiveness of it, the nastiness. They didn’t protest the night before, or the night after, only the night I was there.
“They don’t understand the rights they are giving away, or how hard we had to fight for those rights. What I wish they would realise is that they stand on the shoulders of giants. It is not just me, but the Maiden crew, the people who got us there, my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation. They have all given something to the movement for the 100-plus years since the suffragettes. All have done one or two things that have pushed us that little bit further.”
And now the sad little cast members, who understand nothing of this, demonstrate about the importance of being nice to the men who want to take all this away.
“I always thought that sport would be the jimmy that forced the whole thing open,” Edwards says. “The problem is expressed so visually in sport, by the sight of a huge man towering over a tiny woman on a cycling podium.
“I know from sailing with men, when I’ve been the only woman on the boat, that the physical, immediate, explosive power of men can be shockingly extraordinary, and they can summon it at a moment’s notice. As women, we know this power dynamic to our cost – that you can be fit and strong, but that the bloke can still pulverise you.”
She is implacable, in the face of constant abuse and belittling by trans activists. “There’s no point arguing with them,” she shrugs. “It’s like explaining the theory of relativity to my dog.”
Mick Hartley 