National Women’s Sports

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, like every other noble Lord, I express my pride in both the Lionesses and England’s women, who put in such a gutsy performance in the world championship, losing by such a small margin against New Zealand.

As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said in his excellent opening remarks, during their teenage years girls drop out of sport at three times the rate of boys, yet girls need load-bearing exercise even more than boys during those years. It is the best time to build bone density, helping to protect us from osteoporosis later in life. The push from our sports councils to get more females into exercising and keep us there is not just a social move towards some sort of sporting equality. It is important for our health and well-being, including the impact on the NHS budget.

Football is the most popular team sport in the UK, with millions of people playing regularly. It is a “gender-affected activity”, in the words of the Equality Act, meaning that mixed-sex play would not be fair for females because males are stronger and faster, even when they are the same size. From the age of 12, boys and girls play separately to give females fair and safe play. Even in primary schools, it is common to have girls’ teams and boys’ teams. A 10 year-old girl will tell you that boys will not pass to girls and that she prefers playing with other girls because boys are too rough. The effects of male puberty are clear: more muscle, bigger heart and lung capacity, denser bones, stiffer tendons and the rest.

In the school playground or in the park, you will see boys, not girls, having an impromptu football game. The result is that for every female playing football in the UK, there are nine males. That is almost a whole team. If football is to become a girls’ game too, it is obvious that girls and young women need their own teams. They also need role models. After the success of the England women, girls can see they can be female and sporty, and that can be life-changing.

Here is the problem. Since 2015 the Football Association has had a policy that males may play in women’s teams if they lower their testosterone or, in some cases, even if they do not. Lowering testosterone will slow them down a little but does not reverse male puberty and it certainly does not remove male performance advantage in sport. An average male runs 10% faster than an average female. In a dash to the ball, he needs to be only half a metre in front every time and she will never get a touch. Up to the age of 18, even that requirement is absent. The FA’s current policy says that under-18s may play in the team of “their reassigned/ affirmed gender”, so although talented girls can be forced to drop out of boys’ teams after the age of 11, boys who say they are “girls inside” get to join a girls’ team.

This year the England Universities women’s football squad has a trans-identifying male player, a 30-something six-foot-tall post-pubertal male who now identifies as a woman, in goal, where size advantage really counts. If you had to play them, would you not want a trans-identifying male player in your women’s team too, in order to level the playing field a little?

Last autumn the UK’s Sports Council Equality Group published new guidance on transgender inclusion in sport. It said that the inclusion of trans-identifying males in female sport could not be balanced with fairness, and in many cases safety, for females. This summer English and Welsh rugby reinstated female-only teams, though Scottish Rugby has yet to follow, but football is not there yet.

Women’s football was huge in the early 20th century but was outlawed by the FA in 1921 and remained so for 50 years. Now, once again, women’s football has a chance. Let us hope the FA will not hand it to the boys this time.