"The Jadeing" is a term I've seen used a few times to refer to the process by which a newly-out trans woman goes from the realisation, "omg, I am the same gender as cis women!" to the realisation, "wait, a lot of these cis women hate me." It's a particularly grim process because the acceptance that you are actually the same gender as the cis women you know can feel like a light at the end of the tunnel of misery that had been your closeted life, and to have that light so cruelly snuffed out can be totally devastating. I have some kind-of complicated feelings about women's sports because of this.
I was good at sport before puberty, I won prizes for sprinting, swimming, judo and rugby. But, like so many closeted trans girls, I was never comfortable doing sport after puberty hit, especially team sports. The men's locker room environment is often talked about as a place where manhood is learned and reinforced, but we don't often talk about how unpleasant it is to be a girl in that kind of place. The amount of sexual harassment and assault I went through is something no one should have to experience, and it's no wonder that I stopped playing sport as soon as I was able to. Sport was mandatory for me until the age of 18, but from 15 onwards I became adept at forging letters from my mother saying she had terminal cancer and I had to leave school to visit her at hospital (it was true she had terminal cancer, but I didn't actually have to visit her until after school hours) and I would then cycle to the park, sit in the branches of my favourite tree, and read books alone.
It was a while until I got back into sport again. I became pretty good at distance running in my 20s, and started enjoying watching sport as well, particularly (randomly enough) women's cricket. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I instinctively found men's cricket boring and women's cricket interesting, but as someone who had been involved in feminist activism for a while it felt natural. I did occasionally think about joining a (men's) cricket team, but I knew that they wouldn't really like "someone like me", even if I didn't know what "someone like me" meant. I had a lot of experience with groups of men by this point, and I just knew they'd hate me because I was inexplicably different.
So my enjoyment of watching women's cricket was tempered with the knowledge that actually playing cricket wasn't really on the cards for me. I felt a bit like an elderly grandfather watching his grandkids have experiences that were never available to him in his own youth, and just feeling happy for them with no resentment. All this despite the fact that I was actually younger than most professional players. As I began to realise more stuff about my gender, none of this really changed. Even after I started thinking of myself as a woman, I still never thought that actually playing women's sports was "for me" in any sense. I have aways felt like an outsider in everything I do, and I suppose this felt no different.
The first trans international cricketer ever was Danielle McGahey. She made her T20 International debut in September 2023. In November 2023 trans women were banned from international cricket. She played six matches before being forced to retire. This horrific BBC article was published shortly before her first T20I appearance. In it we see the classic arguments about biological advantages, and a lot of editorialising about how men bowl faster and hit the ball further than women, the relevance of which is left up to the reader to interpret. But there is also a particularly egregious comment by one Gemma Witcomb, sports scientist at the University of Loughborough:
"Trans women may reap the rewards of the greater investment in their early cricketing careers and possess some advantages related to these earlier experiences. For example, more opportunities both at school and recreationally, to learn, play, and hone their skills; better funded and equipped clubs; more invested coaches etc. Such factors - related to opportunity - are well accepted to influence all men's and women's experiences and outcomes in sport and so ignoring these would deny their importance."
It is worth bearing in mind that she said this at a time when no trans woman had ever played a single match of international cricket, something that makes her assertion utterly absurd. This group with a supposedly massive advantage of opportunity had turned that advantage into a whole 0 appearances at the top level. It is particularly grating because, if I had been assigned female at birth, I would've been far more comfortable playing sport and might've actually had a chance to be quite good at it. Being trans made playing sport unbearable for me. Having higher-paid coaches is no advantage if you can't handle playing at all because you keep getting sexually assaulted in the changing room. This is why empirical data should come before theorising, otherwise you end up giving an explanation for why trans women are overrepresented at the top of international women's cricket despite there being no trans women at all in international women's cricket. And there should have been some, right? Could they, perhaps, actually be underrepresented? For some reason? Maybe?
Incidentally I looked up Gemma Witcomb and found this recent article in the European Journal of Sport Science regarding the effect of HRT on trans women athletes. With a sample size of 9 runners and 1 (one) swimmer. Yes, one. The swimmer's pre-HRT race results came from when she was 17 and had they don't have a record of her training volume at the time, the post-HRT results from when she was 22... Really useful data... The running results show a big drop in speed after HRT, but they are also shown normalised using the age-grading system (which gives your result as a percentage of the world record for your age and gender) and show no change over short distances and a decrease for middle and long distances. So, trans women runners are actually over all less competitive racing as women than as men (which is actually what I expected because, as I know from personal experience, the extra mental load of knowing someone might try to kill you mid-race is going to have some effect on your times). And yet the study's conclusions are basically "who knows 🤷" and the main take-away seems to be that trans women can potentially counteract the reduction in athletic ability by training harder. OK, thanks for the insight, sports scientists 👍. If I can somehow up my running volume from 100km/week to 300km/week without getting a stress fracture, maybe I'll be able to come 3rd in a local race that, if I wasn't already banned from it, you would just use as evidence that trans women are too successful.
Watching women's cricket, something that brought me a lot of joy before and early in my transition, is now a really sore point for me. I am still interested in it, but it's really hard to watch a sport I know I'm banned from taking part in. My previous attitude of "playing is not for me" has faded as my self-respect has grown. All the constant commentary about how inspirational it is for young women to watch women succeed at sport, and how they hope many young women will get into cricket after watching, I shouldn't have to sit through that thinking "they don't mean me though". I should be allowed to actually play cricket too. I shouldn't always have to remember that all this stuff "for women" is not for me.
It's really heartbreaking seeing some players I once really admired, knowing what their attitude to me would probably be if I did try to play. I have been too jaded by now by my exposure to what cis women actually think of me and women like me to think otherwise. That's not to say I regret transition at all, because I now actually have the self-respect to advocate for myself rather than shutting myself off from life. To realise I am hated by those I once admired is incredibly hurtful, but also really motivating to try to make the world a better place for those like me who come after.
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