An Australian semi-professional women’s basketball league is set to include a transgender athlete for the first time.
Andrew Bogut, former National Basketball Association player, broke the news saying the league would have a “biological male playing this upcoming season” in the NBL1 South league, which mainly includes teams in the state of Victoria.
“#GirlDads where are you?”
NBL1 sits just below the country’s top-flight basketball competition, the National Basketball League (NBL).
In a later Instagram post, Bogut said the league and Kilsyth Cobras team had not been transparent in letting players know they were competing against a biological male.
“Members of that club don’t know. Other teams in that league don’t know,” Bogut said. “I’m not afraid to speak about it. I think it needs to be discussed.”
“This athlete in question has already played the game. From what I understand a friendly game against a team that had no idea it was going forward. They asked some questions, apparently before the game [and] the game still went ahead—kind of like, ‘Too bad, deal with it.’”
Basketball Victoria’s Response
Basketball Victoria confirmed an application was received and that no final decision had been made yet.“Basketball Victoria recognises that there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer as to the eligibility in elite and sub-elite basketball and therefore continues to treat applications to play on a case-by-case basis at these levels,” the organisation told The Epoch Times in a statement.
“It is important that all athletes participate in an inclusive, fair, and respectful environment and we hope all in the community can move forward together with a clear understanding of the new guidelines” said Nick Honey, CEO of Basketball Victoria.
While Sheena Atkin, the group’s diversity and inclusion manager, said the guidelines provided support and frameworks for the whole Victorian community.
Transgenders In Sports
The inclusion of transgender athletes in sports has been an ongoing and contentious issue.In June 2022, the global body for competitive swimming, FINA, voted to allow biological males to compete in women’s events only if they had not experienced puberty.
Further, they must maintain testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L. Around 71 percent of FINA’s 152 members voted in favour of the new rule.
The move was welcomed by Australian Olympians Cate Campbell and Emily Seebohm.
“If I was swimming in a male event I wouldn’t even place. I wouldn’t have got a medal in Tokyo, and a male who came eighth in Tokyo in the same event as me would have won the event by about five or six seconds, so there’s the difference we’re talking about,” said Seebohm, a backstroke star, in an interview with the Today show in April 2022.
However, fellow Olympian Ian Thorpe opposed the decision saying it was “very complicated” but he was “personally opposed” to the position taken by FINA.
“I am for fairness in sport, but I’m also for equality in sport. And in this instance, they’ve actually got it wrong,” he told reporters.
More recently, U.S. Republican senators have introduced a bill to counteract President Joe Biden’s attempts to compel institutions to allow biological males to share women-only spaces and compete in women’s sports.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education is proposing new regulations that will amend Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to ensure “no person experiences sex discrimination in education”—presumably encompassing transgender individuals.
