Examining World Rugby's Transgender Ban and the Perspectives of Cisgender Women Who Play Rugby in England, Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter critically examines the unprecedented 2020 decision by World Rugby's (WR) primarily male leadership (92% of board members) to ban transgender (trans) women from playing women's rugby union. We examined the process that was followed and found a lack of consultation with those directly impacted: women. To address this critical gap in the policy development process we conducted interviews and focus groups with cisgender female rugby players (junior to elite) of mixed ethnic backgrounds living in England, Canada and Australia. This was done with the support of rugby governing bodies and professional rugby teams. We found no support for WR's blanket ban. Rugby players felt the policy was a contradiction of rugby's claims it is a ‘game for all’. The minority of players with safety concerns supported exclusion on a case-by-case basis, with exclusion justified in a small number of narrowly defined circumstances (e.g. elite male players who transitioned recently). Importantly, the women and girls questioned why rugby's leaders had chosen to focus their energy on ‘protecting’ them from trans athletes but had ignored serious problems which cause them direct harm, such as a lack of funding, pervasive sexist and homophobic behaviour, sexual harassment, and substandard coaching and training facilities (relative to men). Our findings are consistent with and they support the position of women's sports organizations which have called on WR's male leaders to discard their blanket ban and undertake a rigorous, science-driven, collaborative policy development process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".