Transgender Athlete Wins Womens Australian Golf Tournament
Transgender golfer Breanna Gill has won the Australian Women’s Classic at Bonville Golf Resort in the state of New South Wales.
The victory was the 32-year-old’s first win in the Women’s PGA Tour of Australia.
“I always thought in my head if I ever got the opportunity to actually win a golf tournament and the girls happen to come running out on the green, I was going to stand there and take it. I wasn’t going to run away,” Gill said in response.
“For it to actually happen is just incredible. I can’t actually believe it.”
Yet the win was received poorly by some who questioned the fairness of a biological male competing in a women’s league.
“Thoughts on having a transgender-specific league? Or transgender-specific sports?” wrote Hailey Rae Ostrom, a U.S. professional golfer, on Twitter.
Gill also reported receiving online abuse.
“We’re disappointed with the reaction of many in the public and sad that rather than celebrate her win, she has had to be subject to some really nasty comments,” said Karen Lunn, CEO of the WPGA Tour of Australasia, in an interview with 7 News Coast.
“A lot of players work very hard in the gym to get their distance longer and become more powerful, and Bree is probably someone who has done that.”
“Certainly, there is no evidence in women’s golf that transgender athletes have any advantage at all.”
Gill is not the first self-identifying transgender to take part in professional golf. Hailey Davidson in the United States failed to secure her LPGA card last August.
Transgender Athletes in Sport
The inclusion of transgender athletes in sports has been an ongoing and contentious issue.
The semi-professional NBL1 South women’s basketball league is considering whether to allow a biological male to compete in its upcoming league.
“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 body told The Epoch Times in a statement.
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.
In the United States, Wyoming has joined 18 other states in banning male biological students from competing in women’s sports teams after Republican Gov. Mark Gordon allowed new laws to pass without his signature.
It applies to public school students in grades 7 to 12 participating in interscholastic sports.
