The Corridor of Impossibility

Hello, friends! It has been a long time since I have written. In truth, I have not known what to say, and nor have I valued my voice. I will try to do better, and to believe. This article is the full version of a letter that will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Wisden Cricket magazine.

I spent hours teaching myself to play again over the past few years.

This week, English cricket will universally welcome the ECB’s ban on transgender women in elite women’s cricket. It will be lauded as a common sense decision to protect women’s cricket from a critical threat to the game.

The ban will prevent transgender women who have been through any form of male puberty from playing in the top tiers of cricket, and the hundred. This is an impossible standard in the UK. Firstly, this requires transgender women to have received treatment before puberty, when wait times for just an initial appointment are routinely upwards of four years. Secondly, it implicitly requires a transgender woman to have received puberty blockers as a child to suppress puberty, something made explicitly illegal by the Cass Review. The ECB’s pathway for transgender women to play elite women’s cricket categorically does not exist.

In my experience, it is equally impossible for a transgender woman to make it in the men’s game due to intolerance and limited acceptance — these are desperately hard times for transgender people in any team…