Gender critical organisations Sex Matters and For Women Scotland have launched a witch hunt to identify and map the identities of trans women participating in women’s sport around the United Kingdom. These groups call trans women “trans identified males” due to their “gender critical beliefs” objecting to trans women’s identities. This is generally considered offensive.
This is a clear violation of the privacy and dignity of women who will be targeted. Previous outings of trans women in women's sports have also empowered large online harassment campaigns targetting teams in which they play. We saw only this summer how rumours disseminated through gender critical activist groups can result in misidentification, and dangerous global hate campaigns targeting women rumoured to be transgender within women’s sports. In the UK, previous hate campaigns have targetted trans women in football causing match cancellations, and a cisgender woman who ran a marathon who was targetted by a massive hate campaign orchestrated through Gender Critical social media network Mumsnet (with threads organising this harassment and apologising for it later deleted after the fact).
To our knowledge, there are no known trans women playing in the highest level of any popular sport in the UK. All women’s sport in the UK is underfunded, but the harassment this campaign will inevitably stir up is most likely to impact grass roots women’s sports teams and organisations who lack the resources to deal with the security concerns that result from the abuse that follows.
Trans Safety Network call on all British sports governing bodies and anyone involved in organising women's sports to take a visible public stance against this clear threat to sport and its participants.