First trans man to play competitive football in Australia
The Nike match ball infront of rainbow flags during the Premier League match between AFC Bournemouth and Newcastle United at Vitality Stadium on February 24, 2018. (Catherine Ivill/Getty)
Next season, a 25-year-old trans man will become the first to play competitive football in a men’s team in Australia.
Will, who did not want to give his full name, has been living as a man for the last two years.
He told The Age: “I’m just an ordinary guy who wants to play football, just with slightly different circumstances of how I came to be a guy.
“I thought, well, if fat blokes who are in their 40s are playing football, surely I can. The only thing stopping me is other people’s prejudice.”
Following a meeting with Victorian Country Football League (VCFL), he was given the go-ahead to join one of their clubs. He hopes to join the Bendigo football league, one of the oldest in Australia.
For insurance purposes however, he will have to legally amend the gender on his birth certificate to male. Under Victorian law, trans men must have their female reproductive removed in order to be legally recognised as male.
To avoid Will encountering abuse on the pitch, Glen Scott, the VCFL president, has pledged to educate players about trans issues.
Will says he does not want to be treated any differently, joking: “There might be a bit of resentment there, particularly if I turned out to be better than one or two players.
“They would probably hold that against me because they’d be thinking, ‘God, he doesn’t even have a penis and he can kick the ball better than me.”‘
