The Government has told Sport NZ to get rid of the guidelines it adopted under the last Government around how sporting codes should deal with the issue of how to include transgender athletes at the community level.
It's now up to each individual sport to decide what to do.
Mike Hester is New Zealand Rugby's head of participation for community rugby and he spoke to D'Arcy Waldegrave about the approach rugby is taking.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sports Talk podcast with Duncie Wildergrave
from News Talks.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Be all right, it's talk about today's big issue of
twelve minutes after seven here on Sports Thought, we're joined
by Mike cast In. Did ours head of participation at
a community rugby at that level? Welcome to the show, Mike,
great to have you. On the guidelines for transgender players
in sport across the country have been essentially thrown out
(00:32):
by sportings in at the behest of the government. How
does this affect rugby at a community level.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
So transgender participation has been on our sort of agenda
for a few years now to provide a bit of clarity,
and we have direction from World Rugby about what that
looks like in the poor performance and pathway space, and
so we need sort of acknowledge and respect the position
there around how transgender people participate. But what's been left
for countries like Design to resolve in the community spaces.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
What does that look like in terms of participation approach?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
And so that's what we've been working through over the
last couple of years, guided to buy our values but
also guided by the voices of our community. So we've
done a one wave of consultation and we've got a
second one to go over the next sort of six
months or so.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Is it helpful do you think negative or positive? Maybe
around the government pulling these guidelines, taking them off the
website and saying individual sports can do it themselves. Is
this a good move for you or not?
Speaker 4 (01:30):
So?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
As a general rule, Sportings provides lots of really helpful
advice and guidance to the sector around a whole range
of things, and so certainly the advice that they provided
in this area, like others, has been really helpful. It's
been informative, it's highlighted things that we need to think about.
Are particularly in different segments youth, for example, in juniors
is where there's really complex things happening in that space.
(01:52):
So any advice or guidance that they can give is
really helpful. They obviously can't answer everything, and they also
have to respect what's asked of them to support.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
So the short answer is that we where a resource.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Sport and we have a capability and capacity to make
these decisions that will go forward that might ectually more
challenging for others perhaps who don't necessarily have all those resources.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
They weren't directives though, were they. It wasn't you must
do this, It was just based on suggestion. So taking
the suggestions away, was there actually even any point in
doing that? If people had their own decisions to make
and they could handle it themselves, surely a bit of
guidance from upstairs the information they've gleaned would not be
a bad thing. I appreciate what they're doing, but to
(02:38):
take all the guidelines away that weren't mandatable guidelines is odd.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, and we certainly know from a whole bunch of
different situations that that kind of guidance that comes across
the sector is really helpful. And so I'm sure other
sports would have really appreciated all the sport.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
That it's been coming down from sportings.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yet in a whole bunch of areas, if we go
back to COVID, they provided some hugely valuable sort of
interpretation frameworks of which you know, really important rugby, but
for other smallest sort of nesos, really really important to
help interpret things. So potentially this will be an area
where others might feel it more so than rugby.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So with transgender participation, you said you've made moves in
that space and be doing it for a few years now,
what are the big steps that you've made, the decisions
that you've made, what's faced you, what's been in the
way or helped you out with this? What are the
issues around transgender participation in a community level Mike.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So the first one is is there a need for
a policy in the space because it's easy to regulate everything,
but sometimes regulation doesn't actually help what makes actually life
harder for people on the ground. And we think about
how our community game is delivered. It's delivered by tens
of thousands of volunteers. There's one hundred and twenty hundred
and thirty thousand people sort of accessing the game through
(03:57):
clubs and schools, and so it has to be something
that makes sense and is realistic in terms of what's
important to Rugby values around inclusion, our values around the
game for all shapes and sizes.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
It's a game that's played by a wide range of.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Our community European, Maori, Pasifica, Asian. What are their sort
of expectations and values that they want to see reflected
in the game that they play. And also that important
lens of safety in terms of how do we ensure
that across all levels of the game, we are providing
a safe experience. Albeit we're a contact sport and we're
(04:37):
also a sport where physical mismatches is actually part of
its essence. Being bigg as an advantage in some ways
and being smaller as an advantages and others.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So when you look at the brushstrokes for the decisions
made around transgender playing of the game, are you saying
you look to the community, but you've got a number
of different facets of that community. As you mentioned, how
much does their input sway your decisions around what you
do and is it isolated their own community They can
(05:09):
make their own call at that level. Do they sit
under and umbrella from NZR about what you think is
best for the sport.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
It's usually a mix of both.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
In terms of our job is to provide leadership and
sort of the regulations around how the game should be
administered and delivered across the country, but it also needs
to be valued by communities in a way that meets
their needs, so that the community voice is really important.
We've run a series of workshops around what might be
topical for people in this space, and not surprisingly, we've
(05:40):
had really positive and strong engagement from those that are
invested in the girls and women's game around this issue
and the themes that came through from those workshops where
that they really valued inclusion. They wanted to see people
being included. They didn't like the idea of people being excluded,
but they also wanted it to obviously be a safe environment.
And so they are the themes that came through really strongly.
(06:02):
Themes that weren't so strong with those around sort of
fairness because the reality is in the community space that's
a little bit harder to really deliver and to judge
because it's community sport you play for a bunch of
different reasons other than necessarily the competition aspect of it.
(06:22):
In terms of the Rainbow community, we've engaged with them
around their views, particularly those that are engaged in the
game now or those that want to access the game.
What they asked for was just real clarity, so there
was no surprises for them about how they could be involved.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
And so they're the sort of themes that are being.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Really strong and the sort of first wave of consultation
which we're now taken back and trying to work out, right,
what is a regulation that services that all of those needs,
but also can be delivered on the grass as it
is a community game and it's delivered by tens of
thousands of volunteers.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So how many stages does this process go through? You've
completed the first, second, third, fourth, when you're looking at
knowing exactly where they stand or is it like a
moveable feast.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Ideally have clarity even if it's in a sort of
trial phase by the start of the community season next year.
Sometimes you don't know, as we do with for example,
law changes, you don't know the true impact of them
until we've trolled them, and so it may well be
that there is some tight implementation of a position, but
(07:26):
it's subject to review, perhaps within twelve months. And so
there's some of the techniques that we have used in
the past across a whole bunch of different areas to
judge whether or not some of the changes that are
being proposed and contemplated are making sense and having the
right impact, or they need to go through a further review.
So that'll shake out as we go through sort of
the next phase of sort of consultation, which we're hoping
(07:48):
to get underway before Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And when you've settled on what New Zealand Rugby believe
what they think has said, Yes, community engagement, but will
you be passing directors across the entire community all over
the place as to what New Zealand Rugby want. Will
you be the overlord's here? Will you This is where
we stand and you've got to fall into place.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Yeah, we do that in a number of different areas.
So this would be the same in terms of what.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
We call domestic safety law variations, which is how the
game is to be delivered. So, for example, children can
play in a mixed gender competition up until the age
of thirteen, and at that point it then gets split
into single sex competitions. And so what we're talking about
here is the definition and eligibility of those gendered competitions
(08:38):
and who's able to access them. So that is normally
how the game is regulated, and then that provides clarity
for provincial unions, clubs, schools, administrators, managers and participants themselves
about who has the ability to access the game.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
So we'd fall into that kind of category of how
we regulate the game and.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Mike across the board in general, the response through the community,
the clubs and everybody else has there been much pushedback
or is there a sense of general acceptance in this
particular space, and I expect that the amount of athletes
that are actually directly affected by this is really quite small.
(09:19):
The community behind them or against them, or what's the
general feeling.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
My experience over the last five or six years in
the space is that it has been really strong support
for people to be included and welcomed, and it's been
very rare to come up against opposition to it. The
point you make though about the sectual number those is
quite relevant as well, and that the number of those
(09:44):
that want to access the game is very small, and
so you usually end up in these very individualized sort
of cases where a lot of people don't really have
much visibility of the issue and the impact across sort
of the broad broader system, And so we're not talking
large numbers sort of a year on year in which
we get questions about queries around am to access the game,
(10:07):
and so as a result, it's probably not something that
that's sort of troubling most clubs and schools sort of
every day of the week.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
But still very important for NDR that it's addressed, it's
looked after, it's.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Understood absolutely, because we know that there are views when
we do ask that people want to see a position
and they want to see that it reflects, you know,
Rugby's values and inclusion certainly is a dominant feature in
their discussion.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
For more from sports Talk, listen live to News Talks
it'd be from seven pm weekdays, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sports Talk podcast with Duncie Wildergrave
from News Talks.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Be all right, it's talk about today's big issue of
twelve minutes after seven here on Sports Thought, we're joined
by Mike cast In. Did ours head of participation at
a community rugby at that level? Welcome to the show, Mike,
great to have you. On the guidelines for transgender players
in sport across the country have been essentially thrown out
(00:32):
by sportings in at the behest of the government. How
does this affect rugby at a community level.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
So transgender participation has been on our sort of agenda
for a few years now to provide a bit of clarity,
and we have direction from World Rugby about what that
looks like in the poor performance and pathway space, and
so we need sort of acknowledge and respect the position
there around how transgender people participate. But what's been left
for countries like Design to resolve in the community spaces.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
What does that look like in terms of participation approach?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
And so that's what we've been working through over the
last couple of years, guided to buy our values but
also guided by the voices of our community. So we've
done a one wave of consultation and we've got a
second one to go over the next sort of six
months or so.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Is it helpful do you think negative or positive? Maybe
around the government pulling these guidelines, taking them off the
website and saying individual sports can do it themselves. Is
this a good move for you or not?
Speaker 4 (01:30):
So?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
As a general rule, Sportings provides lots of really helpful
advice and guidance to the sector around a whole range
of things, and so certainly the advice that they provided
in this area, like others, has been really helpful. It's
been informative, it's highlighted things that we need to think about.
Are particularly in different segments youth, for example, in juniors
is where there's really complex things happening in that space.
(01:52):
So any advice or guidance that they can give is
really helpful. They obviously can't answer everything, and they also
have to respect what's asked of them to support.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
So the short answer is that we where a resource.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Sport and we have a capability and capacity to make
these decisions that will go forward that might ectually more
challenging for others perhaps who don't necessarily have all those resources.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
They weren't directives though, were they. It wasn't you must
do this, It was just based on suggestion. So taking
the suggestions away, was there actually even any point in
doing that? If people had their own decisions to make
and they could handle it themselves, surely a bit of
guidance from upstairs the information they've gleaned would not be
a bad thing. I appreciate what they're doing, but to
(02:38):
take all the guidelines away that weren't mandatable guidelines is odd.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, and we certainly know from a whole bunch of
different situations that that kind of guidance that comes across
the sector is really helpful. And so I'm sure other
sports would have really appreciated all the sport.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
That it's been coming down from sportings.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yet in a whole bunch of areas, if we go
back to COVID, they provided some hugely valuable sort of
interpretation frameworks of which you know, really important rugby, but
for other smallest sort of nesos, really really important to
help interpret things. So potentially this will be an area
where others might feel it more so than rugby.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So with transgender participation, you said you've made moves in
that space and be doing it for a few years now,
what are the big steps that you've made, the decisions
that you've made, what's faced you, what's been in the
way or helped you out with this? What are the
issues around transgender participation in a community level Mike.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So the first one is is there a need for
a policy in the space because it's easy to regulate everything,
but sometimes regulation doesn't actually help what makes actually life
harder for people on the ground. And we think about
how our community game is delivered. It's delivered by tens
of thousands of volunteers. There's one hundred and twenty hundred
and thirty thousand people sort of accessing the game through
(03:57):
clubs and schools, and so it has to be something
that makes sense and is realistic in terms of what's
important to Rugby values around inclusion, our values around the
game for all shapes and sizes.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
It's a game that's played by a wide range of.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Our community European, Maori, Pasifica, Asian. What are their sort
of expectations and values that they want to see reflected
in the game that they play. And also that important
lens of safety in terms of how do we ensure
that across all levels of the game, we are providing
a safe experience. Albeit we're a contact sport and we're
(04:37):
also a sport where physical mismatches is actually part of
its essence. Being bigg as an advantage in some ways
and being smaller as an advantages and others.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So when you look at the brushstrokes for the decisions
made around transgender playing of the game, are you saying
you look to the community, but you've got a number
of different facets of that community. As you mentioned, how
much does their input sway your decisions around what you
do and is it isolated their own community They can
(05:09):
make their own call at that level. Do they sit
under and umbrella from NZR about what you think is
best for the sport.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
It's usually a mix of both.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
In terms of our job is to provide leadership and
sort of the regulations around how the game should be
administered and delivered across the country, but it also needs
to be valued by communities in a way that meets
their needs, so that the community voice is really important.
We've run a series of workshops around what might be
topical for people in this space, and not surprisingly, we've
(05:40):
had really positive and strong engagement from those that are
invested in the girls and women's game around this issue
and the themes that came through from those workshops where
that they really valued inclusion. They wanted to see people
being included. They didn't like the idea of people being excluded,
but they also wanted it to obviously be a safe environment.
And so they are the themes that came through really strongly.
(06:02):
Themes that weren't so strong with those around sort of
fairness because the reality is in the community space that's
a little bit harder to really deliver and to judge
because it's community sport you play for a bunch of
different reasons other than necessarily the competition aspect of it.
(06:22):
In terms of the Rainbow community, we've engaged with them
around their views, particularly those that are engaged in the
game now or those that want to access the game.
What they asked for was just real clarity, so there
was no surprises for them about how they could be involved.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
And so they're the sort of themes that are being.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Really strong and the sort of first wave of consultation
which we're now taken back and trying to work out, right,
what is a regulation that services that all of those needs,
but also can be delivered on the grass as it
is a community game and it's delivered by tens of
thousands of volunteers.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So how many stages does this process go through? You've
completed the first, second, third, fourth, when you're looking at
knowing exactly where they stand or is it like a
moveable feast.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Ideally have clarity even if it's in a sort of
trial phase by the start of the community season next year.
Sometimes you don't know, as we do with for example,
law changes, you don't know the true impact of them
until we've trolled them, and so it may well be
that there is some tight implementation of a position, but
(07:26):
it's subject to review, perhaps within twelve months. And so
there's some of the techniques that we have used in
the past across a whole bunch of different areas to
judge whether or not some of the changes that are
being proposed and contemplated are making sense and having the
right impact, or they need to go through a further review.
So that'll shake out as we go through sort of
the next phase of sort of consultation, which we're hoping
(07:48):
to get underway before Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And when you've settled on what New Zealand Rugby believe
what they think has said, Yes, community engagement, but will
you be passing directors across the entire community all over
the place as to what New Zealand Rugby want. Will
you be the overlord's here? Will you This is where
we stand and you've got to fall into place.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Yeah, we do that in a number of different areas.
So this would be the same in terms of what.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
We call domestic safety law variations, which is how the
game is to be delivered. So, for example, children can
play in a mixed gender competition up until the age
of thirteen, and at that point it then gets split
into single sex competitions. And so what we're talking about
here is the definition and eligibility of those gendered competitions
(08:38):
and who's able to access them. So that is normally
how the game is regulated, and then that provides clarity
for provincial unions, clubs, schools, administrators, managers and participants themselves
about who has the ability to access the game.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
So we'd fall into that kind of category of how
we regulate the game and.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Mike across the board in general, the response through the community,
the clubs and everybody else has there been much pushedback
or is there a sense of general acceptance in this
particular space, and I expect that the amount of athletes
that are actually directly affected by this is really quite small.
(09:19):
The community behind them or against them, or what's the
general feeling.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
My experience over the last five or six years in
the space is that it has been really strong support
for people to be included and welcomed, and it's been
very rare to come up against opposition to it. The
point you make though about the sectual number those is
quite relevant as well, and that the number of those
(09:44):
that want to access the game is very small, and
so you usually end up in these very individualized sort
of cases where a lot of people don't really have
much visibility of the issue and the impact across sort
of the broad broader system, And so we're not talking
large numbers sort of a year on year in which
we get questions about queries around am to access the game,
(10:07):
and so as a result, it's probably not something that
that's sort of troubling most clubs and schools sort of
every day of the week.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
But still very important for NDR that it's addressed, it's
looked after, it's.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Understood absolutely, because we know that there are views when
we do ask that people want to see a position
and they want to see that it reflects, you know,
Rugby's values and inclusion certainly is a dominant feature in
their discussion.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
For more from sports Talk, listen live to News Talks
it'd be from seven pm weekdays, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com