JENI O’DOWD: Cricket Australia ignores science in allowing trans woman Anaya Bangar to play at highest level

Sport is supposed to be fair.

You train harder, you get picked. You run faster, you win the race. Nobody gets a head start because of who their father is, how much money they’ve got, or anything else that isn’t raw talent and hard work.

Take fairness out of sport, and you’ve got nothing left worth watching.

So when Cricket Australia cleared a transgender woman, the 25-year-old daughter of former Indian Test cricketer Sanjay Bangar, to play elite women’s domestic cricket, my first thought wasn’t about her.

It was about every girl who’s spent her whole life training to make a State squad, only to find the rules can change for her without warning.

Anaya Bangar played age-group cricket in India at the under-16 and under-19 levels, and trialled for Mumbai’s under-23 squad before transitioning in 2022.

She’s now been cleared to play elite women’s cricket in Australia from March 2027, subject to a final testosterone test. She is already allowed to play community cricket.

Bangar argues a 12-week testing program at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Institute of Sport found her “physical parameters fall within the cisgender female athlete range”.

But we don’t know what those parameters are. A 12-week test can measure muscle mass and grip strength today. But, according to experts, it can’t undo male puberty.

It can’t shrink bones that finished growing years ago. Under-16 and under-19 cricket happens right in the middle of puberty, so whatever else that test found, it didn’t find a body that skipped the part that matters most.

Bangar says her bone density has dropped, and that’s plausible. Density falls on hormone therapy, but architecture doesn’t. Height, shoulder width, limb length and the frame developed at 15 and 16 stay the same.

Dr Joanna Harper, a medical physicist researching transgender athletes in Oregon, has advised the International Olympic Committee on this exact question.

“In the absolute sense, trans women will still be stronger than cisgender or typical women, even after a prolonged period of testosterone suppression,” Dr Harper, a transgender woman herself, told CNN.

Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, and Dr Tommy Lundberg, a clinical physiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, found the same thing: the muscle, strength and bone advantages built during male puberty don’t go away with hormone therapy.

The International Cricket Council banned transgender women who’ve been through male puberty from international women’s cricket in 2023, with no exceptions.

Last year the England and Wales Cricket Board went even further and banned them from every level of the women’s game, right down to club cricket.

So the two biggest cricket boards in the world looked at this and said no. Cricket Australia looked at the same evidence and said yes.

South African professional cricketer Marizanne Kapp called the decision on Instagram “absolutely ridiculous” and said it shouldn’t be allowed.

This isn’t about Bangar’s right to live as herself. She’s entitled to that, fully. What she isn’t entitled to is a place in a category that exists because male and female bodies perform differently once puberty’s done. That’s not unkind. That’s the reason the category exists at all.

Cricket Australia had its own global governing body to follow here and chose to be more permissive, at the exact moment the rest of sport is going the other way.

Swimming’s restricted. Rugby’s restricted. Athletics has been restricted. Cricket’s own international body has restricted. Cricket Australia decided to be the exception.

Bangar’s response to her critics was to tell them to educate themselves.

She told The Daily Mail: “I’m not talking from personal feelings or opinions. I have actual scientific evidence backing my case.

“My advocacy in this part is that not all trans women have an unfair advantage. It needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, similar to how Cricket Australia has approached my case, and I think that’s how it should be worldwide as well.”

So it seems even Bangar admits some trans women have an unfair advantage.

If we’re doing this on pure science, and she says she is, then the science has to be the thing that decides it, not the applicant.

And case by case only works if there’s a case-by-case system: an agreed test, an agreed threshold, an independent panel, something a 16-year-old girl in a State academy could actually read. There isn’t one. There’s a study, a testosterone reading and an administrator’s judgment call.

Cricket Australia said yes anyway to one case, with no published standard for the next one.

It’s just not cricket, right?