“Every step we’re taking to Wembley, we’re showing that even though they might be trying to pull us back, we’re moving forward in a way that’s united and centring on the joy of football,” Fleur Cousens said, “and at the core of that is trans joy.”
Cousens, the founder of Goal Diggers, a grassroots football club in London, was one of more than 100 people who marched on Monday to protest the Football Association’s incoming ban on transgender women playing women’s football. Starting from Goal Diggers’ training ground in the east of the capital, they made their way to the home of English football to deliver an open letter to the governing body.
Influenced by the supreme ccourt’s ruling on April 16, when the UK’s highest court decided that the legal definition of a woman would be based on biological sex, the FA amended its inclusion policy to exclude all transgender women from women’s football from June 1, falling in line with other major sports in the UK.
But Cousens and Goal Diggers are demanding that the FA’s decision be reversed.
“I wanted to put the ‘all’ back in football,” Cousens told The Athletic, on mile nine of the 12-mile sponsored walk, which had raised almost £10,000 ($13, 393 at current conversion rates) at the time of…
