So when Cricket Australia cleared a transgender woman, the 25-year-old daughter of former Indian Test cricketer Sanjay Bangar, to play elite women\u2019s domestic cricket, my first thought wasn\u2019t about her.<\/p>\n
It was about every girl who\u2019s spent her whole life training to make a State squad, only to find the rules can change for her without warning.<\/p>\n
Anaya Bangar played age-group cricket in India at the under-16 and under-19 levels, and trialled for Mumbai\u2019s under-23 squad before transitioning in 2022.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s now been cleared to play elite women\u2019s cricket in Australia from March 2027, subject to a final testosterone test. She is already allowed to play community cricket.<\/p>\n
Bangar argues a 12-week testing program at Manchester Metropolitan University\u2019s Institute of Sport found her \u201cphysical parameters fall within the cisgender female athlete range\u201d.<\/p>\n
But we don\u2019t know what those parameters are. A 12-week test can measure muscle mass and grip strength today. But, according to experts, it can\u2019t undo male puberty.<\/p>\n
It can\u2019t 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\u2019t find a body that skipped the part that matters most.<\/p>\n
Bangar says her bone density has dropped, and that\u2019s plausible. Density falls on hormone therapy, but architecture doesn\u2019t. Height, shoulder width, limb length and the frame developed at 15 and 16 stay the same.<\/p>\n
Dr Joanna Harper, a medical physicist researching transgender athletes in Oregon, has advised the International Olympic Committee on this exact question.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the absolute sense, trans women will still be stronger than cisgender or typical women, even after a prolonged period of testosterone suppression,\u201d Dr Harper, a transgender woman herself, told CNN.<\/p>\n
Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, and Dr Tommy Lundberg, a clinical physiologist at Sweden\u2019s Karolinska Institute, found the same thing: the muscle, strength and bone advantages built during male puberty don\u2019t go away with hormone therapy.<\/p>\n
The International Cricket Council banned transgender women who\u2019ve been through male puberty from international women\u2019s cricket in 2023, with no exceptions.<\/p>\n
Last year the England and Wales Cricket Board went even further and banned them from every level of the women\u2019s game, right down to club cricket.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
![\"Transgender](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/a8df9eefde0104c45503566bd9521c053093ab0e.jpg\")
Transgender cricketer Anaya Bangar has ben cleared by Cricket Australia to play elite women’s cricket in 2027. Credit: Anaya Bangar\/Facebook<\/p>\n
South African professional cricketer Marizanne Kapp called the decision on Instagram \u201cabsolutely ridiculous\u201d and said it shouldn\u2019t be allowed.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t about Bangar\u2019s right to live as herself. She\u2019s entitled to that, fully. What she isn\u2019t entitled to is a place in a category that exists because male and female bodies perform differently once puberty\u2019s done. That\u2019s not unkind. That\u2019s the reason the category exists at all.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Swimming\u2019s restricted. Rugby\u2019s restricted. Athletics has been restricted. Cricket\u2019s own international body has restricted. Cricket Australia decided to be the exception.<\/p>\n
Bangar\u2019s response to her critics was to tell them to educate themselves.<\/p>\n
She told The Daily Mail: \u201cI\u2019m not talking from personal feelings or opinions. I have actual scientific evidence backing my case.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy 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\u2019s how it should be worldwide as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
So it seems even Bangar admits some trans women have an unfair advantage.<\/p>\n
If we\u2019re doing this on pure science, and she says she is, then the science has to be the thing that decides it, not the applicant.<\/p>\n
And case by case only works if there\u2019s 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\u2019t one. There\u2019s a study, a testosterone reading and an administrator\u2019s judgment call.<\/p>\n
Cricket Australia said yes anyway to one case, with no published standard for the next one.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just not cricket, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sport is supposed to be fair. You train harder, you get picked. You run faster, you win the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":885195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,1721,588,85],"class_list":["post-885194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-opinion","tag-sport","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}