Dave T

That isn't true really. The World Club game in particular is the best example, it's had some rubbish times. It has generally moved around for the home broadcaster, if Sky want it at 6pm on a Sunday (not a major slot for crowds) that's where it has been. The problem is that by taking these short term decisions, you are never building up any kind of market with international rights. If we look at the three main factors, local rights, international rights and fans, the 3rd one is pretty robust, the 1st one gets treated like king, and international rights are all but ignored. This sin why we are not getting offers, we haven't built up a market.

I can understand the principle of wanting us to own assets rather than cashing in for modest amounts of money, but in terms of Red Hall, ultimately we are better off working from more appropriate buildings in more appropriate locations. It does sound, on the surface, that the moves are positive.

Dutton pretty much confirming that the offers aren't good from Oz. Obviously negotiating tactic, but it's quite depressing that we are talking about broadcasting through an app because there isn't decent levels of interest in the biggest RL nation in the world for what should be a superb World Cup. For me one of the biggest bits of incompetence over the last few decades with things like this is that we havent tried to run events with broadcasting in mind. Scheduling has been sporadic - playing World Cup openers at times that do not allow for maximising viewers on both sides of the world is basic stuff. IIRC, The last World Cup opener saw England play their first game on a Friday morning here, hardly a great slot for getting numbers. World Club Challenges have been played so they are on in Oz at 4am on a Monday morning. We are now getting the rewards for things like that. We need to be really strong on scheduling to provide live content that ticks boxes on both sides of the world. It looks slightly better this time - all of Australia's games will be early Sat or Sunday morning, but NZ's opener will be early Monday morning. All of Tonga's group games will be midweek mornings. So there are still quite a few games that will be early morning midweek.

FFS. Another game? Hasn't this ended yet?

I think it's important that RL addresses the unfairness question properly though. What does the science say? How much faster, how much stronger, how much bigger, how much more stamina - does it make them an outlier to cis women, or just around the top end, because if the averages are within the natural levels for cis women then it takes away some of the safety challenges. In terms of unfairness, does it make them better at RL? Does it make them more agile, better catchers, kickers, tackles, play under pressure? RL isn't about a single measure, otherwise Dwain Chambers may have been a great success at Cas. I expect we would come to the same conclusion that we are heading for (a formal rollout of this suspension), but if we are going to claim it is a research, fact based decision, I think the facts should strongly support this. A lot of the claims are high level and generic at the moment in many discussions.

I'm afraid it isn't that simple. What does considerably stronger equate to, and we are talking about trans women, not men vs women. Does the evidence show that trans women are stronger, faster, bigger etc than the strongest, fastest, biggest cis women? Are they outliers, or are they above average on these metrics?

You say RL will never be inclusive, but then talk about a possible option which could be more inclusive. So it may be possible

What nonsense. The world is changing, Sports, including RL have to respond to that and have approaches to things that we haven't in the past. It would be shambolic and immoral if sports weren't responding to what is happening in the world. Whether that be sexual orientation, gender rights, female sport, physical and learning disability sport, mental health support, domestic abuse, environment etc. Sports can have real positive impacts on society, we should not shy away from that.

Accepting that these sports may end up with consistent approaches in the end, and that sometimes there are politics at play, but it is odd if the danger present is so obvious and without doubt, then governing bodies arriving at different places is odd. It suggests that these decisions aren't purely being made on science and facts and that other things are at play.

Yes, I agree with that. And I do think this is where science needs to be strong on it. What exactly is it that makes it dangerous or unfair for trans women to play women's RL? We hear the odd snippet about trans women remain x% faster following hormone treatment, which may be a direct challenge for 100m sprint or similar, but for a multi skill team sport like RL how does that translate into danger or unfairness.

Wasn't there a mention earlier in this thread that in certain categories the RFU rules differ from World Rugby? It seems odd to me that sports wouldn't have a consistent approach on this.

I don't think I need to explain the word campaigners to you dkw. But I acknowledge my post as clumsy, I should have gone on to say "campaigners, media and fans as opposed to governing bodies".

It is the outcome we get though. If a trans woman has been living their whole life as a female with a physical transition, are they really expected to go and play RL for a man's team?

I find it interesting that many of the sports do appear to focus on fairness over safety. The safety focus does seem to come more from campaigners. And I think some of that is that when you have a sport that makes no concessions or categorisation based on height, weight, strength, pace etc, it can easily come under challenge.

This is a private forum - the mods can delete what they want - they even censor f l a t cap pers I believe. People get banned from here all the time. But that isn't cancelling. Those people can go off wherever they want. I can be asked to leave a pub, I'm not cancelled. I think there needs to be some kind of understanding of what people mean by cancelled. But this is probably one for another thread John.

A well thought out approach from IRL would have contained detail on the research they followed (although they do link to a paper in the full release - but say they haven't completed research). It would also have laid out their position on all transgender people, not just trans women, and it ideally would have made reference to where transgender people are eligible to play. They have effectively banned a segment of the population. The natural assumption here is that trans women are eligible for men's RL - but they hold back from saying that, presumably because it would be controversial. So if it is controversial you need to have an approach to that rather than just ignoring it. The unsaid things here are the problematic bits - and if they weren't ready to say anything - they should have cracked on with the work needed to get to a position.

I'm happy that we have recognised the shortage of big forwards and are addressing this - in terms of how they will do, who knows? We have had some great players from the Southern Hemisphere and some dire ones, but NRL experience isn't always an indicator of how they will go.

Yes, absolutely agree, the way some campaigners are trying to cancel trans people is appalling. Edit to add more context. That may seem a harsh statement, but that is what we are ultimately talking about here. We are talking about banning trans women from sport, toilets, changing rooms - eroding their rights, we are seeing harsh statements about what trans women should and shouldn't be able to do, even from our prominent politicians and prominent celebrities. So despite the many claims that people who speak out are cancelled, it just isn't true - they get reactions which is fine. Their views are allowed to be challenged. And private companies are then allowed to decide whether they will platform these people. And at the moment, many are very happy to platform people with anti-trans sentiment. We do need to be careful here, the last few posts and the one from Dunbar is spot on, we need to be sensitive and empathetic, even if we land on a ruling that we don't all agree with - this is people's lives and the provocative language used to campaign for chipping away at trans people's rights is problematic imho.

But so do others. This isn't an issue. RL fans are normal people doing normal things like football fans do. Places like this just thrive on self-deprecation and judge ourselves far too harshly. I've seen the likes of Wigan and Saints bring up to 4k to Warrington (less now but still healthy) - and these are clubs that at times have only 10k home fans. That is an excellent following. More people attend closer games, fewer people attend far away games - that isn't an RL phenomenon. Your point (I think it was you who raised it) about things like supporters branches in football is a reason why modest sized clubs may have decent numbers, but that is just an outcome of football being a more popular game overall.

RL fans do travel.

The only person who ever uses the phrase 'beg Australia' is Shropshire Bull himself. Everyone else just calls it playing against Australia.

I saw a trans woman on twitter expressing her disappointment on this subject earlier. We should absolutely be mindful that because it may not directly affect players right here and now, it will have impacts on people. This decision will be seen as challenging to many people. Many will agree, many will disagree, its a challenging situation.

What is sad is that when we moved to Four Nations, it didn't necessarily have the 4th team being competitive - but surely now we genuinely could have 6 or even 8 teams that we talked about previously. Aus, NZ, Eng, Tonga, Samoa, PNG, France, Fiji - I can;t see how that couldn't be an entertaining competitive comp.

Of course those sports have those issues.

RL fans do travel. Our numbers are smaller than football, so fewer will travel. There isn't any great mystery to it. In football there are often fewer travelling fans for these difficult midweek games.