Cerys Vaughan, the 18 year-old girl who was given a six-match ban by the Lancashire Football Association after asking a bearded opponent on a ladies team she was due to play against whether he was a man, has had the sanction overturned with the help of the Free Speech Union. The Telegraph has more.
She has been banned from playing football for asking a transgender opponent: “Are you a man?” She has been discussed and debated on television, online and in parliament. She has become a symbol in the fight against those born male playing in women’s sport. And almost nobody knows who she is.
Until now.
Her name is Cerys Vaughan and she is sitting nervously on a bench in her local park. She is about to break her public silence about her Kafkaesque trial and the extraordinary events that have followed. She has long been afraid to do so – even anonymously – amid the threat of a backlash or of her ban being extended. But she is now ready to tell her story to Telegraph Sport, which has exclusively chronicled her months-long ordeal without her being identified.
She has agreed to speak out following a hat-trick of landmark developments linked to her case. The first of them, it can be revealed, was a successful appeal against the six-match ban imposed on her back in October. The second was last month’s Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces – delivered minutes after she was told the case against her had collapsed. But it is the third seismic development which has convinced her it is finally safe for her to come forward: last week’s announcement by the Football Association banning transgender women from the female game in England.
She is nevertheless still anxious when she agrees to meet – the day after that announcement – at a warm and sunny Leyland Park in Hindley, near Wigan. With three full-sized football pitches, it is a place she recalls enjoying many a childhood kickabout with her siblings. She is no longer a child, having turned 18 in January. But, standing at 5ft 5in and wearing a beige hoodie and football shorts from one of the women’s game’s biggest teams, Lyon, she could easily be mistaken for someone much younger. Sitting alongside her are parents Ian and Lynda, who admit to being almost as nervous as their daughter.
All this would be daunting enough for any teenager, let alone one currently on the assessment pathway for autism. But whenever she speaks, she does so calmly and clearly, her suspected condition barely noticeable save for perhaps a certain directness in her manner.
She talks about her earliest footballing memories, saying she began playing around the age of six, when she was good enough to make the school team. Even back then, she says, that team was “girls only”, with a young Cerys playing boys exclusively “at break and lunch” during school hours. “They wouldn’t want to pass the ball to me,” she adds. “They’d leave me out picking teams, even though I was better than all of them.” She talks about what football means to her and how it has helped her make “a lot of new friends”. She adds: “I’m either playing football, watching football, collecting football stickers. It’s everything.”
She is modest about her own footballing ability, saying she does not think she is “good enough” to turn professional. The club she plays for, Leigh Genesis, are in Greater Manchester Women’s League Division 2, where, Cerys says, the focus is less on winning every week and more on women and girls having “fun”. Until last summer, Cerys was doing just that.
Then everything changed.
Her account of what took place on a “boiling” July day has been chronicled in detail by Telegraph Sport – including that it centred on a pre-season friendly between her club and a side it can now be revealed was fielded by Manchester Laces, an openly pro-LGBTQ+ team. Cerys painstakingly goes through it all again: how she asked a transgender opponent with “a beard”: “Are you a man?”; how she raised safety concerns with the referee; how she was confronted about it by a Laces player who then reported her to Kick It Out, triggering an investigation by the Lancashire FA.
That led to her being charged with saying, “Are you a man?”, “That’s a man”, “Don’t come here again”, or similar comments. She was told she faced a ban of up to 12 matches, a sanction she says could have been life-altering for her. She explains she has been studying A-level PE and the course includes a practical element linked to her playing football. She denied the charges but was found guilty by a National Serious Case Panel and banned for six games – four of which were suspended for 12 months.
At each stage in the process, Cerys says she assumed the case would go no further because she thought those involved would know she had not been transphobic. That includes after Telegraph Sport broke the news of her plight back in October. She says: “I remember when the article first came out and I was reading through the comments on the website, and it was nice to see that everyone was on my side.”
Her story had an extraordinary impact, with the likes of former FA chairman Lord Triesman, human rights charity Sex Matters and the Free Speech Union all rallying behind her. There was a protest outside Wembley before England’s Nations League game against Republic of Ireland in November and another before the Lionesses’ friendly against Switzerland at Bramall Lane the following month.
“I was glad that I could be used as an example to support something that I believe in,” she says. “I felt a bit like a little micro-celebrity. It was funny seeing all the posts online and I knew that was me but no one else knew that was me.” She says that, apart from her family and team-mates, only “two or three friends” were aware who she was.
She appealed her punishment with the help of the FSU, which had also been assisting Allison Pearson after police visited the Telegraph columnist’s home over a complaint about a year-old deleted post on social media. Cerys, who served her two-match suspension before being granted permission to appeal, admits she was worried challenging her guilty verdict would result in her being handed “a harsher punishment”.
After a three-month battle, an appeal board of the FA quashed the ruling against her in a damning – and alarming – judgment on the original proceedings. Seen by Telegraph Sport, the written reasons state: she had not received a fair hearing during a three-hour video call that left her in tears; proper consideration had not been given to her age or the evidence against her; and she was wrongly found guilty “by own admission” when she had denied the charges.
Cerys is equally scathing about the original proceedings, during which she says she was asked how many LGBTQ+ players there were on her own team. She adds: “Why did they bother making us do a three-hour call if they already knew before it began that they were going to find me guilty?”
Worth reading in full.
BBC News has also published a story which includes an interview with Cerys.
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