After everything, the UoL Men’s Rugby Team are still sexist to us

Grow up

rugby sexism UoL

Since becoming a rugby union player at Liverpool I have found one thing to be very true; there is still a hell of a lot of sexism in sport. Whenever I tell someone that I play rugby, I am faced with comments such as “so are you a lesbian then?”, “do you know what a ruck is?”, “you don’t look fat enough to be a rugby player.” Obviously these comments piss me off, but there is one thing that really grates on me…

Our male counterparts, the ones who also partake in the sport, find it necessary to patronise us and make our lives difficult. More than anyone they should understand that it’s a tough enough sport as it is without the addition of irrelevant, chauvinistic comments. The barrage of sexist remarks that we have received since we started playing can all be summed up by one day this year.

At a recent charity event, organised by the men’s rugby union team, they managed to mess up our timetable and gave us two games rather than six, which took place in the lunch break. After persistent pushing from four of us over the course of a month finally we finally got a revised agenda which was still crap.

The new timetable left us with a four hour gap between our first and second game, which were only 14 minutes long anyway, and during this time the boys decided to constantly remind us of the fact we had to wait around in the rain. Even one of our team’s dads tweeted them about it.

This was then followed by them chanting patronising comments at us, such as ‘you can’t even catch the ball’, ‘why don’t you run with it?!?!’ and so on. Sadly, this led to some of the girls telling me they didn’t want to play anymore, as they were afraid of the kind of comments the ‘lads’ would shout at them. This meant that one of our games then wasn’t played, so at least waiting around for four hours didn’t go to waste… oh wait…

Those girls that were still prepared to get on with their games and ignore the comments then had to attempt to play the game with the boys standing on the pitch, one of them even pissing on it, cheers. Not the best day so far. It certainly put me off going on a night out with them all, yet still some of the girls are troopers and didn’t allow their spirits to be ruined and headed into town. The following day, I received texts stating that there have been yet more sexist comments, including the ever-popular ‘get back in the kitchen’ remark.

Our team this year has won the BUCS league, BUCS cup and Varsity, raking in the points for our University. We are proud to play our sport, and every single girl on our team puts in 100% commitment. Even though we were told, “it doesn’t matter that you’ve won all your games this year because you’re just women’s rugby” (which they later apologised for), to be honest, we are pretty rucking awesome.

So back off with your shitty comments, maybe if you put as much effort into rugby as you do into patronising us, you would start winning some games too.

*The Tab reached out to the student who was President of the Rugby society at the time of these events, who told us that they are apologetic and have been working to kick sexist abuse from the club.