A young female rugby player is questioning the policies that allowed her to suffer a serious knee injury during a match against a transgender opponent.
Elena King, 20, sustained a torn ACL and MCL in January when playing in the Netherlands after her biologically male opponent caused her left knee to pop out of its socket during a tackle. Now facing lifelong pain and six months of physiotherapy just to run again, she is challenging the Dutch Rugby Association’s policies on transgender athletes competing against women.
“I felt the strength being used against me: it’s nothing that I can explain because I don’t have that strength myself,” King told The Times. “A cis woman could not have pulled my leg out of its socket… I heard a really loud pop. That’s when I started screaming. My leg was on fire.”
“I do not want it to ever happen to anyone again because I don’t want it to happen to me. It could have been prevented,” she added.
King, who has Dutch, English, and Scottish heritage, has been recovering at her home in Amsterdam since the incident in the Dutch Premiership earlier this year. She is now seeking legal advice about the situation.
Her opponent, Ashley Mooney, played in the subsequent game but was later suspended for four matches. Mooney has since returned to action earlier this month and even won player of the match at a recent weekend fixture.
In a detailed blog post, King described how she had already been apprehensive about facing Mooney after previous incidents where the player allegedly caused injuries to other teammates, including a black eye, rib, and spine injuries. According to King, when these concerns were raised with the Dutch Rugby Union, they responded that “it’s fine.”
During the fateful match against Breda Dames Rugby Club, King recounts how she was being held by two players as a maul was forming when Mooney began to tackle one of her legs improperly, with a shoulder pressing below her kneecap.
“The transplayer came in from the left side and my knee doesn’t bend that way. So the transplayer pushed her shoulder into my knee and with immense strength pulled her arms closer to herself,” King writes in her blog. “I then heard a massive popping sound. I screamed my lungs out. The transplayer had pulled my pretty little knee out of its socket and broke my MCL and ACL in one single movement.”
“Later I heard that teammates on the pitch had to walk away with their hands over their ears because my screams sounded too painful,” she continued.
King had to be carried off by her teammates as the opposing club did not provide a stretcher.
“I knew it was serious, I didn’t feel connected to my knee at all, later I would find out my nerves were dead because the ligaments were completely torn apart,” she wrote. “I kept going back to that moment where I felt the male strength of this transplayer. It is something that still goes through my head.”
In March, King met with the Dutch Rugby Association but feels they made her feel as if “the whole thing was my fault.”
“I came out of that meeting incredibly let down,” she wrote. “It was clear to me that the Dutch Rugby Association didn’t want anything to do with this issue. They put inclusion before safety in our sport.”
King emphasizes that her concerns are about safety, not inclusion. “Inclusion is important,” she told The Times. “That’s also not what I’m on about. It’s to do with safety. Women want the best for everyone: we want everyone to feel included so of course, people are like, why not? But then you actually see the reasons why it’s not possible. We have women’s spaces for a reason.”
The Dutch Rugby Union has not established a formal policy on transgender players, although they recently convened for a discussion on the subject on May 9. They have since established a “group of experts” to assess whether they need to adapt their stance on transgender participation.
A Dutch Rugby Union board member told The Times: “Inclusion, fairness, and player safety are extremely important principles of the sport of rugby. Precisely because the risk of injury is higher in rugby, RN takes safety on the field very seriously. This is why the federation applies strict rules when it comes to dangerous play.”
This approach differs from World Rugby, which in 2020 became the first international sports federation to ban transgender women from elite and international levels of the sport. In 2022, the Rugby Football League and Rugby Football Union banned transgender players from female-only formats, and by 2023, this ban was applied across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
