A transgender athlete who has spent nearly a decade representing Australia in women’s handball now fears her Olympic dreams may be crushed by shifting international policies.
35 year old Hannah Mouncey has been a core part of Australia’s women’s national handball team since making her debut in late 2018 at the Asian Women’s Handball Championship. Her journey to the sport came after being blocked from the AFL Women’s draft in 2017, when officials ruled her inclusion could create an “unreasonable physical advantage” over other players.
Now, as Australia’s handball team works toward qualifying for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and securing automatic entry to the 2032 Brisbane Games, Mouncey believes mounting pressure against transgender athletes in elite sport will end her international career.
“I expect to be banned by the end of the year, if I am honest,” Mouncey revealed on the Sacked podcast. “It seems like that is where they are going at the moment, they are looking probably at a ban across the board, and not just for trans athletes, but intersex athletes. They will be forced to compete in the men’s competition.”
Her concerns aren’t unfounded. The space for transgender athletes has shifted dramatically in recent years, with major sporting bodies implementing restrictive policies. In June 2022, FINA introduced regulations effectively banning most transgender women from elite swimming competitions. World Athletics followed suit in March 2023, barring transgender women who experienced male puberty from competing in elite female track and field events.
What makes Mouncey’s situation particularly complex is the stark contrast between her experience in handball and the broader sporting controversy. Unlike other sports where transgender inclusion has sparked heated debates, her participation has been welcomed internationally.
“I am playing for Australia at the moment, I have played for the Australian women’s team for seven or eight years now, and I have had no issues really at all, especially from overseas,” she explained. “I have been very open about it with the international federations, they have been fantastic, the Asian handball federation has no issues at all.”
Even more striking is the reception she’s received from teams in traditionally conservative nations. “I have had such positive responses from some of the girls from Iran and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,” Mouncey noted, highlighting how her sport has embraced inclusion where others have moved toward exclusion.
The International Handball Federation updated its statutes in February 2024, explicitly supporting transgender participation. The policy states: “The IHF tolerates no discrimination of any kind against a country, private person or groups of people on the grounds of racial origin, gender, language, religion or politics.”
Despite this official support, Mouncey faces mounting opposition from various quarters. Critics argue that transgender women retain physical advantages even after hormone therapy, a claim she disputes based on her personal experience.
“I started hormone treatment after we got back from Qatar to try to qualify for the Rio Olympics and in November 2015 I squatted 200 kilograms, benched 150kg, cleaned 140kg,” she detailed. “Within 12 months everything had dropped by two thirds across the board. My quad had gone down to 60 or 65, my bench had dropped to 50.”
She attributes these dramatic changes to the loss of testosterone from her system, emphasizing the significant physical transformation that hormone therapy produces. “People don’t understand that it is because you lose testosterone from the body and that has an impact across the board.”
Mouncey points to the lack of evidence supporting claims of unfair advantage as a key argument for continued inclusion. “I think the evidence in this is that if there was this problem of trans people having an unfair advantage, we would know it by now in the results. But we don’t have it.”
She advocates for reasonable restrictions while supporting continued participation, suggesting current International Olympic Committee guidelines requiring 12-24 months of hormone treatment strike the right balance. As someone who has undergone the process, she believes these requirements adequately address fairness concerns.
The pressure she anticipates comes from multiple sources, including what she describes as “pressure from a vocal minority” and concerns about the political climate in the United States as the host nation for the 2028 Olympics.
For now, Mouncey remains an integral part of Australia’s handball team, continuing to compete while uncertainty looms over her Olympic future.
