It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Then again, it’s been looking a lot like Christmas since, oh I don’t know, early October?
Everywhere you turn it’s festive this and yuletide that. I just sneezed halfway through typing this sentence and a bit of bloomin’ tinsel flew out of my nose.
There’s just no escape is there? I recall nipping into my local supermarket a couple of months ago to get some goodies for the Halloween guisers.
Not only were said goodies sold out, the mince pies in a hastily erected and hideously premature Christmas aisle were gone too. Remember, this was October.
Now, read that paragraph again and ask yourself if we live in a sane and civilised society? The answer, as we all wearily know, is a quite emphatic ‘no’.
The times they are a-flabbergasting. When I was a young ‘un – and I’m now conjuring up some misty-eyed nostalgic vision that should be accompanied by the brass band music from the Hovis bread advert – my only worry in life concerned my inability to execute a half decent wheelie on my BMX bike. It was a simpler age, eh?
Nowadays, everybody seems to be stressed, strained, tortured and tormented by so much of this, that and the other, we may as well strap the entire world to a hospital gurney.
As for affairs in the world of golf? Well, controversies and complexities abound, even as we cocoon ourselves in this season of goodwill.
If it’s not the contentious confirmation last night that US players will get paid to play in next year’s Ryder Cup – the greedy sods - then it’s golf’s organisations clarifying a hitherto shoogly stance on the transgender issue.
Not long after the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) and the United States Golf Association (USGA) updated their respective gender policies to exclude players who have gone through male puberty from competing in women’s events, the R&A followed suit the other day with a similar approach for its professional and elite amateur championships.
The LPGA’s decision has a significant impact on Scottish-born transgender golfer Hailey Davidson and means that she will not be allowed to compete on its second-tier Epson Tour next season.
Her appearance in various events prompted protests and considerable consternation among female competitors and re-ignited the heated trans debate in golf.
It’s now 20 years since Denmark’s Mianne Bagger became the first transgender golfer to play a professional event at the Women’s Australian Open of 2004.
Her emergence kick-started something of a domino effect with the Ladies European Tour amending its membership criteria that year before the LPGA removed its ‘female at birth’ entry condition in 2010.
Since then, though, Bagger has become a critic of some of the more relaxed rules governing transgender participation in elite women’s sport as various governing bodies awkwardly contorted and squirmed to prioritise inclusion over sporting fairness.
“It's a slap in the face to women,” she said a couple of years ago.
To be honest, I can’t recall writing much about the initial Bagger furore at the time. In my usual style, I would’ve just sat on the fence, stuck my head in the nearest bucket of sand and hoped things would just muddle along.
A year after Bagger’s groundbreaking appearance, the golf writers probably scribbled a heck of a lot more words on the fairly seismic announcement by the R&A that the word ‘female’ would be added to the entry form of The Open.
The catalyst for change was provided by Michelle Wie. At the time, the teenage sensation was being awarded a variety of invitations to men’s PGA Tour events and her outings got frothing observers mulling over some of the more outrageous possibilities of her largely futile endeavours.
If - and it was a colossal ‘if’ - she had won, say, the 2005 John Deere Classic, an event which offered an Open place to a player not already exempt, the championship committee could not have denied her a place in the field.
For 2006, therefore, the entry form for The Open changed and allowed women, who had finished in the top five of the female majors, to enter at the regional qualifying stage, which was a bit like saying, ‘right girls, there’s Everest, here’s a map and some meat paste pieces, good luck.’
Unsurprisingly, given the daunting nature of the task, not one female name ever appeared in regional qualifying. That was until Alison Perkins popped up in the draw sheet for the 18-hole shoot-out at Hollinwell in 2021. Perkins, though, was a transgender golfer.
She clearly didn’t meet the criteria – top five of the majors and all that – and when I asked for a bit of clarification, I was told that, while she identified as a woman, she was still a registered male professional so was eligible to enter.
At that point, I just about choked on my own brain trying to untangle the complexities of this very emotive, evolving issue.
Having tiptoed through the tulips in the transgender debate for a while, golf’s various bodies have now delivered a strong message to the wider world of sport that they are taking a stand to protect the game’s female category.
The criteria has been set – again – but the conversation and controversy will, no doubt, rage on.
Can I not just hide away and practice that ruddy wheelie?
