I vividly recall two incidents close to home involving sportswomen being hurt by men playing against them.

One involved my eldest granddaughter Zoe, then about 17 or 18, playing in a mixed futsal comp in Wollongong, and a young male player in the opposing team being very aggressive (he should have been sent off before) and breaking her left foot. It took a year to heal and, thank God, she is now OK.

The other incident involved me. I was playing at the then Bruce Stadium in an invitation team involving me, then Chief Minister Kate Carnell, the late Jim Murphy, Mal Meninga, Cosmos Chief, the late, great Steve Doszpot MLA, and several Cosmos players against the Australian national women’s soccer team, the Matildas.

I vividly recall a small Matildas player, a mere slip of a girl, as they say in the classics, running into me. She bounced off with a bloody nose, and I recall just being able to catch her fall before she hit the ground and lay her gently onto the turf.

It was an accident, but I was a big rugby forward twice her size, and she was a star female athlete. Luckily, she was not permanently hurt.

Imagine my horror to see news of Freya Golding, a big unit, playing in the Adelaide Footy League women’s community competition. The footage showed scenes where Freya had bumped female players to the ground and hurt one of them in the process. The AFL, being super woke and politically correct, had ruled Freya could play despite protests from the other clubs.

Freya had been an average player in the local men’s comp before that.

I can’t quite fathom why a biological man would want to play in a female comp, even if he identifies as a woman.

Now, I always, in my dreams, saw myself as a dashing outside centre instead of the plodding old second-row forward I have always been, but I never insisted on playing in that position, even when I was the captain-coach of the team I was playing in.

AFL experts tell me a women’s AFL team would struggle against a good under-13 boys’ side.

Once puberty hits, boys become stronger than girls. Men are physically different and stronger than women. That’s just a fact which no amount of DEI nonsense can alter.

I think it’s delusional and selfish in the extreme for a biological man to insist on playing in a women’s team. Even if they have had a sex change, they are still built like a man.

We take inclusion too far. To start with, very few men identify as women. As one of the longest-serving ACT Sports Ministers, I have always been supportive of all people playing sport, especially women and girls. But a duty of care is owed to all participants.

In the South Australian case in question, the other teams in the comp are threatening to forfeit when they play the club with Freya in the team.

That is not fair on anyone, and it should not have had to come to this. The AFL needs to get a grip on itself and ban this person from playing in the women’s competition.