The early moments of Breanna Gill’s first professional win on the WPGA Tour of Australasia looked like any other women’s tournament. Players came rushing out to shower Gill with champagne on Bonville Golf Resort’s 18th green, and she savored the moment.
“I always thought in my head if I ever got the opportunity to actually win a golf tournament and the girls happen to come running out on the green, I was going to stand there and take it. I wasn’t going to run away,” said Gill in a release.
“If you get yourself in that position, you just take it. It was so special.”
The celebrations quickly turned sour, however, as the transgender athlete’s playoff victory at the Australia Women’s Classic April 2 in New South Wales became awash in controversy.
Gill, No. 393 in the Rolex Rankings, began receiving death threats not long after the WPGA Tour posted about her victory on its Twitter account. While the tweet didn’t note that Gill is a transgender athlete, other accounts did and the ensuing backlash was so great the tour’s Twitter account was made private. Gill also hid her accounts.
WPGA chief Karen Lunn told The Sydney Morning Herald that the tournament deleted the tweets over concerns for Gill’s welfare, noting that Lunn had received death threats along with other governing members of the WPGA.
“Everyone’s worried about her welfare,” Lunn told the paper. “It’s obviously a very tough time.”
On May 13, 2021, U.S. pro golfer Hailey Davidson won her first professional title on the NWGA tour (National Women’s Golf Association), beating several LPGA players in the process, including Paula Creamer and Perrine Delacour. Davidson is believed to be the first trans woman to win a professional tournament in the U.S. and now owns several titles. She has also twice participated in LPGA Q-School, though she has yet to advance past the second stage.
In 2004, Mianne Bagger became the first openly transgender woman to play in a professional golf tournament at the Women’s Australian Open. She’d go on to become the first transgender woman to qualify for the Ladies European Tour.
Bagger is now retired from tour life but continues to follow the emerging science around trans athletes and what kind of advantage going through puberty as a male might give trans women over cisgender women (those whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth). The science isn’t settled, Bagger told Golfweek in 2021. In fact, if anything, she believes it’s leaning more toward the exclusion of transitioned women in women’s sport.
“Everyone has to be reasonable in this,” she said. “You can’t just deny some physiological advantages for the sake of inclusion.”
Bagger would like to see the LPGA’s hormone therapy requirement extended beyond one year.
“It’s quite clear that merely one year of hormone therapy is not at all adequate,” said Bagger. “That’s if it is deemed acceptable for transitioned women to continue competing in women’s sport.”
She’d also like to see a minimum of three years of an ineligible period after gender reassignment surgery. The LPGA and USGA recently removed a two-year waiting period after surgery.
Mianne Bagger of Denmark lines up a putt during the second round of the 2007 ANZ Ladies Masters at the Royal Pines East Course on February 9, 2007, at the Gold Coast, Australia. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
Last June, World Aquatics, swimming’s governing body, formerly known as FINA, adopted a new “gender inclusion policy” that only allows athletes who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events. The organization is also exploring a new “open competition category.”
In addition, World Athletics, the governing body for track and field, put a policy in effect last month that prohibits transgender women who went through male puberty from being able to compete in women’s events at international competitions.
Twenty states have placed restrictions on transgender athletes, most recently Kansas, which banned transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports through college. The new law goes into effect this summer.
