Elizabeth Eddy had no reason to suppose that her team-mates were anything but her friends. After contributing to three title triumphs in the US National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), she felt so embraced by Los Angeles' Angel City that her captain, Sarah Gorden , had even helped her fiancé plan their engagement. With her career as a defender nearing its conclusion and her personal life blissfully content, she invited both Gorden and Angelina Anderson, the goalkeeper, to her wedding. But the moment she spoke out about her league's failure to protect the female category, a subject that almost everybody in women's football would rather sweep aside, these same two players abandoned any pretence at loyalty, instead staging a press conference to denounce her as "racist" and "transphobic".
"It was terrible," Eddy says, still scalded by the experience almost a year later. With her sunny southern Californian temperament and an enquiring mind that propelled her to obtain a master's degree alongside her football career, she understood she was tackling a fraught topic but had no warning about the ferocity of the backlash. "I knew it would be bad, I just didn't realise it would be this type of bad, with character defamation and public shaming. I thought, 'Maybe some people will hate me.' But to slander my name and lie about me? I was shocked by the complete disowning."
Eddy (left) invited her Angel City team-mate Sarah Gorden (right) to her wedding - Getty Images/Kevork Djansezian
This is a brave and important interview for Eddy to be giving. "I'm the only one in women's soccer speaking about this," she acknowledges. "Part of the beauty of sport is that you're supposed to bring people together with different views. But it has not become that." Her alleged cardinal sin had been to express her unease at how competitive fairness was being sacrificed at the altar of gender ideology.
She had watched the warp-speed growth of the women's game in the United States with pride, marvelling at how it had gone in one decade from being livestreamed on YouTube to earning a £44m-a-year television contract. But this explosion of interest concealed a fundamental problem, with the league failing to conduct sex testing or to impose any firm eligibility standards at all. Its 2021 guidelines stated that biological males needed only to assert that "their gender identity is female" and to record testosterone serum levels below 10 nanomoles per litre for 12 months, despite the average range for women falling between 0.5 and 2.4.
To Eddy, 35, the notion of a women's league opening itself to male advantage was patently absurd. After all, Angel City had recently lost a practice match to an under-14 boys' academy team from nearby Los Angeles FC . "It was embarrassing for us, but also normal," she reflects. Just as it was normal for the United States's all-conquering women's team to lose 5-2 in 2017 to FC Dallas 's Under-15 boys. Or for Allyson Felix, one of the greatest female 400 metres runners in history, to find her lifetime best of 49.26sec eclipsed by hundreds of 15-year-old boys each year. Or for Serena Williams to tell David Letterman in 2013 that if she were ever to face Andy Murray in singles, she would lose "6-0, 6-0 in five, six, maybe 10 minutes". "Men serve harder, they hit harder – it's just a different game," she explained. And that is why sport, if anybody still needs reminding, is segregated by sex in the first place.
Against this backdrop, Eddy decided to talk, as rationally as she could, about the NWSL's dereliction of duty. The result was a column last October in the New York Post , where she aired her concern that "without clarity about who the league is for, it will lose its identity and its momentum". Her prescription for change was anything but provocative. She simply called on the league either to declare that players must be born with ovaries, as now required by the Football Association in England , or to introduce mandatory sex screening in the form of a once-in-a-lifetime cheek swab , a policy adopted over the past year by both World Athletics and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). And yet at her own club, the reaction to her suggestion was savage.
"That article does not speak for this team in this locker room," said Gorden, who has captained Angel City since 2024, in an announcement where she took no questions. "My team-mates are hurt, and they are harmed. Mostly the undertones come across as transphobic and racist as well." Alongside her on stage, Anderson indicated that Eddy had violated the team's "spirit of love and inclusivity for all people". The allegations were so outrageous that Eddy had grounds for legal action. Gorden's claim of transphobia was profoundly misguided, given that the central controversy here was not the transgender debate, but the NWSL's habit of turning a blind eye to players with confirmed or suspected differences in sexual development (DSDs).
As for the racism claim? Eddy's piece did not mention race once. The Post had merely illustrated it with a photograph of Barbra Banda , the Zambia -born player who, according to the country's former federation chief, did not meet the "gender verification criteria" for the 2022 Women's Africa Cup of Nations. Banda is the only player ever to score back-to-back hat-tricks in women's football at the Olympics and has signed a four-year contract with Orlando Pride worth more than £1.5m. In 2024, the BBC ignored the uncomfortable doubts by naming Banda its Women's Footballer of the Year , prompting JK Rowling to remark that it was "presumably more time-efficient than going door to door to spit in women's faces".
Barbra Banda accepts the BBC Women's Footballer of the Year Award in 2024 - BBC
Eddy, despairing of her team-mates' baseless condemnation, says: "If I step back a little, I realise that it's part of the strategy. When people dissent, others will try to ostracise you, shame you, silence you. But I knew that what I was saying was true, so I wanted to say more about it. The language my team-mates used was extremely manipulative – it was like a race to the bottom. I don't really know how to combat that, except by speaking the truth and walking the line, even if it means I get apples thrown at me."
She is unafraid to take aim at some of the loudest voices in football's "trans women are women" lobby, not least Megan Rapinoe , the two-time world champion, who has previously insisted: "We need to start from inclusion, period."
"It's completely out of touch with reality," Eddy says. "It's like the ugly underbelly of feminism. There's a lot of good feminism, but then there's some that crosses the line to become the opposite. It goes back to an idea of 'we're all victims, and all the victims need to come together'. That seems to be more the priority. Women have rights, but now women are giving up those rights for those they see as more oppressed. I just think, 'What are we doing?'"
Eddy has spoken out against some of the biggest and most established names in women's football - Dan Tuffs for The Telegraph
Unfortunately, the women's game is an echo chamber on this subject, almost never engaging with the substance of the argument and just reheating the tired tropes of identity politics. When Gorden said Angel City players had been "harmed" by Eddy's intervention, she gave no evidence, leaving the impression that the only harm came from being exposed to an alternative point of view. And when Anderson invoked that dreaded term "inclusivity", how did she square this with the exclusion and traducing of a woman meant to be her friend, all because Eddy had dared to deviate from the orthodoxy? It is a form of modern-day McCarthyism, and it goes on with the full approval of the clubs. Angel City – subject of the richest acquisition in women's sport when bought by Bob Iger, Walt Disney's chief executive, in 2024 for £187m – praised the two people attacking a team-mate for wrong-think as showing "courage and clarity".
"We're in this weird moment where 'diversity' and 'inclusion' might sound really nice, but unless they're attached to something they mean nothing," Eddy says. "It's an extreme progressive ideology. Even on a call with the lawyer from the players' association, she asked me multiple times, 'What literature have you been reading?' But there's no literature on this topic to learn. There's this preconceived moral superiority, where you're made to feel, 'How dare you question us or go against us?' I needed to get to a point where I understood the costs of having my voice heard. I believed that if I didn't speak out about something I knew to be true, I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror."
Eddy has continued her fight for fairness in women's sport despite retiring from football - Dan Tuffs for The Telegraph
Two Zambian strikers, Banda and Racheal Kundananji , have forged hugely successful careers in the NWSL, by far the world's richest women's football league, in spite of being withdrawn from their nation's 2022 squad after they refused to undergo testosterone-suppression treatment. Kundananji was briefly the most expensive female player ever when she moved to San Francisco's Bay FC in 2024 for £640,000. But for Eddy, the issue struck closest to home when a third Zambian player, Prisca Chilufya , joined Angel City last autumn even after admitting to being "intersex".
Within hours of the club posting footage of Chilufya's first training session on social media, there was an outcry over the forward's highly masculinised appearance. Lest this be dismissed as a subjective interpretation of womanhood, it is worth pointing to an interview that Chilufya gave in Zambia in 2017, describing the difficulties of obtaining a national registration card marked "female": "People came to make fun of me when they heard that I had a female name, they thought I was joking. I explained that I was intersex, but most people said they had never heard of such."
The "intersex" label is also rejected by many biologists, who point out that it is not a distinct category but rather a misleading umbrella term used for individuals whose sex is ambiguous or who have a mismatch between their internal and external sexual characteristics. Caster Semenya, for example, won world and Olympic titles on the track but has publicly confirmed to have been born with internal testes and without a uterus. "I believe if you are a woman, you are a woman, no matter the differences you have," the South African said. Except in 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport established Semenya's condition as 5-ARD reductase deficiency, a condition only influencing male sexual characteristics before birth and during puberty. This triggered a ban from female competition, with World Athletics determined to ensure that the scandal of the 2016 Olympics – when the women's 800m medals were all taken by athletes with DSDs – was never repeated.
From left: Francine Niyonsaba (silver), Caster Semenya (gold) and Nyairera Wambui (bronze) dominated the women's 800m at the Rio Olympics - Getty Images/Patrick Smith
In football, it is as if the past decade never happened, with Chilufya openly identifying as intersex but still able to play for a top US club with no genetic screening and no questions asked. "Despite all that, one of my team-mates told me, 'We need to protect Prisca, and what you've done totally attacks her,'" Eddy says. "But this is far more important than just Prisca, or what one player feels about something. It got to the point where even during training, certain players would tell me, 'You're a cheater and a liar.' It was as if people were so focused on valuing a person's feelings over reality. They would double down, triple down. And then you're chopped liver."
In the end, Eddy was released by the club just weeks later, and she has little doubt that the furore was a major factor in her being let go. "My contract was scheduled to end, so I was already preparing to leave, but the way that team operates is that they don't really care about winning – they just care about their political and social agendas," she says. "With me, they had a view of, 'We don't want to touch you with a 100-foot pole, because you're going to bring drama with you, and it's drama for which we don't even have a solution.' That put the nail in the coffin. I was ready to move on, to get married and start a family. Plus, I was fed up with the unbecoming, unprofessional and disgraceful way the league had chosen to operate. It's making a mockery of competitive sports if you can't call a spade a spade and address reality as it comes. It's denying the situation, ushering in these DSD athletes."
At her home in Newport Beach, she gives every impression of forging ahead with her life. She is pregnant and has devoted herself instead to a lifelong passion for surfing, recently returning from her first professional contest in Barbados. Her fight for the restoration of fair sport endures: she protested on the steps of the Supreme Court earlier this year and plans to launch an online petition that calls the league to account. The NWSL has done nothing, with Fifa failing to introduce a coherent policy at global level, resisting any alignment with the IOC's stricter rules on biological sex. This month, fans of Oregon's Portland Thorns were thrown out of the stadium just for wearing T-shirts advocating the protection of women's sport, while transgender activists' giant flags flew in the background regardless.
Through all this, Eddy has even sought to extend an olive branch to the two team-mates who cruelly castigated her. "I just felt, while it wasn't acceptable for them to resort to bullying and name-calling, we still needed to work together on this issue," she says. And so, remarkably, she told them that they were still welcome to attend her wedding, given they had both previously said yes to the invitation. They never turned up. It serves as a final reminder of how, in sport's most febrile debate, the viciousness flows invariably from those who masquerade as tolerant through their words – and who reveal through their actions that they are quite the opposite.
