Sport New Zealand's new guiding framework to include transgender participants at the grassroots level has been hailed as a means of allowing athletes to compete as the gender they identify with.
Sport NZ has released its new guiding principles, with the cornerstone of inclusion for transgender athletes, but individual sports are still free to establish and implement their own protocols in terms of transgender inclusion at community and grassroots level.
While some see potential danger in transgender women competing against cisgender women, advocates say inclusion should be the first step when forming policy.
For Richard Jin, secretary of New Zealand Falcons - Aotearoa's gay rugby team - practicality dictates that inclusion should be the first step, when forming policy to include transgender athletes.
"What we are looking at when we talk about trans players at the community level… is that we do have different shapes and sizes of players," Richard Jin told AM.
"The key point that we have all the time throughout our journey, as New Zealand Falcons, is we want to include everyone to play and to feel safe to play.
"The current situation, with trans players I've talked to in the past, they have been neglected in sport. They've been literally excluded from the mainstream of sport.
"A sport like rugby is such a cisgender, heterosexual-dominated sport. [Transgender players] always feel like 'if I come into this environment and play sport, I'm not included here. Why am I here?'
"At the end of the day, inclusiveness overrides everything. We are at a community sport level, safety is part of the topic we're going to be discussing further down.
"At the very beginning step, we need to include players to say 'here is the space we provide, this is safe and we're all supporting you to join'.
"You shouldn't feel like you're excluded from here."
Meanwhile, Save Women's Sport New Zealand spokesperson Ro Edge worries transgender participation, most notably in contact sport, could prove a deterrent for cisgender women wanting to participate.
"When you're talking about contact sport like rugby, for instance, it does put females at a far greater risk of injury," Edge said. "Sports are going to need to be really mindful and careful when they develop their policies.
"Community sport is not just social sport - it encapsulates everything up to when you represent your country or have a professional contract.
"Those are the pathways our elite female athletes go through. If they lose at that level, we have to ask 'will they have the motivation to succeed to get to that elite level and inspire the next generation of young girls to do the same?'
"If it's a small number [of transgender athletes], why do we have to destroy the integrity of the female category? Why can we not find other ways of inclusion?"
Sport NZ's new principles are split into six categories, centred on inclusion, while focussing on wellbeing and safety of participants, privacy and dignity, anti-bullying, discrimination and harrassment, listening and responding to concerns, and education.
