women's cricket Australia
(Image: AAP)

I was presenting my client’s case to a tribunal, addressing the person presiding as “chair”, and wondering as I sometimes do whether I’d like to be referred to as a piece of furniture. Then I remembered that I am and have been the chair of various entities and it hasn’t made me feel any more inanimate than my personality dictates.

The cricket world is still digesting the news that the traditional term for the person who holds a stick and hits the ball, the “batsman”, is being retired in favour of the gender-neutral “batter”. With the wild popularity of women’s cricket, nobody was keen on “batswoman” because it sounds stupid which, if true, means batsman sounds stupid too. “Batsperson” hasn’t been considered by anyone, sadly.

Anyway, any objections from the old school are crippled by the fact that the person chucking the ball has always been called a “bowler”, not a bowlsman.  Bowler, batter, fielder, wicketkeeper, umpire; by historical accident, cricket had always been almost perfectly equality-ready. Third man still needs to be dealt with.

In the football codes, the playing positions have never been gendered, but they are about to be drawn into the next phase of the revolution: the W.

The A-League, Australia’s premier football (soccer) competition, has announced it will be the first to drop an anomaly which has been prevalent worldwide: the (traditional) men’s competition carries a gender-neutral name, but the more recent women’s equivalent is distinguished by the addition of a W. Thus the men played in the A-League and the women in the W-League, but now they will be referred to as the A-League Men and A-League Women.

Which does make a lot more semantic sense, since the A stands for Australia and the W did not stand for Womenistan.

In rugby league, it remains NRL for the men, NRLW for the women; in Australian rules, AFL and AFLW. Rugby has the Super Rugby and Super W Rugby.

It’s been the same, largely, overseas: the NBL and WNBL in American basketball, and the Premier League for men, FA Women’s National League for women in English football.

A push for the AFL to add an M to its men’s competition title and thereby equalise AFLM with AFLW has begun.  It has the merit of logic.

Do these semantic battles matter? You bet they do. It’s important that we address them with an open and rational mind, not reflexively either for or against. The argument for neutral terminology, for all designations of title or role to be occupied by a person, has universal force as a necessary weapon in combating gender-typing.

The case for neutrality in the naming of cohorts has a different basis: it is simply a statement that neither gender’s engagement in a particular pursuit is the norm, and the other an exception. Netball played by men should not, likewise, be called men’s netball.

There is a separate, and more difficult, debate — mostly not had at all — about the binary distinctions in sports and elsewhere in which we persist and which exclude non-binary people or force them into difficult and sometimes controversial choices. 

It’s lovely to see these days what wasn’t possible when I was in under-sixes soccer: children of whatever gender running around and failing to kick the ball together.

Bigger questions remain, but we can keep working in the meantime on rooting out the anachronistic residue of our sexist past. Levelling a playing field is always worthwhile. And I’m at peace with being, or talking to, a chair.

Is the change cosmetic or, as Bradley says, an important move? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.