The Swans are nothing without the W: Why I’ll be at the SCG on Sunday

It’s been a hard week to be a Swans supporter, especially as a woman. The horror of headlines on Monday and Tuesday about some of our most revered players has led to a reckoning of who we are and what we can support. While police investigations are ongoing, the details that are emerging are both damning and distressing.

As a researcher in gendered violence, and a passionate Swans supporter, this has been a particularly challenging experience. Like many supporters, I have long seen the Swans as leaders in social justice and progressive issues in the AFL. They are the Pride Round club, and this year took a stand against another club’s inaction and hypocrisy around homophobia. They create a home ground experience that is incredibly inclusive and oriented to welcome all.

From this baseline, the best word to define my feelings this week has been betrayal. In many ways, I was foolish enough to think the Swans were different. But really, I should have paid more attention to my own two-decade experience as an AFL player, administrator, umpire and fan.

The signs of exclusion and hostility were there as a girl; there was no pathway for me to play football, so it never even appeared on my radar. We were framed as incapable, too delicate, not interested, or not active enough to have leagues warranted for us. Many current and past AFLW players continue to share this narrative.

The signs were there when I finally played in the Sydney Women’s Australian Football League, as it was then known, a group of teams from around Sydney that played a league that was run by women, for women. Even then, it was hard to find space and time for training that didn’t clash with the favoured men’s teams. At Sydney University, we trained on a grass hockey square, despite our games being played at large oval grounds. This, I was told, was a huge improvement from just a couple of years prior, where volunteers had to bring temporary Auskick posts to set up games on “cow paddock” fields each weekend.

They were there when I worked in a club administrator job in Sydney. They were keen to have a “ladies’ day”, not for the players of the adjacent women’s club, but for the wives and girlfriends of the men’s players. As I pitched the idea of fundraising for a charity that focused on violence against women, I was told that it was a bit grim, and we should go for the more palatable concern of breast cancer. The message? Men’s violence against women exists elsewhere, and is not our concern.

They were there as I umpired for around 10 years, where both personally and structurally, I was subjected to elements that make girls and women understand that they are, and always will be, outsiders. My research on the experience of female umpires in Australian football showed that this was not an individual experience, but a systemic issue, and one that the AFL has been slow to address.

While I’m not suggesting that these experiences are commensurate or comparable to the harms of sexual assault, they speak to a broader positioning of women as lesser, as peripheral, and of not warranting equal respect in football spaces.