When I was in school a few decades ago, it was standard to be called a lesbian if you so much as kicked a football back to a boy in the playground. This was obviously after the ball had been aimed at one’s (lesbo) head in the kind of terrifying gesture that we were taught, as girls, to laugh off – or, worse, take as a compliment. (See also: the pinging of bra straps.) Well, here we are in 2018, which in many ways is just an endless gif of a football whacking your outraged teenage head (which – ha! – in my case turned out to be bisexual), and a 13-year-old girl is being called a lesbian … for playing football. Some things, such as the nature and content of homophobic taunts, don’t change.

Darcie, from Monmouthshire in Wales, has reportedly been told by PE teachers that she cannot play football as a recommended sport at school. Her peers “have criticised me a lot by saying I’m a man or a lesbian”, she says. The other children’s parents are reportedly no better, apparently shouting “don’t let a girl tackle you” during matches. Gender stereotyping never looked so unoriginal.

What starts in the playground ends up the rule in a world where women’s events make up a paltry 7% of all UK sports coverage. Then there is the recreational world, where golf remains the preserve of men and women do less exercise. What we’re really talking about is health inequality. Then there is the matter of what women are doing while men are playing football with their mates at the weekend. At a guess? Childcare and domestic work.

Anyone who is bringing up children or has walked past a playground or weekend kickabout in their local park will have clocked the vast outnumbering of boys playing football while a vast outnumbering of dads shout encouragement; the separating of primary school girls and boys for sports days; the conspicuous lack of girls and, for that matter, black and Asian children.

The veneration of conventionality has always been the way of school life, stultifying for so many of us, but gender stereotyping and segregation in sport continues to be completely unacknowledged. Which is how you get dated, embarrassing stuff happening, like England’s national governing body for swimming offering guidance to women on the best costume for flabby stomachs, pear shapes, boyish bodies and large or small busts. In 2018. In schools and sports clubs across the country, it’s as if #thisgirlcan never happened.