Late last week, the AFL released its long-awaited policy on transgender participation in Australian rules football. In it are a set of requirements trans women need to follow if they aim to play at AFLW level. These include having your testosterone below a certain level for two years, which I have no problem with, as well as the requirement that trans women undertake number of physical tests designed to ascertain if they have an advantage over cis women playing AFLW – the presumption being that this is because they are trans.

The reasons I’m critical of the AFL’s policy are not the reasons people may assume. Essentially, every physical requirement the policy asks me to meet I will. I know what I can do, and I know how I compare overall. Yet, there are still a number of issues surrounding how the policy is applied.

It is not yet clear, for example, if the data being used by the AFL to compare cis and trans women can be independently verified. Nor can we be sure the clubs have accurately reported their data. The question that has been answered by the AFL, however, is that if a trans athlete and a non-trans athlete were both to perform above average on their testing regime, the trans athlete would be excluded from AFLW, but the cis athlete wouldn’t. Not very consistent, or fair.

But while these are clear problems, there are positives in the policy, particularly that people are able to play community football unhindered.

My biggest concern is the fact that weight is being used as one of the key physical measures for possible exclusion. Forget the fact that in a game that has such an emphasis on endurance and speed, being heavy is not necessarily an advantage and think about the message it sends to women and girls about their bodies: if you’re too big, you can’t play. That is incredibly dangerous and backward.

It is an especially dangerous message for girls and teenagers (trans or not) who may not understand the difference between fat or muscle: they will simply get the message that being bigger is bad. If you don’t fit a certain stereotype, or possess a certain body shape, that’s bad. This is a message constantly reinforced through all types of media and the last place it needs to be coming from is sporting organisations: the very people who are currently engaged in a conscious push to increase physical activity for women and girls, which continues to lag at unhealthy rates.

The AFL should know better, as a number of its own female playing cohort – including Western Bulldogs captain Katie Brennan – have come out since the AFLW started to speak about their own prior issues with eating disorders.

That the AFL either hasn’t considered this when putting this policy together or chose to ignore it is terrible. It doesn’t take much for the seeds of lifelong body image issues to become set in a person’s mind, and with children less likely to be able to critically analyse a situation the way adults would, it is a very easy thing for a child to take the message “this person’s too big” and internalise it, turning it into “so am I”.

With so much unnecessary pressure already on girls and women about their appearance, sport should surely aspire to be a safe haven from that; a place where people’s bodies are celebrated for what they can do, rather than what they look like.

I’ve already spoken to a number of friends of mine, all cis women, about this part of the policy, and to a person their responses have been the same. The first question is always: “why does a panel of men get to decide if a woman is too big or too heavy to play football?” The irony is we know full well that our society would never tolerate a panel of women deciding if a man’s body was too small to play football.

There needs to be a policy in place for trans inclusion in Australian rules football, but whether women are too heavy or too big to play once they get to a certain size should never have been a consideration. It seems as though while some of the world has moved past judging women based on their size or appearance, the AFL has not. And it’s dangerous.