Women’s Policy Group Calls for Changes in Irish Dancing Gender Rules

A women’s public policy organization is urging Irish dancing governing bodies to revise their participation policies after a male dancer who previously competed in boys’ divisions qualified for world championships in the girls’ category for the third consecutive year.

Concerned Women for America (CWA) has sent formal letters to An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha and the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America, calling for stricter sex-based eligibility requirements in competitive Irish dancing.

“I just happened to be at the competition where this boy won in the girls’ category for the very first time back in 2023,” said Maggie McKneely, Director of Government Relations at CWA. “He has been Irish dancing for a long time and had gone to the World Championships as a boy years before, but then in 2023, he suddenly started identifying as a girl and dancing in the girl’s category.”

According to McKneely, the male competitor won a regional title for the first time while competing in the girls’ division in 2023 and has since secured two more victories, including at a competition last December in Florida.

The policy push comes amid growing debate about transgender participation in sports across the globe. In their letter, CWA pointed to other major sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, which have announced or implemented sex-based eligibility requirements for competition.

McKneely expressed concern about the cascading effect of allowing male competitors in female divisions. “Not only did a boy win the girl’s title for his age category, placing the girl who got second who should have been in first, but that also means that the girl who got 11th did not qualify for Worlds because the top 10 dancers qualify,” she explained.

This ripple effect extends further down the rankings, as the top 25 dancers qualify for nationals. “You have a boy on top of the podium and all these girls who have dreamed and have set goals for different placements in their age category who were not able to make them because of this one boy disrupting the entire category,” McKneely added.

Penny Nance, CEO and President of CWA, argued that male participation in female competitions could create a chilling effect that ultimately discourages young women from competing.

“We strongly encourage our Young Women for America members to be involved in sports. We think it’s a great training proving ground,” Nance said. “We know that the majority of women who make it to the C-suite are women who competed athletically in some way. And so it’s good sociologically, it’s good for women’s identity, it is good for their bodies.”

While some may view Irish dancing primarily as an art form, McKneely, herself a former Irish dancer, emphasized its athletic demands. The dance form requires consistent leaps, jumps, complicated rhythm patterns and substantial endurance. Physical differences, including muscle strength and even femur length, can provide advantages in competition as they allow dancers to achieve greater height in jumps.

“At the elite level competitions that we’re talking about, like regionals and nationals, men and women don’t compete against each other. But at our local competitions, they do, just because it’s a smaller field,” McKneely noted. “And nine times out of 10, when boys are competing against girls in those local competitions, they win, purely because they do have greater endurance and greater capacity to do more of the tricks and complicated things in Irish dance than the girls do.”

According to McKneely, a petition was previously sent to the governing bodies when the incident first occurred in 2023. The initial response was to consider establishing a third category for competitors who do not identify as biologically male or female, but the motion was ultimately tabled and never implemented.

McKneely suggested that the organizations’ reluctance to take action may be partially due to recent cheating scandals that have made them “allergic to legal threats” and wary of policies that might prompt lawsuits.

Fox News Digital reached out to both An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha and the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America for comment on the policy push and criticism from CWA but received no response.

The controversy highlights the ongoing tension between traditional sex-based competition structures and evolving gender identity policies across various sports and competitive fields around the world.