Breaking The Mould

The Blizzard

"Saelua's role in giving some dignity back to one of the worst teams in the world made waves across the globe. "Korean TV came to my house to do an interview. It was kind of weird," Saelua said. "I would have people from New York call in and say they wanted to come to my house and do a photo shoot and interviews and stuff. All the attention was very overwhelming."

"There was less of a ripple in the trans community. Plenty don't care about the "macho" elements of sport, according to Juliet Jacques, a writer who frequently tackles trans and football topics. "Those who do like football realised that the anomaly of a 'transgender' woman playing for a men's team owed much to American Samoa's lowly international position, the small resources and pool of talent available to them etc," Jacques said, "and that Saelua's debut was a good thing to see but unlikely to change the deeply ingrained sexism, split between male and female and lack of space for anyone between male and female in western professional football."

In episode One Hundred and Four we revisit "Breaking the Mould" by Zac Lee Rigg, first published in Issue Seven back in December 2012.

Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/breaking-mould

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