A young female rugby player who was left screaming in agony after a transgender rival tore apart her knee ligaments has accused sporting chiefs of letting her down. 

Elena King, 20, suffered a torn ACL and MCL in January in the Netherlands after her biologically male opponent popped her left knee out of its socket with a rash challenge.

Now facing lifelong pain and six months of physiotherapy just to run again, she is asking why the Dutch Rugby Association allows transgender athletes to compete against women. 

Serious injuries are part and parcel of the risk of playing rugby, but King insists the sheer strength she was exposed to was something that should not have been allowed in the women’s game. 

‘I felt the strength being used against me: it’s nothing that I can explain because I don’t have that strength myself,’ King told The Times. 

‘A cis woman could not have pulled my leg out of its socket… I heard a really loud pop. That’s when I started screaming. My leg was on fire.

Elena King was left with a torn ACL and MCL after a horror tackle from a trans rugby player

King faces lifelong pain and six months of physiotherapy just to be able to run again 

The transgender player, Ashley Mooney, tackled one of King’s legs as a maul was forming 

‘I do not want it to ever happen to anyone again because I don’t want it to happen to me. It could have been prevented.’ 

King, who is of Dutch, English, and Scottish heritage, has been recovering at home in Amsterdam since her horror injury in the Dutch Premiership in January. 

She is now taking legal advice and has sought stories from other players, as per The Times. Her opponent, Ashley Mooney, played in the game after but was subsequently suspended and missed four games. Mooney returned to action earlier in May and won player of the match at the weekend. 

In a blog post, King describes how she had already been nervous about facing her opponent after Mooney allegedly caused a black eye, rib, and spine injuries, with ‘one of my lovely teammates coming off the pitch crying’.

That incident was raised with the Dutch Rugby Union, she says, but the reply came back that ‘it’s fine’.

During the match against Breda Dames Rugby Club, King describes how she was being held by two players as a maul was forming when the trans player began to tackle one of her legs (not both, as you should) – with a shoulder pressing below her kneecap. 

‘The transplayer came in from the left side and my knee doesn’t bend that way. So the transplayer pushed her shoulder into my knee and with immense strength pulled her arms closer to herself,’ King writes in her heart-breaking blog.

‘I then heard a massive popping sound. I screamed my lungs out. The transplayer had pulled my pretty little knee out of its socket and broke my MCL and ACL in one single movement.

Mooney returned to action earlier this month and won player of the match at the weekend

King says her leg was ‘on fire’ and that a biological woman could not have caused the damage

Transgender players are banned in international women’s rugby and many domestic leagues

‘Later I heard that teammates on the pitch had to walk away with their hands over their ears because my screams sounded too painful.’

King had to be carried off by her team-mates because the opposing club did not provide a stretcher.  

She adds: ‘I knew it was serious, I didn’t feel connected to my knee at all, later I would find out my nerves were dead because the ligaments were completely torn apart. I understood that yesterday was way too far away and tomorrow would not look the same.

‘All of the sudden I felt very alone in my own body, my knee didn’t feel like it was part of me anymore. My lower leg felt like a dead weight hanging and pulling my knee further apart.’

‘I kept going back to that moment where I felt the male strength of this transplayer. It is something that still goes through my head. It was a type of strength that I only partly ever felt while playing with the older boys in my youth. The kind of strength that women can’t match. Women do not possess that strength. 

‘I cannot make peace with something that felt like an attack on my body. I can’t make peace with knowing that if the Dutch Rugby Association had protected my safety by not allowing transgenders into the women’s competition, I would not have my pretty little knee pulled out of its socket. 

‘I can’t understand how the Dutch Rugby Association can allow biological men to play in women’s rugby; a contact sport where injuries are more likely to happen.’ 

In March, King had an audience with the Dutch Rugby Association but says they were made her feel as if ‘the whole thing was my fault’.

King says she finds inclusion important, but insists that this is a matter of women’s safety

‘I came out of that meeting incredibly let down,’ she wrote. ‘It was clear to me that the Dutch Rugby Association didn’t want anything to do with this issue. They put inclusion before safety in our sport. The only thing they did do was go against the science, World Rugby, and hope nothing would happen.’

She explains that ‘transphobia phobia’ has made people frightened to speak up about safety. 

‘Inclusion is important,’ she told The Times. ‘That’s also not what I’m on about. It’s to do with safety. Women want the best for everyone: we want everyone to feel included so of course, people are like, why not? But then you actually see the reasons why it’s not possible. We have women’s spaces for a reason.’

Dutch News also reports that club officials had previously been concerned about one particular player who had caused multiple injuries.  

The Dutch Rugby Union has not set a formal policy on transgender players, although they did convene for a discussion around the subject on May 9. 

They have since set up a ‘group of experts’ to assess whether they must adapt their stance on transgender participation. 

A Dutch Rugby Union board member told The Times: ‘Inclusion, fairness, and player safety are extremely important principles of the sport of rugby. Precisely because the risk of injury is higher in rugby, RN takes safety on the field very seriously. This is why the federation applies strict rules when it comes to dangerous play.’

Their laissez-faire attitude until now is out of line with World Rugby, which in 2020 became the first international sports federation to ban trans women from the elite and international levels of the sport.

Then, in 2022, the Rugby Football League and Rugby Football Union banned transgender players from female-only formats. By 2023, the ban applied across all of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.