Le sexisme : une réalité ordinaire pour les joueuses. Midi Libre – BERULLIER Max
Remarques déplacées, rumeurs malsaines ou propositions indécentes : dans le rugby amateurs biterrois, les femmes font face à un sexisme décomplexé.
Last month's conviction of ASBH second row Hans N'Kinsi for domestic violence and that, for the same reason, of Taleta Tupuola in November, have shed a harsh light on the problems of sexist and sexual violence within professional rugby in Béziers. As serious as they are, these facts should not hide another, lesser-known reality that affects the world of amateur rugby. Players, supporters, or volunteers, they speak out to denounce a system where sexism is still very much alive.
“As long as we stay below and they keep the upper hand, everything is fine”. Clara (name changed), a young player, sets the scene from the outset. Having played rugby since she was 12, her career, like many others, has been full of ups and downs. Through her experiences, she has come to the bitter realization that sexism is part of society and that her sport is no exception to the rule. After her twenties, she nevertheless decided to found a women's team in a club in the Béziers region.
“At the beginning everything was going well, the leaders welcomed the initiative rather well”, she explains. But as the training sessions progressed, things got worse with the coach. “He made very inappropriate remarks about our physique, talked about our shapes, our buttocks: it made me very angry” , testifies the one who nevertheless claims to be “unfortunately used to it, having grown up among boys”.
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Later, things take a different turn as a rumor about her begins to swell within the club. “I learned in a roundabout way that some leaders were accusing me of having filed a complaint for rape against a player on the men's team”, she testifies. Clara is stunned: “Nothing had happened at all! But for them [the leaders, editor's note], the problem was not that I was a potential victim, but that I had the idea of filing a complaint.” Disgusted by this story and weighed down by other personal and sporting concerns, she then decided to voluntarily leave the team she had founded. “I was slandered and the staff didn't defend me”, she believes.
If Clara denounces the behavior of certain leaders, “old pigs who look at us like meat when they could be our fathers or even our grandfathers”, she does not, however, wish to make a generalization of it. “The problem isn't the rugby players, there are some big idiots, like everywhere,” she says. But I don't want to put all men in the same bag, the nuance is important to me.”
“Destabilizing factor”
For her part, Lucie, (name has been changed), also a player, makes the same observation. “Rugby remains a boy's sport, we continue to hear that we have no place there except to sleep with the players”, she confides coldly. At 22, this passionate player who also volunteers at a Béziers club also claims to have been a victim of sexism.
Like Clara, she mentions the coach's lewd remarks, but highlights the behavior of some of her male counterparts. Like that winter evening in 2023 when, during a third half of the men's team. The women's team were present and one of the players behaved inappropriately towards a girl. “A simple hand on the thigh”, Lucie testifies, but who does not come across as the victim. “She complained about it and instead of sanctioning the player, the management simply banned the girls from participating in the third halves”.
“In a thong on the shield”
This excitement about a potential scandal that could tarnish the club's reputation pushes sports executives to extreme behavior. For example, Lucie, who as a volunteer was on all the men's team's trips, was suddenly refused access to the players' bus. “The leaders made this decision because they thought I would destabilize the boys before the match.” Like the old sailors' beliefs about the presence of women in the crew, in 2025, part of the amateur rugby world still seems to believe that the female factor is synonymous with destabilization.
“One evening when the boys won, I was asked to take a photo in a thong on the shield”, confides Lucie who obviously refused. The woman, naked and objectified rather than active within the collective on a bus. That says a lot about the representations of certain players, whether they are professionals or amateurs.
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