Trans Hockey Tournament Releases Statement, Clarifies NHL Ties After Video Of Injury

The organizers of a tournament for transgender hockey players have released a statement after a trans female player injured a trans male player.

It occurred at the All-Trans Draft Tournament in Middleton, Wisconsin. The event involved both trans men and trans women playing together on teams picked especially for the tournament. However, this leads to a disparity in skill level — as well as size and strength — between teams.

During the tournament, a biological male bumped into a biological female. That routine play caused the biological female to go down, suffering a concussion, and requiring a stretcher to get off the ice.

Video of the incident has been making the rounds on social.

While the tournament took place on November 19 and 20, the video didn't start getting passed around until December. Once it did, it was quickly cited as evidence of the inherent dangers that come with biological men playing sports with biological women.

Tournament Organizers Clafired NHL Connection

The very first thing Team Trans Ice Hockey's looked to clear up was its connection to the National Hockey League.

Last month, the NHL tweeted its support for the tournament after it had already concluded.

While the NHL was trying to score some brownie points with the woke crowd, it led a commenter to ask a question that garnered the league some criticism.

"So, men playing on womans team?" which prompted the NHL to respond.

This complete denial of biology got the NHL some headlines but also helped create the incorrect that the league had set up the All-Trans Draft Tournament.

The fact of the matter is that while the NHL did support the tournament, they were not responsible for setting it up or running it.

"While the NHL is supportive of providing accessibility to all organizations that love hockey," the Team Trans statement reads. "This tournament was organized by Team Trans - NOT the NHL, and was done with intentionality to create teams with even skill levels."

The NHL Should Have Stayed Out Of Politics

Interestingly, the statement seeks to distance itself from the National Hockey League immediately. Given the criticism that the incident faced — combined with the erroneous information that this was an NHL event — it makes sense that the league might want to make the extent of their involvement crystal clear.

Could the NHL have asked Team Trans to clear the air after the injury video went public? It's possible, and would certainly make sense.

However, it may be too late for them to escape any blame in this situation.

Unfortunately for the NHL, they brought this entire fiasco and any negative press it brings upon themselves. This is the sort of thing that can happen if you get involved in politics one way or the other. If they had simply kept their noses clean and not waded into the waters of wokeness with their factually inaccurate Twitter statements, there wouldn't be any need for Team Trans to clear the air.

Team Trans States The Obvious: Hockey Is Dangerous

The next part of their statement addresses whether the teams were evenly built through a draft. Players gave themselves grades which had to be signed off on by a coach, and the teams had to choose a certain number of players from each grade.

That's all well and good, but as you saw in that video. It wasn't skill that was the problem, it was size.

To that Team Trans writes that, well, hockey is dangerous.

"During the championship game, a player was injured, they wrote acknowledging the viral incident. "Everyone who steps on the ice to play this sport knows there is a risk of injury. The injured player has recovered. and there is no ill will between the two players involved."

Well, it's good to hear that the two players involved don't have beef with each other.

However, it's a bad look for an organization that several sentences later busted out the word "safe space" to shrug off a physical safety concern.

They say it themselves: "This tournament was about a community that doesn't have many safe spaces being able to gather and play the game they love."

That statement in and of itself is great. Everyone should be able to enjoy the sport of hockey. Yet the tournament organizers — and the NHL who supported it — seem to be fine with placing radical ideology over the safety of players, and that's extremely unfortunate.

Follow on Twitter: @Matt_Reigle

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Matt is a University of Central Florida graduate and a long-suffering Philadelphia Flyers fan living in Orlando, Florida. He can usually be heard playing guitar, shoe-horning obscure quotes from The Simpsons into conversations, or giving dissertations to captive audiences on why Iron Maiden is the greatest band of all time.