The early moments of Breanna Gill’s first professional win on the WPGA Tour of Australasia looked like any other women’s tournament. Players came rushing out to shower Gill with champagne on Bonville Golf Resort’s 18th green, and she savored the moment.
“I always thought in my head if I ever got the opportunity to actually win a golf tournament and the girls happen to come running out on the green, I was going to stand there and take it. I wasn’t going to run away,” said Gill in a release.
“If you get yourself in that position, you just take it. It was so special.”
The celebrations quickly turned sour, however, as the transgender athlete’s playoff victory at the Australia Women’s Classic April 2 in New South Wales became awash in controversy.
Gill, No. 393 in the Rolex Rankings, began receiving death threats not long after the WPGA Tour posted about her victory on its Twitter account. While the tweet didn’t note that Gill is a transgender athlete, other accounts did and the ensuing backlash was so great the tour’s Twitter account was made private. Gill also hid her accounts.
WPGA chief Karen Lunn told The Sydney Morning Herald that the tournament deleted the tweets over concerns for Gill’s welfare, noting that Lunn had received death threats along with other governing members of the WPGA.
“Everyone’s worried about her welfare,” Lunn told the paper. “It’s obviously a very tough time.”
On May 13, 2021, U.S. pro golfer Hailey Davidson won her first professional title on the NWGA tour (National Women’s Golf Association), beating several LPGA players in the process, including Paula Creamer and Perrine Delacour. Davidson is believed to be the first trans woman to win a professional tournament in the U.S. and now owns several titles. She has also twice participated in LPGA Q-School, though she has yet to advance past the second stage.
In 2004, Mianne Bagger became the first openly transgender woman to play in a professional golf tournament at the Women’s Australian Open. She’d go on to become the first transgender woman to qualify for the Ladies European Tour.
Bagger is now retired from tour life but continues to follow the emerging science around trans athletes and what kind of advantage going through puberty as a male might give trans women over cisgender women (those whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth). The science isn’t settled, Bagger told Golfweek in 2021. In fact, if anything, she…
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