Tracy Edwards MBE became the first sailor to skipper an all-female crew while still in her 20s. Ahead of her visit to Jersey for a Women’s Rights Network talk, she spoke to TOM OGG about her record-breaking sailing achievements, about why the recent Supreme Court ruling is good news for women’s sports and about her recent work promoting online safety for children and teenagers
THERE are two types of people in the world. Those who, when told they aren’t capable of doing something, cheerfully or reluctantly admit defeat and move onto something else. And those who take the approach favoured by Tracy Edwards MBE.
At the age of 27, and after years of serving as a deckhand and first mate, the Berkshire-born sailor announced she was going to skipper the first all-female crew in the world-famous Ocean Race, then known as the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. And, initially at least, she was met with nothing but disbelief, condescension and ridicule.
“Oh, the reaction was shocking – just shocking,” says Tracy, chatting via Zoom earlier this week.
“Young women today have no idea of just how misogynistic the culture was back then. It’s hard to remember just how impossible everyone thought it was that I could skipper an all-female crew – and I’m not just talking about men. Women as well. It was pretty much across-the-board disbelief. They all said the same: ‘You can’t do this. You’ll die. It’s too much. You need men looking after you and helping you and protecting you’.
“In the end, the only way to prove them wrong was to just go out and do it – and so that’s what we did.”
Indeed they did. As detailed in the (excellent) feature-length documentary-film Maiden (2018), Tracy and her young female crew battled through turbulent weather conditions and the brutally cold Southern Ocean in order to finish first in both the second and third legs of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, resulting in worldwide attention and praise.
“Winning those two legs? Oh, God, it was just… it was a thing of beauty,” says Tracy, beaming at the memory.
“Every human being should have a moment like that, even if just once in their lives.”
As a result of their win, Tracy and her team tossed a mooring cleat through the glass ceiling – an entire cockpit locker’s worth of mooring cleats, in fact – and shortly afterwards Tracy was awarded the prestigious Yachtsman of the Year Award, the first woman ever to be given the accolade.
“I sometimes have people say to me: ‘Oh, shouldn’t it be Yachtsperson of the Year?’ And I’m, like, nah, I quite like the fact that it’s Yachtsman of the Year. If I was asked, I would probably call myself a yachtsman. I wouldn’t say yachtswoman or yachtsperson. It is weird, I suppose. But, then, sailing is a whole different level of misogynistic. I mean, the only reason sailing hasn’t been caught up in this gender-ideology mess is because it’s so misogynistic, it’s so far behind, that by the time they caught up with it, the train had already pulled out of the station.”
It is on the subject of the “gender-ideology mess” that Tracy will partly focus when she visits the Island next month to host the latest Women’s Rights Network Jersey talk.
Titled “Tracy Edwards MBE: My Story and Why I am a Member of Women’s Rights Network”, the free-to-enter event will take place on Thursday 5 June at St Brelade’s Parish Hall and will see Tracy discussing her fascinating life and career, from her working-class upbringing and being expelled from school at the age of 15 to learning to sail at 17 (“It was a tortuous route and one which people always seem to find amusing”), her record-breaking sailing achievements and, more recently, her fundraising work with her charitable organisation: The Maiden Factor Foundation.
Alongside this, she will talk about women’s sports and the thorny topic of trans-identifying men competing in women’s sporting categories, something which has taken place in everything from cycling (Veronica Ivy/Rachel McKinnon) and swimming (Lia Thomas) to 400-metre racing (Ada Gallagher), and which has resulted in hundreds of female athletes – both amateur and professional – losing out on medals and trophies. In the most serious of instances, women have been left with life-altering physical injuries (17-year-old schoolgirl Payton McNabb was left partially paralysed with brain damage after a trans-identifying schoolboy threw a volleyball in her face at full-force).
It is a subject about which Tracy, not surprisingly, has strong feelings, and she is quick to dismiss suggestions that her own sporting achievements are evidence that male and female athletes should compete against one another.
“One of the things I get thrown at me in this argument is, well, if you think that men are stronger and faster than women, why did you race on all-female crews against men? And how come you did so well? The answer is simple. It’s because ocean racing is actually one of the very few sports in which men and women are on a genuinely equal playing field. Ocean racing isn’t about physical strength – it’s about brainpower and knowledge. We have machines and we have to use our brains to make these machines go fast, and we have to use our knowledge of the weather and the sea and the wind conditions. It isn’t like boxing or football or swimming, where males quite obviously have a physical advantage over females.”
When asked why so many people, men especially, refuse to condemn something – males competing in female sports – that is so demonstrably unfair, Tracy highlights Gary Lineker as an example of a high-profile individual who shies away from having to properly address the issue.
“Oh my God, Gary Lineker, I can’t even talk about that man,” says Tracy, before promptly doing exactly that. “There was an interview with him [in The Telegraph] and it was so funny because he was sounding off about, you know, the Middle East and all these various wars – and then women’s sports got brought up and he went: ‘Oh, that’s too complicated, I can’t possibly talk about that’. The Middle East? That’s simple. 2,000 years of religious conflict? Easy. Piece of cake. But men in women’s sports? That, apparently, is too complicated for Gary Lineker.
“Honestly, these men make me sick. Their cowardice and spinelessness. All this adhering and kowtowing to this non-existent thing. Hundreds and hundreds of women have had sports awards and trophies taken away from them by men. And Gary Lineker – in his extensive knowledge – says: ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s my problem’. It’s pathetic. Grow a bloody backbone.”
The above is delivered with a smile and a fair few laughs (Tracy is one of the most infectiously upbeat and amusing individuals I have ever had the pleasure of interviewing), but there is no doubting the sincerity of her words nor the depth of her feeling on this issue.
“I find it’s one of those things that a lot of people don’t worry about until it affects them personally,” she says. “They say: ‘Oh, can’t we just be nice’, and then it impacts one of their daughters and, suddenly, they’re not so keen on being ‘nice’ after all. Look at the soccer mums in America. As soon as it started affected their daughters – yikes! I’ve met some American soccer mums and, believe me, you do not want to cross them. I mean, whoa, scary! [laughs]
“I have friends, some of them close friends, and I can’t talk to them about this subject,” she continues. “As much as I would love to, they just say: ‘No, no, no’. They refuse to listen. And inevitably it’s because one of their children’s friends or grandchildren’s friends will be identifying as trans. It’s so sad, it really is very sad, especially when it’s a teenager who is obviously just a bit confused and who needs some proper help and guidance, rather than being misled into believing things that aren’t true. It’s awful that these kids have been fed this – pardon my French – absolute b***cks. And it is very frustrating that so many adults would rather just go along with it rather than trying to find out what the real problem is, which would, of course, be the truly kind thing to do.
“But, as I say, I have friends who will never let me get past the first sentence because they just don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to understand.”
The recent UK Supreme Court ruling has certainly given Tracy and likeminded women cause for optimism. The landmark ruling – For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers – confirmed that, under UK law, sex is a biological fact and men cannot become women.
“I was there at the hearing and it was fascinating,” recalls Tracy. “It was the first time, really, that I’d heard barristers argue for both sides, and some of the things that we heard were… extraordinary.”
Was she confident of victory? “Hmm, you never know how it is going to go, especially given some of the judgements that have gone against women in recent years, such as Tickle vs Giggle in Australia, which was an unbelievable judgment [Giggle – a social networking platform exclusively for women – was ruled to have discriminated against a trans-identifying individual named Roxanne Tickle]. Everyone was quietly confident but also nervous because, well, you just don’t know these days. The world, after all, has gone completely and utterly mad.
“Anyway, we were all outside listening and we had a mole on the inside. You couldn’t have fit another person in there – it was packed. And then we heard ‘it’s a win’. The court agreed that sex is biological and that women are defined by biological sex, and isn’t it crazy that we need a court to rule on such a thing in 2025. We were all waiting for the ‘but’ – there’s always a ‘but’ – but there was no but. It was an absolute victory. There were lots of tears and happiness.”
Sadly, the victory was swiftly followed by much of the media trying to gaslight the nation into believing the wrong side had won.
“None of them were talking to women to ask what it was like to finally get our rights back after watching them being torn away from us for 15 years,” says Tracy. “Instead, most of the interviews were with men, asking them how they felt about it, and focusing on how upset they were. But, you know, the judgement was good. It was correct. It’s the law. It hasn’t changed anything. It has just reinforced rights that were already in place.
“You know, this fight has been soul-destroying at times. The battle has been long and hard. I only really started speaking out about it in July last year. Before then I couldn’t afford to be cancelled because, between my charity [The Maiden Factor] and the Maiden, I employed 22 people. So I haven’t been battling as long and as hard as, say, Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova and all these extraordinary women. I stand on their shoulders.
“For me, I think the moment of realisation of just how little women’s rights matter was seeing organisations announcing that they are going to ignore or defy the ruling. I didn’t think I could be shocked any more, but I’m totally shocked. The [UK teaching] union have basically said they are going to ignore it, which is against the law – they will be breaking the law – but people are so brainwashed they think their mad ideological beliefs trump everything else. I don’t know who will sue them, but someone will, and they’ll win.”
Today, Tracy spends much of her time advocating for online safety for children and teenagers, and this is something about which she has campaigned for over two decades.
“My involvement with it first came about after I was forced into bankruptcy in 2005,” she says. “I’d put on a big sailing event in Qatar and – surprise, surprise – they didn’t pay us. And I lost everything, absolutely everything, and had to start from scratch. And so, at the age of 43, I went and got my first ever real job.”
The job in question was with the CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection – for which Tracy worked as project manager for the International Youth Advisory Conference.
“It is just a phenomenal organisation and one which was set up by an equally phenomenal man, Mr Jim Gamble, who has become my absolute hero. At the time, my daughter was seven years old and she was just starting to visit Barbie websites and things like that. Social media wasn’t really around then, thank God.
“Working with Jim, I learned more than I think I ever wanted to know about what happens online – it is a dark, dark place – but it also gave me the tools to protect my daughter. And I knew I wanted to help protect other children, too.”
This was 2005 and, sadly, Tracy says things haven’t improved in the intervening years, and have in many respects become much worse.
“Rather depressingly, absolutely nothing has changed. Back then, my boss, Jim, was telling the UK government: ‘If you do not restrict or get rid of online pornography then you are going to end up with a generation of disturbed young boys who are going to disrespect women, who are going to think misogynistic sexual violence is the norm, who aren’t going to understand what a loving relationship is’. Theresa May was in the Home Office at the time and we told her all this – and we were totally ignored. They did nothing. And now everything that we predicted has come true.
“This was nearly two decades ago. We knew back then that ten-year-olds were accessing online porn – ten-year-olds. And it was very frustrating because I was going into schools to do talks, and I would speak to people who were in charge of safeguarding, and, God knows why, but none of them believed us. Every single one of them went: ‘Nah, not happening’. I said: ‘We have the proof – young children are accessing this stuff’. ‘No, no, that’s not happening in our schools’. And then when I spoke to parents, it was the same reaction. ‘No, no, no. No, my son would never watch that. No, my daughter would never send a naked picture of herself to a boy.”
In 2013, Tracy founded Safer World Training with the aim of teaching internet safety to parents, children and teachers. And, as a result, more and more adults are now finally waking up to the dangers of allowing children and teenagers to roam free on the internet and social media.
“Too many parents think they have to protect children from the outside world by keeping them indoors while at the same time allowing their children to open this virtual door to their bedrooms and letting the entire world inside,” says Tracy. “There was a great advert from Germany which I recommend everyone should watch. In it, a mother answers the door to this big crowd of awful people and they’re all, like, ‘Is Amy at home?’ And the mum says: ‘Oh yes, come on in. She’s upstairs in her bedroom’ And all these creepy strange people start marching inside the house. I thought that was a very powerful advert because it made it visual.
“We’re the first generation where our children know more about technology than we do, but we have the life experience, and you’ve got to somehow find a way of putting those together. You can’t stop young people from going online. You can’t stop them from having smartphones. It is their world. But what you can do is limit the amount of time they spend online, and you can guide their online use to ensure they’re kept safe.
“Rule number one: never, ever let your child have a laptop in their room. Never. Especially if you have a daughter. Because people on chat rooms and chat lines, they are on the lookout for kids who are alone in their bedrooms. That’s what they’re looking for. But as soon as they see that a child is in the sitting room and there are adults around, they leave them alone. This is a really simple way to protect your child. They might object to it, but so what? Put your foot down.
“Another safeguarding method is that, when your child reaches the age where they have a smartphone, you say to them: ‘Right, here is the contract between us. This is my phone. It is mine. I paid for this phone. I own it. I pay for the Wi-Fi. I pay for the whole package. I am going to lend this smartphone to you on the condition that we will have regular spot checks. And if I ever take your phone and you can’t tell me how you know every single person on your social media, you lose the phone. It’s not three strikes and you’re out. There won’t be a second chance. You will lose your phone, immediately and permanently.’
“If you’re a parent, do this. It is incredibly powerful – and it works. Suddenly your child thinks: ‘Do I really want to befriend this person just because they know 14 of my friends? I don’t really know them. I don’t want my phone taken away.’
“Of course, we didn’t have mobile phones when I was young, least of all phones with bloody cameras on them, and thank God for that. They really haven’t made childhood better, have they? Back when we were children, if we made a mistake then we had the time to put it right and deal with it. Kids don’t have that any more.”
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Tracy if she would ever consider taking part in competitive sailing again were the opportunity to arise. Alas, her ocean racing days, it seems, are officially done and dusted.
“I can’t do it because of my back,” she says. “I’d love to be able to tell you that it was some spectacular sailing accident, but it wasn’t. I was kicked in the base of my spine by a horse in my 20s. And, because I was young and stupid, I didn’t do the physio. I thought: ‘Ah, I’m indestructible – I’ll be fine’. 40 years later and I’m paying for it now.
“The only injury I’ve ever had through sailing was when I knocked out all my front teeth,” she adds. “But, you know, that wasn’t enough to stop me.”
*Tracy Edwards MBE: My Story and Why I am a Member of Women’s Rights Network will be held at St Brelade’s Parish Hall on Thursday 5 June, 7pm to 9pm. Entry is free. Tickets are available at eventbrite.co.uk, although advance booking isn’t essential. There will be wine and beer for all attendees.
