Israeli Referee Sapir Berman Breaks Barriers As First Trans Woman To Officiate International Football Match

When Sapir Berman walked onto the pitch earlier this year to referee her first international match, she said it felt like a dream decades in the making.

“I always wanted to be a woman, and I always wanted to be a football referee and then those two came together and fused into one dream that just exploded with joy,” the 31-year-old told AFP.

Berman’s journey to that moment was anything but simple. Growing up in a football-obsessed family, she played as a defender for about a decade before realizing her professional career on the field wasn’t materializing. She turned to refereeing, rising through the ranks to officiate men’s matches in Israel’s Premier League.

But for nearly 26 years, she lived with a secret. “Since I was five, I remember wanting to be a woman. I decided to hide who I was and just keep playing football,” she said.

The Covid-19 lockdown gave her the pause to ask herself if she could keep hiding forever. The answer was no. She began her transition and, despite initial setbacks — failing two fitness tests, being moved down a league, and feeling resentment toward her body during hormone therapy she fought her way back with the help of a sports psychologist and relentless persistence.

Israeli referee Sapir Berman (C), 31, the first transgender woman to judge an international football match (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP)

Her comeback culminated in March, when she officiated a Women’s Under-17 Euro qualifier between Northern Ireland and Montenegro in Belfast a first for European football, according to UEFA.

The path hasn’t been without resistance. “There were a lot of questions, and a lot of moments where they said: ‘We don’t know what to do.’ And I also didn’t know what to do,” she admitted. Still, Israel’s referees association supported her throughout.

On the pitch, she jokes, little has changed: “The fans continued to curse me only now, they did it in the feminine form. It was a kind of stamp of approval.”

Off the pitch, Berman has received gratitude from young people who say her story gives them hope. “That fills me up. It gives me so much strength to keep going and doing what I do because at the end of the day, I chose myself.”

Berman now dreams of officiating at the Champions League, the European Championship, or even the World Cup.

“I’m showing the world it’s possible,” she said.