Washington played Men’s Sunday League football before joining an outside women’s team in 2017. She was one of 28 trans women registered to play amateur football in the UK.
She told BBC Sports: “That’s a shock.
“This means that for me personally and for a lot of people who play football, we can no longer do what we can do last week and we can do it for decades.
“I stopped playing in the men’s games 10-12 years ago, but I didn’t feel like it was a safe place to transition.
“The effects that hormones have are when I occasionally do five side kickouts with men, I don’t feel like I can compete with men with age and similar physical characteristics.
“The reality is that we don’t have enough trans people to run our own sports and our own spaces, and there are no numbers that make it viable.
“This is not causing any problems, it attracts a lot of attention on a very small number of people who are just living their lives.
“This is a practical ban, more generally, and more realistically, especially for trans women from football, especially those who have played women’s soccer for decades.
“It’s very mentally challenging and in reality it would be physically dangerous for those people to go back to the men’s game.
“So, this is really about kicking those people out of football entirely.”
BBC Sport has seen letters sent to trans players in the face of an immediate ban from the FA.
The FA said it hopes to have a mix of gender football from the 2026-27 season, similar to the offer for “free and completely confidential online talking therapy,” and suggests players will be redirected to other areas of the game.
