2 Chapter Two: Playing with Gender
Section One: The Fundamentals
A) History and Context
Exercise 1: Notebook Prompt
| i learned term DSD which stands for difference of sex development, categorizing athletes whose naturally high testosterone levels place them under scrutiny. this sets the tone of science being used to define and regulate who qualifies as a “woman” in sports. i also learned about the athlete Maximila Imali who had to get intimate exams and blood testing without knowing the purpose, and then for the result of this unethical practice of secret exams, that her body’s natural biology supposedly disqualified her from women’s events. this shocked me as it shows they’re policing our bodies based off hormones, that naturally vary person to person? and something i thought of and the podcaster touched on is that even if a woman has naturally high testosterone levels that give her an “unfair advantage”, then shouldn’t being born with extremely long legs give runners an “unfair advantage”, it shows how they love to pick and choose for what benefits them and their personal beliefs. another thing i learned that shocked me was that 1968-1999 every Olympic female athlete had to have their chromosomes characterized to verify “female chromosomes”, and then they had to carry a small card, literally a “femininity card”, proving they passed this test, which makes me think about intersex individuals that identify as female but may have XXY chromosomes, as they are just discarded and not thought of or considered. and they did all of this despite no documented cases of a man pretending to be a female athlete.
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B) Timeline of History
Exercise 2: Notebook Prompt
What other significant case/milestone would you add to this timeline? Note it in your notebook along with a brief (one or two sentences) explanation of why you feel it is important.
| another case i would add to the timeline is 2015 – Dutee Chand v. AFI & IAAF (CAS interim award). this was when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled in favor of indian sprinter Dutee Chand, suspending the IAAF’s hyperandrogenism regulations for two years to allow them time to produce scientific evidence on the performance impact of endogenous testosterone in female athletes, its important because it marks when it was exposed that there was insufficient scientific basis for requiring athletes with naturally elevated testosterone to take drugs to lower their hormone levels or be barred from competition, showing this discrimination was all based off of personal beliefs and bias.
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C) Gender coding in Sports
Exercise 3: Notebook Prompt
Has the gendering of sport ever been a constraint on your involvement? How?
Or, if not, why do you think this is?
| i played many sports growing up, with some being “manly” like hockey and soccer and some being “girly” like cheerleading and ringette. for me the gendering of sports was never a constraint on my involvement. i think this is because i didnt care what people said, and had a strong net of supportive coaches, family, and friends focused on progress and teamwork rather than reinforcing traditional masculine and feminine stereotypes. And the leagues tried to ensure that our girls teams had the same funding and media coverage as the boys, effectively dismantling barriers to participation. An example of this I can remember is when my house league under 12 years girls hockey team had one of our games in the big sports arena in my town and rogers filmed it and it was available to watch on TV, making us feel included and important, despite being low level female hockey. i also almost always had some female coaches and also referees, showing us that leadership in sports isnt limited by gender. another example of something that helped gendering to not constrain my involvement is when i played ringette, one year we didn’t have enough girls signed up to make a team this year so we had two of the girls brothers join the team, and even though they may have had “biological advantage” they were never given more ice time or special treatment from the coaches, and they also performed in line with our abilities, showing that maybe there isnt much of a biological advantage.
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D) How is sport gendered in the popular imagination?
Exercise 4: Padlet/Notebook Prompt
While most sports are in fact unisex, gender coding remains pervasive, particularly at the professional level, although with a foundation established in youth competition. Participate in the poll below to share your views on how popular sports are gendered in the popular imagination. Also feel welcome to add or suggest sports that you feel strongly conform to the gender binary!
After you contribute to the padlet prompt, record your response in your notebook AND briefly discuss in two or three sentences how these responses and the polling figures in general confirm or contradict your assumptions about gender-coding and sports. Did anything surprise you?
| i was really curious about how the polls for hockey were gonna be, and i was thinking it was mostly going to be male, which was correct. i found that almost all of my assumptions about gender coding and sports were correct. the one that i got wrong and surprised me was soccer being majority gender neutral. i noticed that any combat sport mostly was majority assumed to be male gender coded, and sports more artistic like cheer, dance, or figure skating were mostly majority assumed to be female gender coded, and i wonder if this is in part because we subconsciously associate men with violence and aggression and women with grace and artistry.
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Section Two: Breaking it down
A) Title IX
Exercise 5: Notebook Prompt
In a longer version of the interview excerpted in the video above, Leah Thomas states “Trans women competing in women’s sports does not threaten women’s sports as a whole because trans women are a very small minority of all athletes and the NCAA rules around trans women competing in women’s sports have been around for 10+ years and we haven’t seen any massive wave of trans women dominating”?
Do you agree with this statement? See also the image above suggesting that the issue may be overblown by politicians and influencers who don’t actually care that much about women’s sports.
Please share any thoughts you have in your Notebook by clicking on the audio button above or writing a few sentences.
| i do agree with this statement and have had this exact conversation multiple times with some conservative people in my life. especially in recent times, people have made such a stink about transgender athletes, even though there is such few of them. and i also always think about how there are many bigger problems in the world than a handful of trans athletes, like for example, pedophilia and sexual assault in the church, which has 100’s-1000’s of perpetrators who harm people, but they would rather put their efforts into policing a handful of athletes. and i think their hate comes from a fear of what they dont understand, but they don’t care enough to try to understand.
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B) Unfair Advantage?
Exercise 6: Notebook Prompt
What does the host and writer, Rose Eveleth, have to say on the issue of unfair advantage?
Can you think of other examples of unique biological or circumstantial advantages from which athletes have benefitted enormously that have nothing to do with gender?
| rose says that advantage is what sports are all about, being faster, stronger, smarter, and there are many biological advantages not related to gender that are celebrated instead of ridiculed for being unfair. she also says that sport performance relies on many factors, many not biological, like socioeconomics and resources/equipment, as well as other biological advantages like physiological/genetic traits. rose talks about the obvious example of Michael Phelps who has long arms and torso, and short legs, a build perfect for swimming, as well as another biological advantage with lactic acid production, but people don’t question these biological advantages for fairness, even though they help his performance. another example of this would be athletes who are from or even just train in high altitude places, as this leads to increased red blood cell numbers and hemoglobin, which gives them better oxygen delivery capacity, and a unique advantage for sports like distance running. another example thats a genetic advantage would be people with the i (insertion) allele in the angiotensin‑converting enzyme (ACE) gene, which is linked with lower ACE activity, and improved cardiovascular efficiency and endurance capacity, giving them a unique advantage for endurance sports like rowing, biking or distance running. if they think trans athletes or female athletes with naturally high endogenous testosterone need their own division to compete in, should we also make separate divisions for individuals with the i ACE allele?
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Again, let’s turn to Katie Barnes who points out that we tend to forget amidst all the debate that “sports, by design, are not fair” (235), that “the reality of sports is that we accept unfairness all the time” (235).
Do you agree? Why? In your experience, how fair are sports? Feel welcome to add a video response in the padlet and provide an example if you’re willing. Make sure you include a screenshot of your response in your notebook.
| In favor- i do agree that by design, sports are unfair. this is because not everyone has the same abilities and biological adaptations for sports performance. as well as on a deeper levels with different socioeconomics which can give access to performance increasing training and resources/equipment, which can lead to more/better opportunities, compared to less privileged children who didn’t have access to the best training and equipment. in my experience, sports are quite unfair in the socioeconomic field. growing up playing on my small towns teams, almost every time we played against a city, they would crush us. and i think this was because the obvious, there’s more people so only the best make it on the team whereas we were struggling to have enough kids for a team, but also i assume their teams had more money and so could access better performance enhancing resources like power skating sessions. i also believe sports are unfair in the face of opportunities as well as connections, and an example of this is when i was playing ringette, a coach asked me to play on their select team for a 3 on 3 tournament, and i was the only player who wasn’t a coaches child who was asked to join the team.
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B) The Paris Olympics
Optional Response:
What does Robins mean when she argues that:
“The aims of transvestigating an Olympic athlete are not, in any meaningful sense, anything to do with sports, or fairness, or even with women (cis women, at least) as a social category. Rather, they have everything to do with transness, and the public expression of transfemininity.
For my money this has never been about sport.
What it has always been is an excuse to publicly relitigate the existence of trans women.”
Make a note in your Notebook.
| i agree with here statement, and understand exactly what she means, they don’t actually care about fairness and it’s never been about that, it’s about holding down a marginalized group of people that they feel threatened by or don’t understand, and letting them know you don’t think they should exist, and not letting them progress in the world.
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