2 Chapter Two: Playing with Gender
Section One: The Fundamentals
A) History and Context
Exercise 1: Notebook Prompt
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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.
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The Battle of the Sexes is one of the important cases to add in a timeline. The match was designed by Billie Jean King during the 1970s. The game was known as the gender equality in the tennis league. A female player defeated a former male tennis champion after mocking the women’s tennis division. The case displays the importances of equal treatment and acknowledgement of tennis player in both division
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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?
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I believe that gender has not constraint with my involvement in the field of sports. I have played many sports in life. The outcome of playing different games are always the same for my body reactions. These reaction include sweat, increasing heart pump and tiredness. I play with every individuals from any genders in the field of sports. However, I do notice the impact in a sport field around players with different gender. I have witnessed the majority of the players strengths and weakness based on the gender. I think that those abilities to be the main reason society separate genders to male and female in the field of sports. Sport games does not restrict players based on their gender. Instead, the society does constraint gender in a sport activities.
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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?
| Are martial art Sport like MMA designed for male, female or neutral sport?
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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 completely agree with the statement provided by Leah Thomas about trans women. Trans women do not pose a significant threat in the women’s sport leagues. The NCAA rule about trans women has provided a lot of disagreement among the LGBTQ community. The rule is shown to be more political theory rather than proof based theory in women’s sport.
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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?
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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.
| I completely agree with this statement about sport. The organization created a system where person could easily play the sport games by good quality access and resource. The system has affected many individuals with different gender, background, race, culture or class. The probability to enter the sport activities are higher for wealthy individuals than the poor people.
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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.
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