4 Chapter Two: Playing With Gender
Rebecca Redfearn
Section One: The Fundamentals
A) History and Context
Exercise 1: Notebook Prompt
Make a note of anything that surprised you in this episode or something new that you learned.
| I learned that there were gender passports, I was not aware this was ever a thing let alone used during sports. Having gender tests in sport is an interesting and unique turn in history that I wouldn’t otherwise suspect.
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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.
| One additional milestone I would add would be the first all female professional baseball league known as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). I learned about this event from the movie “A league of their own” and I believe this event to be significant as it was paved the way for women’s sports during WWII and allowing female leagues to develop.
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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?
| gendering in sport has not been a large constraint in my involvement as I have been fortunate enough to train and compete in an environment that does not discriminate against gender. In the Olympic games my sport, horse riding, is one of the very few sports that have both males and females competing at the same level for the same medals. This is seen in lower level competition and training as well which has fostered an environment of inclusion and emphasized improving skills and passion over the trials that come along with being lesser than due to gender. The understanding of gender equality in sport and limitations of gender norms have caused for stereotypes to occur within other types of sports and the equality and understanding found within horse riding to not be universal in all other sports. |
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?
Here are my results of the padlet:
Other sports that conform to gender biases in my opinion are
Other sports that do not conform to gender bias in my mind are
Some of the results did surprise me, for example 100% of people said Gymnastics were female. This surprised me as an ex gymnast I had many friends who were male, and although I also said it was a ‘female’ sport, I viewed the question as what is the general assumption of each sport and not what do you believe each sport to be. Every sport is a neutral if it was asking what I believe, so it was interesting to learn what other people either think of as the assumption as well as what others believe each sports gender ‘is’. |
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 think the complexity of determining the fairness of having transgender in sport. In the interest of inclusion I think that allowing anyone to compete in any league of any sport is possible, however when it comes to fairness in sport and societal values I tend to lean towards a disagreement in regard to the statement above. I believe there are better ways of creating an empowering and positive environment for all athletes however having rules of waiting periods or testosterone levels in liters of blood is not necessarily the best way of enacting it. Possibly having a league/category for trans women and trans men alone could be an option, however the question arises again on equality and fairness.
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B) Unfair Advantage?
Exercise 6: Notebook Prompt
What does the host and writer, Rose Evereth, 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?
| Evereth shares an opinion that emphasized the importance of framing issues with fairness and inclusion in sport as well as how athletic competition is rarely a fair playing field before gender is even on the table.
Other examples of a unique biological advantage in athletes, regardless of gender, are equipment, such as a postotic runners leg which allows athletes to get a higher return in energy compared to able-bodied individuals meaning that they can use less energy when running. Another example is Usain Bolt who has a high rate of fast-twitch muscles along with stride length and height allow for him to have a biological advantage when sprinting.
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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 agree with Barnes in her opinions as sports are inherently unfair and because of this it provides rewards to those who have physical, biological, circumstantial, or technological advantages in competition. Athletes compete with different resources, access to training, and genetics that are generally accepted within competition. For example those from high altitude regions are found to dominate long distance events due to the natural physical conditioning that comes along with it. Although overall fairness in sport is important, equality is seemingly impossible.
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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.
| Robin means that by scrutinizing athletes’ gender within sports is less about fairness but more about a societal biases against trans and women within competition. By focusing on the ‘transness’ and transfeminitity disproportionately it debates the question of sport specific issues. For Robins, it is not about fairness or protecting women’s categories, it focuses on a broader cultural effort to challenge societal views on trans identities.
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