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Section One: The Fundamentals
A) History and Context
Exercise 1: Notebook Prompt
One of the unexpected lessons of the episode is the long battle against sex verification policies, with competitors such as Maximila Imali opting to go to court instead of conforming to the rules. It was also interesting to hear about the decades-long struggle by scientists, reporters, and competitors to combat and eliminate earlier styles of sex testing, highlighting the strength of opposition and the multifaceted intersections of sport, science, and gender.
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.
| 2000s, The IOC shifted its focus away from physiological sex testing to acceptance of gender identity for entry to participate in the Olympic Games because of increasing concerns over the fairness and ethical implications of sex verification testing. The development was important as it marked a move toward more inclusive and respectful recognition of athletes’ gender identities, especially for transgender and intersex people.
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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 don’t believe personally that gendering in sports has created a constraint on my involvement. I believe this is the case because of my identity and the sport that I mainly participated in, which is hockey. I believe that this is due to the fact that the majority of hockey players, especially in the place I am from, are of a very similar demographic in which I fit, which makes it easy to not be limited in involvement.
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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?
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Male Female Neutral I discovered that responses and poll figures largely confirmed my understanding about the strong gender coding in sport. Most responses seemed to confirm the idea that sport is still understood in terms of traditional gender roles, with men widely associated with strength and competitiveness and women understood through stereotypes of agility and grace. What struck me as surprising was how few of the participants appeared to question these profoundly entrenched concepts, indicating an ongoing societal difficulty with fully accepting gender diversity in sports.
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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.
| Leah Thomas’s argument about trans women competing in women’s sports is that they are a very minor group of athletes, and despite decades of NCAA policy, there has been no widespread domination of sports by trans women. I believe that the issue is often hyperbolized, especially by influencers and politicians who might not necessarily care about the integrity of women’s sports but utilize it as a political wedge. That would mean that the real threat to sports is not the presence of trans athletes but the politicization of the issue itself.
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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 Eveleth argues that the idea of trans women having an “unfair advantage” in sports is largely unfounded. She highlights that trans women, like other athletes, face unique challenges and that the advantages attributed to them are often exaggerated. Eveleth suggests that the focus on gender-related advantages detracts from other factors that can influence athletic performance. In terms of non-gender-related advantages, athletes with natural gifts like exceptional height (basketball players), unique joint flexibility, or those from high altitude regions (benefiting from higher red blood cell counts) have also gained significant advantages in their respective sports.
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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 Katie Barnes that, by design, sports cannot be entirely fair. Resources, opportunities for better practice, and inherent physical attributes all vary, making some people more susceptible than others to any arbitrary kind of failure. Now, perhaps we do talk about fairness a lot, but we accept these advantages and inequalities as just the nature of the sports competition. For example, an athlete from a well-funded training program will often have better opportunities than someone from a less privileged background, yet this is rarely questioned in discussions of fairness.
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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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