The World Athletics Council just barred trans women from competition if they transitioned after puberty — mind you, in much of the country, it isn’t as if transitioning as a teen is an option! They’ve also declared that all athletes with “a difference in sex development [will] be barred from competing internationally in all events unless they reduced their testosterone to 2.5 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a minimum of six months.” This feels quite specifically aimed at Caster Semenya, who, under the previous regulations was barred from running her preferred events (e.g. 800m). She had been allowed to compete in the 5000m. No more, however.

I’m reposting, reframing some paragraphs from a 2016 article I shared here—even then I was exhausted by the fascist obsession with women athletes who are “not really women” but are, it seems, always black. The men running this sport (track & field) just cannot let the idea of Caster Semenya go—Semenya, by the way, as great as an athlete as she is, is not the super dominant Godzilla storming through women’s sports with some freakish advantage that leads to the total destruction of all world records in her events. She’s just one of the best athletes out there.

Let me make it clear, for those of you who have been sleeping on this for the past 15 years.

Trans women are women and have competed in women’s sports for DECADES. And it’s been fine!

Some women have above average testosterone levels. This doesn’t make them not women. This is not an unnatural advantage. It is literally their bodies. Even if it gave people an advantage, and much research refutes that claim, that should be OK. The best athletes have advantages! And it’s never reducible to a single feature of their physiognomy. That is just not how it works and frankly anyone with even basic awareness of sports gets this.

These rules impact all athletes who can, through these regulations, be subject to truly invasive gender policing—e.g. medical examination, by which I mean pelvic exams. This can be forced on an athlete by sporting officials, shitty parents, abusive and homophobic coaches. Anyone with short hair, delayed puberty, facial hair (not uncommon for girls and women), broad shoulders, flat chests or just plan swagger can cause gender panic. Lots of people decide NOT to play sports because they consider this kind of social ecology murderous. They are not wrong.

This end-of-women’s-sports fantasy imposes on women’s sports a surprising fragility given that almost every women’s sport we can think of has survived being actively suppressed by men with arbitrary regulations and outright bans (limiting, for example, women’s tennis matches to three sets instead of five; barring women from marathons, virtually outlawing women’s soccer).

Women’s sports will not disappear because women with different hormones and gender presentation are allowed to compete against each other. PERIOD. Pun intended. If I weren’t menopausal I would write this in my own menstrual blood.

Women’s sports is not a “protected category.” It is, instead, the category that takes the most beatings.

Athletes compete as women by virtue of the alignment of their identity (as they perceive it, as others perceive it) with this already-existing category of gender. That alignment is not stable; it is a site of constant negotiation. And it is compulsory. We do not have women’s sports because women need to be protected from men. We have women sports because the world has women athletes. We also have women’s sports because gender difference is such a powerful, defining aspect of our experience of being in a body that we enjoy – as athletes and as spectators — the spectacle of gendered subjects in competition with each other as gendered subjects.

That enjoyment is NOT biological. It’s political.

Quite a few of us, furthermore, also enjoy direct physical competition across gender and know to our bones that women must be allowed to lose to men in order to win against them. And so when it comes to mixed-gender competition, there are a lot of us out here who say: bring it on.

IAAF regulations police gender in more way than via “sex hormones” (which, by the way, is not a biological category). IAAF stigmatizes the speed of women racing against men by moving marathon records set by women into a special category when those records are set in races in which women have run alongside men. The fastest marathon run by a woman is the fastest marathon run by a woman whether or not she is running alongside men. People run faster when they run with faster people. And to create the weird sense that women, as a category, are slower than men as a category, we have to minimize our awareness of the fact that, in fact, girls and women excel in a wide range of context when allowed to go toe to toe with male wrestlers, runners, soccer players, basketball players. Protecting women from direct physical competition against men holds women back. (Lindsey Vonn, the downhill skier, has bumped up against even more intense rules whose explicit aim is to slow women down. Men’s and women’s courses are mapped out differently, women’s courses are designed to be slower. When Vonn petitioned to race against men, she was petitioning to be allowed to race the same course as men — in order to achieve faster times. That petition was denied.) The practice of making women ski a slower course, or run only alongside other women do nothing other than slow women down — these other rules attempt to root out from women all traces of their own masculinity in order to shore up a sense of absolute gender difference.

Women’s sports is not a defensive structure from which men are excluded so that women might flourish. It is, in fact, the opposite of this: it is, potentially, a radically inclusive space which has the capacity to destroy the public’s ideas about gender and gender difference precisely because gender is always in play in women’s sports in ways that it is not in men’s sports (with a few exceptions — e.g. figure skating). Because men have been so committed to the “end of women’s sports” for so long, women’s sports thrives in the zone of destruction. It has its own character thanks to the gender trouble at its origin. If women’s sports has one job that really is different from men’s sports, it is the destruction of sex/gender difference. Men’s sports (again with a few exceptions which prove the rule) reinforce ideologies of gender difference. Women’s sports destroy them. Magic happens when the difference between men’s and women’s sports crumbles.

morte súbita from Jaime Lauriano on Vimeo.

from the artist’s vimeo page:

direção (director) jaime lauriano
direção de fotografia e câmera (cinematography) cassio luiz rothschild
edição e finalização (film editing) onze corujas

The Brazilian team which won the 1970 World Cup is considered by many to be the greatest of all time. In a spectacle transmitted, live, for the first time for the Brazilian people through television, this achievement was transformed into a heroic feat. With strong media coverage then, the Brazilian team’s victory in 1970 was used as a propaganda tool for the Brazilian military regime.

“Morte Subita (Death Sudden)” consists of a projection with people covering their faces with shirts of the Brazilian Soccer Team. In the background, listen to an audio that mixes sounds of football stadiums (shouts, clapping, fireworks) with sounds of protests and street demonstrations (bombs, shots, shouts, etc); as the camera tracks these people, we hear a sports announcer recite the names of dead and disappeared politicians in the year 1970, the hardest year of the Brazilian military dictatorship.

Artist’s postcard (photo from auction). See also Ice Skating Naked.

The Lure of the Arena, 2019 — a bit of football art, to recall the thing I know many of us can’t wait to get back to. Sitting in the stands together. Art historian and fantastic thinker of sports-art Przemyslaw Strozek wrote to me about Marcin Dudek a few years ago. Dudek tends to work with the situation of the fan/spectator, and has done some really provocative work exploring the relationship between sports, art and violence. Click on that first link for a slide show & text about Lure. I love this artist’s work, and find myself turning to it on a day when I’m planning to see some of the guys I used to play with.

Within a sexist setting, women’s joy is valuable only as an image that serves men’s pleasure. Within queer and feminist settings that pleasure circulates, echoes, accumulates. It is shared out, given away, taken back, stored, recycled, amplified, converted into thought and energy or just left to be what it is. It is never just one thing. It is selfish and generous, sharp and blurry, spontaneous and planned.

The cultural minimization of the value of women’s joy has a big impact on the development of women’s sports. It is hard to start a women’s team when the women in your community are taking care of their families in addition to holding down jobs. Those women will need to argue (with themselves as well as their husbands, children, parents) for the importance of their game over the importance of care-taking. That is very, very difficult to do. For a 40-something year old woman, there is no argument for her game beyond its importance to her pleasure.

The trolls running the country would have you think that progressive spaces look like tortured graduate seminars in which everyone is trying to prove how smart and “correct” they are. And while, sure, some spaces are a lot like that, really and truly inclusively queer feminist communities can generate an energy much closer to the vibe of this USWNT or, reaching back to a moment earlier this year, the vibe created by UCLA’s gymnastics squad — as represented by Katelyn Ohashi.

Women’s sports and women athletes — like the Williams sisters — increase the sense of the possible and expand our sense of how joy, desire and power can express themselves.

Yesterday, when she called for more love and less hate, Megan Rapinoe spoke from that place of joy. Do not let anyone tell you that that “more love” is a limp political sentiment — whoever is telling you that has clearly never felt the full force of a 72-hour champagne-fueled chaotic gay energy wave, never mind figured out how to harness it!

Once the last match was finished, as the winners celebrated and the losers put their arms around each other, the stadium thrummed with the grinding beat of Stromae’s 2009 hit, “Alors on danse.”

As fantastic as that song is; it is a VERY strange thing to play at the end of a World Cup final.

The gist of these lyrics: it’s all pointless. We are misery itself and dance to forget. It’s all a grind; we just get deeper and deeper dans la merde. On danse because what’s the use.  It’s an anthem for alienation and depression. Go team!

THENJIWE NIKI NKOSI, ROUTINE, 2019 Oil on canvas. 35 7/8 x 39 3/8 x 1 7/8 in. Series: Gymnasium

I am very interested in how artists engage, represent and work with the structural and formal dimensions of a sport.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s Gymnasium series does just this. As is typical for Nkosi’s work, the canvas is clean, tight. It feels composed but also like a space meant for bodies and movement and, here, judgement.

So pleased to have happened on a tweet from art critic Rianna Jade Parker, in which she shared an image from this series.