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Policing Women’s Sports Does Not Protect Women’s Sports

March 23, 2023 by

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.

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Grant Wahl’s Utopianism

December 11, 2022 by

In 2011, Grant Wahl announced his intention to run for President of FIFA. His platform included the introduction of term-limits for FIFA officials, hiring the best referees for the World Cup and requiring them to explain controversial calls, ending the use of yellow cards for stupid things like removing shirts in goal celebrations, and the dismantling of the system which effectively excluded women from FIFA leadership. It’s worth reading Grant’s take on his “half-serious, half-satire” campaign and watching his campaign ad: “There’s a cure for FIFA’s Blatter infection!“

The prescience of this interventionist project is hard to appreciate. He promised to appoint a woman as FIFA’s General Secretary, its most powerful position. The role is now served by Fatma Samoura, appointed in 2016. He advocated for the introduction of goal-line technology and instant replay. We now have a new sports writing sub-genre: complaints about VAR. He promised a “wikileaks”-level release of FIFA’s records which would allow the organization to being to reckon with the rot within its structure and culture. Football leaks, a massive data dump exposing the scale of corruption in the sport, launched in 2015. In recent years, FIFA has been the subject of sustained forms of scrutiny and global reflection on the question of what accountability and change might be for an organization this incestuous, this rotten.

At the time, however, for a candidate to advance to the election, FIFA required the official endorsement of just one of its 208 football association: not one would take the risk of alienating themselves from the affections of the men who run the organization. The action of soliciting a nomination from the 150 FAs that Grant selected as the “least corrupt” in FIFA’s system made visible the shamefulness of FIFA’s so-called democratic process. Without a nomination, his candidacy was stopped before anyone had a chance to vote for him. Sepp Blatter ran unopposed.

Today FIFA requires the endorsement of five FAs, a change attributed to Wahl’s action and one designed to make interventions like his less feasible. But in the wake of his candidacy, Grant wrote, “ordinary fans in countries around the world talked a little bit more about the absurdities of Fifa’s electoral process.”

This is a good moment to reflect on what FIFA might have been under Grant’s leadership, and on the importance of journalism to the project of wrestling this sport away from the hyper-exploitative systems we’ve been tricked into thinking of as inevitable and insurmountable.

Truth tellers with utopian impulses are to be cherished. We saw a little of this side of Grant in the photo he shared of himself in a rainbow shirt when he was stopped from entering the stadium near the start of the tournament. He was eventually allowed to proceed to his seat in the press zone; reporting of his death often includes a photo of Grant in that shirt sitting at a desk, writing. He of course knew he was likely to be stopped, and I am sure he understood the action as pure symbol. But in a week marked by a mass shooting at yet another LGBTQ bar, in a season shadowed by the violent repression of young revolutionaries in soccer-mad Iran and the question of how one honors them at the tournament when the team is used ruthlessly by the country’s dictatorship as if their wins could wash away its sins, at a time when anti-trans hate has been perfectly fused into fascism’s psychosis, Grant’s gesture of solidarity from inside the machine mattered. It was a signal for those of us watching the game and feeling driven to the edge of madness by the gaslight—it was a way of letting us know that there are allies in the press who are also struggling with the structure and with the moment.

I don’t know how he managed to balance his love for the sport with his awareness of the awfulness of the organizations which manage it—I’m in constant awe of the people who write about this day-in, day-out. He clearly understood the importance and the value of that work himself: he was a constant ally and champion of feminist, queer, and anti-racist sports writing. He often let us know when, in our own work, we hit the nail on the head, and via his social media platform he amplified our voices. He read our work.

Great sports writers make you feel the passions invoked by the subject, and, often in equal measure, the frustration and outrage we feel when our love is exploited and betrayed. This has been especially true of Grant’s writing about this World Cup, the enjoyment of which is shadowed and corrupted not only by the ruthlessness of Qatar’s development practice but by the resonance of that practice with those of FIFA itself. Those of us struggling to manage our relationship to this tournament are responding not only to the present, but to decades of the abuse of our love for the sport and for the people who play it. We have really and truly had enough and want a different FIFA, maybe even something that isn’t FIFA at all.

The very deep grief so many of us feel at the news of Grant’s death is tied to the forms of grievance that Grant helped us to name, even as he wrote the story of our love for this game.

Note. There are many sharing their affection and respect for Grant. Although I’m using his name like he was a personal friend, I only met him IRL a few times. There are so many people out there who collaborated with him, worked alongside him, and really knew him and who are writing their grief and sharing stories. Richard Deitsch included a beautiful list on The Athletic as an addendum to the moving sketch of his own sense of loss. If you are feeling sad, I encourage leaning into this community of people who are sitting down at their desks and honoring his memory by giving our love and our grief a shape we can share.

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Jaime Lauriano: morte súbita (2014)

October 20, 2021 by

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.

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Sexism, Corruption, Sports (a brief note)

September 30, 2021 by

If you have yet to read Meg Linehan’s story about NWSL coach Paul Riley, you should read it now. And if you aren’t following the story about sexual abuse within Haiti’s national women’s team program, you should catch up. Not a women’s sports fan and think sexual abuse is just a women’s issue? You will want to read this, or this, or this, or this.

Struggling to understand why sexual abuse is such a strong feature of organized sports?

Patriarchy is a specific form of corruption: men only dominate by virtue of theft and betrayal. They only occupy positions of power and authority by working hard to undermine and destroy people whose competency and talent challenge their sense of entitlement. In patriarchal structures, sex operates as a vector for the accumulation of power, and wealth. One feels entitled to the bodies of one’s subordinates. And a whole sexual culture — white, heterosexist, patriarchal, homophobic, cis, binary — normalizes this association of power with sexual access.

Women, gay men, trans men and women, non-binary and genderqueer people in these systems become targets because they, in essence, are sex. Territory to be colonized. Sexualized forms of hazing and sexual abuse of men and boys within patriarchal, straight homosocial spaces operate as a means for expressing and consolidating power—you become implicated in a set of “crimes”—if you speak of it, you exit the scene.

In systems like this, that sexualized performance of abusive authority is treated as a form of competency—even professional achievement.

A few years back, I remember sitting in a meeting with men in charge at my campus. We were talking about some issues related to sexual harassment charges. In some of the cases we were talking about, women had been bad actors—enablers, mainly. Ironic, isn’t it, someone said. No, I replied. In these corrupt systems, the only women allowed close to that form of power are those who collaborate with it. Either by operating as an abuser’s enabler, or as an alibi — “I haven’t had any problems, so my example demonstrates that there is no problem.” Usually, those women end up under the bus.

As Brenda Elsey and I have argued, this shit sits on a continuum with the profound corruption that rots this sport from the inside out. Professional sports does not have to be like this—it really and truly doesn’t. The people running the game will have you thinking that the “ironies” of the system are key to its pleasures and its profits. This is flat out bullshit. OK. I am going to go punch something.

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ACFC: Not Even a Women’s Football Club?

July 8, 2021 by

I pulled the above screenshot from Angel City FC’s “our story” page. How could anyone involved in marketing think “we’re not even a women’s football club” is an OK thing to put on the website for a women’s football club?

Reading this sentence, I recalled a year I spent working at a women’s college in Virginia — this place had no women’s studies program and was run by people who had internalized misogyny and racism so very deeply that the students went into revolt — I remember one student taking the mic at a town hall and telling the college president “You are a women’s college that is ashamed of the fact that it is a women’s college.” When I read “not even a women’s football club,” I remembered the hurt in that student’s voice.

I feel really hurt by this language. It contradicts the club’s too-good-to-be-true branding. Supporters like myself also feel it telegraphs the betrayal we are experiencing as we witness the club reproduce the patriarchal privilege which has marginalized women coaches in the game.

Lots of people new to feminist work struggle with the idea of women-centered organizations and structures, and are also challenged by what it means to center a practice in women and to also practice inclusion within these women-centered spaces. You can’t practice inclusion as a feminist if you hold onto white supremacist, homophobic, transphobic ideas about who and what a woman is—so really digging into feminist work always includes a confrontation with the way the term “woman” is defined. That’s HARD work and it is not a given that people in women’s sports have gotten any real training in that. That is just ONE zone of difficulty particular to feminist work in a women’s centered organization. There are others, like: confronting and working through the degree to which traits associated with toxic masculinity are treated in our society as hallmarks of professionalism and authority: women can and do buy into that system. Another: the sense that because your thing is centered in women, it will be valued less by the world at large. You actually have to accept some parts of that because the work you do is a direct challenge to patriarchal systems of value.

So, fans are nervous.

From where I sit, it looks like some of the people running ACFC are suffering from gendered forms of confusion and ambivalence — how else to understand the mixed signal combo of “not even a women’s football club” and the ultra femme crest and salmon pink ACFC has chosen for itself?

Good god ACFC please strip every layer of apology for the fact that the club is a women’s club from your discourse. And remember that you do not need to feminize the visual iconography of the club to remind people that the club is a women’s club. As the USWNT has shown us again and again and again and again and again and again and again: a great women’s team appeals to sports fans. Women are sports fans. So are other people! And it is really, really fun to experience an alignment between one’s love for the sport and one’s commitment to women. I will never ever forget the feeling that came over me in the stands at the World Cup final, when I understood that the USWNT fan section was changing “equal pay.” NEVER. I have never in my life felt so in love with the game as in that moment. The politics of women’s sports is really dense and intense: it is always best to run towards the white hot fire of that intensity than away from it.

I am guessing that ACFC folks were going for Barça’s “mes que un club” vibe, but good god I WILL WORK FOR YOU FULL TIME if you need an English professor to tell you how to communicate that spirit without treating the women of women’s football as a problem that must be transcended! I will come down there and give you all an intro to women’s studies course! I’m ready to retire from the University of California and make it my job to save you from yourselves because I love this sport and want very much to love my home team.

You cannot market women’s sports as a cause. You have to actually get the cause, and then build your brand around that. Horse. Then cart.


Note: Almost immediately after I posted this, some readers expressed anger on twitter about the lack of a non-binary framework in my writing here. Most people who read me here (and on twitter) have been reading my work for years and I’ve earned their trust (this blog normally sees only a handful of visitors a day). But of course people who are just seeing this have zero reason to trust me on anything.

When I say that in feminist work in women’s centered spaces the category woman should be engaged critically, this is what I mean: it should not be weaponized as we see in trans-phobic legislative violence we are seeing conducted in the name of protecting women’s sports. Women’s sports itself structurally embodies the problem of not only the gender binary, but of an apparatus that enforces radical gender segregation. This leaves no space for non-binary athletes. BUT, and this is a big one: athletes have a really interesting history of defying binarized structures and making space for non-binary athletes. People play across this line all the time and there is a rich practice of making this space within women’s sports. That’s the version of the game I most love.

I apologize to readers who experienced the above as harmfully oblivious to the violence of the gender binary and all of its enforcing structures.

One person criticizing me said that they’d read the ACFC statement as expressing non-binary possibilities. I champion that optimism and would be ecstatic to learn that this is the club’s aim. Perhaps I should apologize to all readers here for my cynicism!

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Carolee Schneemann, Kitch (figure skater)

May 26, 2021 by

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

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Khaled Jarrar: Concrete

May 23, 2021 by
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Marcin Dudek: The Lure of the Arena

April 27, 2021 by

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.

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The Joy of Ashlyn Harris

July 11, 2019 by

 

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!

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Alors

July 9, 2019 by

 

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!

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