The Un-Equal Playing Field
Renee Richards won a decisive court battle against the United States Tennis Association.
Lia Thomas is nominated for NCAA Women of the Year.
100’s (maybe 1000s) of Trans athletes go unheard of because they don’t win.
Each year more than 65 million Americans tune in to watch live sporting events (Statistia). At the foundation of sports entertainment is the idea of like competing with like to establish superiority based on athletic performance. Victors are celebrated and the others commit to try again and do better.
Sports promises the opportunity for the feel-good redemption story and the surprise underdog story. The Williams sisters started their journey on the cracked asphalt courts of Compton, CA to reign supreme on the grass-courts of Wimbledon. Demaryius Thomas (rest in power), a beloved Colorado sports icon, started in a family embroiled in substance abuse but had his previously imprisoned mother in the stands to watch him win a Super Bowl. We watch sports because we believe in the fairness of opportunity and the goodness of camaraderie.
But consider this… take away the idea of like competing with like and ask yourself this question… would you tune in to watch a sporting event? If you thought the competition and the rewards were unfair, would you still be committed to the spectacle?
Systems of Classifications in Sports
The sports industry has long depended on the idea of like competing with like to build credibility in competition. The NFL has created a convoluted salary cap system and an even more confusing process of selecting and contracting players to craft the perception of parity. MLB doesn’t have a salary cap, but has something called a “luxury tax”, so that teams can’t essentially “buy” a championship. But that is not where the systems of creating parity end. It goes further by creating a mechanism of classification of players.
The same classification system that generates the perception of like-competing-with-like is at the foundation of separating athletes into weight classes in some sports (boxing, wrestling etc.), age classes by limiting the age of when someone can become a professional athlete, and levels of experience. It is the same argument that separates male athletes from female athletes. That is until that last classification system became complicated.
The methods of classification in sports and athletics have always been a socio-political project. Once upon a time there existed a 42 team Negro League for baseball. The league was built on the idea that Black players were not fit to play in the all-white leagues because of old racist ideas. As late as the 1930s and 1940s a scientific community of eugenicists argued that there were genetic differences between races that made a race either superior or inferior. Jesse Owens’ 1936 Olympics performance and Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League Baseball in 1946 started to chip away at that thinking.
Separating athletes by male and female athletes is currently the norm. What is worth examining however is the rationale and the logic behind the classification system and what values guide the decision making when the classification is no longer simple. The male-female binary classification system adopted by most athletics governing bodies have conveniently placed trans-athletes and non-binary athletes in the margins for a very long time. But the truth is that Trans and non-binary athletes force us to re-think a kind of classification that is rooted in the idea that somehow male athletes are superior to female athletes. This thinking is underpinned by an even more dangerous ideology… that males are superior to females. The current backlash against Transwomen competing in athletics with other women is rooted in the same sexist thinking that fueled the bathroom scandal in North Carolina. The idea that women need to be protected from ill-intended “men,” who take on female personas to cause harm. This kind of thinking assigns malicious intent and fundamentally misrepresents the experience of the Trans community.
Currently there are three dominant discourses that determine the classification system when it comes to gender identity. The medical discourse looks at sexual organs and hormonal markers to determine sex. The legal discourse considers legally documented markers such as assignment at birth, assignment in legally obtained identity documents and places onus on governance bodies to determine classification. The discourse of choice considers self-identification as the determining factor. Each of these discourses hold sway in various arenas. In employment spaces a combination of choice and legal discourse hold sway. In religious settings the medical discourse dominates. In athletics… the discourses of choice and medical markers are currently competing for legitimacy.
The justification for embracing the medical discourse in sports classification is at best based on incomplete understanding of the complexities of the human body. At worst it’s a deliberate choice to continue to keep Trans athletes in the margins. Even though studies on the impact of testosterone on athletics performance have been inconclusive at best, it continues to be the key marker that sport’s governing bodies seem to rely on to determine whether an athlete can compete with other assigned at birth females. Even more problematic is the manner in which the same standard is applied differently to male athletes. Whereas a female athletes’ high levels of natural testosterone are grounds for sanctions high levels of it is treated as a competitive advantage in male athletes.
Belonging and not belonging in sports
Currently 18 states in the United States ban Transgender youth from participating in sports inconsistent with their gender identity. Research shows that people who begin gender-affirming hormone therapy during their teens enjoy better mental health as adults. Conversely, young people who grow up with gender dysphoria, a state of unease that a person’s physical body does not match their gender identity, report higher levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and anxiety. Gender-affirming hormone treatment manipulates the levels of estrogen or testosterone so that a person’s physical characteristics are more in line with their gender identities. Because the classification in sports depends on hormonal markers the choice for young Trans athletes is a choice between their mental well-being and access to participate in athletics…. something that is easily accessible to all cis-gendered athletes. When you add on, the reported benefits of youth sports on the mental wellbeing of young people, we start to recognize the cruelty of limiting access to trans and non-binary athletes to participate in sports.
The perception of parity based on like competing with like is an arbitrary social choice making enterprise. Deciding to separate male athletes from female athletes makes as much sense as separating swimmers with long arms vs those with shorter arms. We now know separating white athletes from non-white athletes is just plain and simple racism. It is time we re-think the simple gender binary classification since it is no longer simple and because it is rooted in good old-fashioned sexism.