The comments about Caster Semenya here at Feministing and elsewhere have prompted me to reflect a little bit on my own experience in competitive athletics. I was a competitive rower for six years. Two of those years I spent rowing at a NCAA Division I school. To be able to compete in the NCAA you do sign away some privacy and independence. Urine testing is a commonly cited example of this. For the sample to be considered “good” an official has to see the stream hit the cup. Yeah, that means someone has to watch you pee. Is it humiliating? I didn’t think so. A little awkward maybe but not really an invasion.
There were plenty of other invasions though. Like the fact that my coach was constantly commenting on my weight. One season I would be too heavy. The next, too light. In many ways your body simply ceases to be your own. When you sleep and for how long is largely determined by practice schedules. Some coaches insist that their athletes follow certain diets. There’s an endless list of compromises that athletes make in their personal lives to be better competitors. I don’t think any of these compromises are comparable to the one that Caster Semenya is being asked to make but that isn’t really what I want to focus on in this post. My moment of clarity on Caster Semenya came when I began to consider how height affects athletes.
I am 5’4”. That’s pretty close to the average for women worldwide. Yes, it varies from country to country but 5’4” is definitely within the “average” range. Except when you’re talking about female athletes. The average height on my team was 5’11” and we had one athlete who was 6’2”. To be able to compete with them, I had to keep up with them. That wasn’t easy. I’m not going to make an argument for height to muscle mass because although there is a correlation between the two there’s no exact formula to determine it. I will say that having longer limbs is generally an advantage for rowers and sprinters alike.
There are weight divisions in rowing that are meant to level the playing field for shorter athletes but not many colleges have lightweight teams and there are less lightweight events in the Olympics as well. This obviously means, less opportunities for shorter athletes. This is a problem because it creates a pyramid effect in competitive athletics. Meaning that the further you travel up the pyramid, the more anatomical restrictions there are to competing. Other factors help to form they pyramid as well such as access to facilities, nutrition, time, socio-economic status, etc, etc. The system we have built for competitive sport is largely designed to exclude and that is a problem in and of itself.
My question is this: if Caster Semenya should not be allowed to compete with women because gender differences may give her an advantage does that mean that taller athletes should not be allowed to compete with shorter athletes because their height gives them an advantage?
There are a few things I’d like to qualify that question with. First, I realize that in studies on the differences in muscle mass between men and women, men have a lower percentage of body fat and a higher percentage of muscle mass no matter their height. Meaning that if I were to compare myself to a man who was 5’4”, he would still have the muscle mass advantage. However, since there are so few women of average height at the highest levels of competitive sport (gymnastics being a notable exception) I think any advantage that Caster Semanya might have so far as muscle mass is concerned is probably comparable to the advantage that the average elite sprinter would have over a woman of average height (training, technique, etc. all being equal). Second, many people believe that elite athletics are and should be a reflection of the exceptional and therefore athletes who are disadvantaged by their height should be weeded out. I think there is some validity to this argument. However, I don’t think anatomic exceptionality is limited to height.
The discussion surrounding Caster Semanya has reminded me that we need to rethink how we look at competitive sport as an institution. The limitations we place upon athletes are damaging not only to them but also to society as a whole. I think this is an opportunity to examine both how we view gender and the constructs that govern what we believe about athletes’ bodies in general.
Disclaimer : I know this is far from a perfect argument. I’m posting this so that we can have a discussion on factors not limited to gender. I’m excited to hear your thoughts. Please help me to expand upon this.
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Please ignore the idiotic spelling error I made. I know it's Semenya not Semanya. I tried to resubmit with the correct spelling... hopefully it won't double post.
Argh... so embarrassed.
In most cases where it's applicable (and basketball is an obvious extreme example) short people are at such a horrendous disadvantage that they rarely have a *chance* of competing. Four foot six sprinters and pole vaulters are pretty rare too. Competitive sport is all about being at the extreme end of the bell curve, otherwise we'd all be able to run a sub-10 second hundred metres.
The only sport I can think of where being a biological female is an advantage is long distance swimming. The higher body fat ratio aids flotation. I've also heard it said that in back-to-back marathons women have an advantage in the second one.
There are far more sports where being short does not put you at a disadvantage though. Most long distance runners are short, if you look at any event longer than 800m you'll find the best runners are short. Sports that require endurance don't tend to reward larger individuals. Other sports also favour short people In cricket, the best batsman are short, jockeys are short, etc.
But the major difference here, IMO, is that when someone is 8 or 9 you can't tell if they are going to be a short adult - they might put on a growth spurt. So, you wouldn't discorurage them from basketball, sprinting or any other sport where height is an advantage. Thus even short people are given the chance to excell.
Usually you can tell if someone is male or female though. Without a separate division for female athletes, women would be near universally discouraged from pursuing sport. Certainly they wouldn't be encouraged to pursue elite sport - too much of a chance that less strength will put them at a disadvantage. Girls wouldn't consider sport to be for them. Athletic builds in women would be less encouraged than they are now, and instead women would be further encouraged to fulfill the beauty ideal.
Having a separate division for women in sports where strength is a significant factor is fundamental to equalising the opportunities given to men and women in life. A sperate sporting division for the female sex (not gender*), I would say it was a feminist necessity.
Women should receive comparable accolades for doing well in sport to their male counterparts. The men's competitions are always 'open' though, and so the best women can compete and accolades should be apportioned appropriately.
*For those that think the division should be gender I ask the following: How would it be if it was generally known that to compete in women's sport you needed to be a biological male (or close to it)? I would suggest that such a situation undermines the whole reason for women's sport as I have outlined it above.
I'm curious whether you think that trans women who have transitioned medically (eg, Renee Richards) should be permitted to compete as women.
also,
"For those that think the division should be gender I ask the following: How would it be if it was generally known that to compete in women's sport you needed to be a biological male (or close to it)?"
I am sure you did not mean it this way, but that question to me evokes the same sort of trans panic sentiment that activists working around bathroom segregation, or transgender legal issues have incurred, eg, "OMG but how would it be if we let everyone use the bathrooms they said they felt most comfortable using and then women's rooms everywhere were filled with MEN???" The court case deciding that Renee Richards, for instance, could compete does not seem to have spawned masses of biologically male tennis players disingenuously duping the system in order to compete and win as women.
I should acknowledge that I think I'm debating some of the finer parts of the issue here, and that I don't think either of us are arguing for very different things (I'm also OK w/ "sex" segregated sports). I do, however, think there is a tendency to think that sex = science, gender = society, and it is always easy to tell one from the other. But I think it's actually a lot messier than that and that these kinds of issues would rightfully incorporate consideration of both sexual and gendered concerns.
Yeah, your right. I didn't mean it like that, as implied by the sentence that follows that one. I worry about encouraging women to participate in competitive sport, if those competing most strongly at the highest level were closer to biological males than females.
I agree that things are quite messy, where to draw the line exactly I don't know. I do think there needs to be a hard line for the purposes of competition as this goes to fairness and a level playing field. No such hard line should exist in societal definitions of gender.
For another perspective on the hard line consider this. As a junior sports-person I was born 5 days from the age cut-off for my chosen sport. So I was one of the youngest, I was also slight for my age (still am). The hard cut-off was age, other factors didn't matter, even though I could probably have played in a younger age group without having a significant advantage it wouldn't have been fair to change the line for one player. The date for age cut-off was 1 October, it's an arbitrary date but that's the rule I was playing under. Without a cut-off age we'd all have been playing open age which would have been unfair not just on me but many more players. Sometimes the fairest option is one that is unfair on the fewest people, is the moral to the story.
Sure, I'm not against hard lines (that's one of the things about sports, they seem to have a particular predilection for rules)... I really liked Alice Dreger's piece for the Times where she argued for hard lines, so long as they're lines that are drawn with a) full attentiveness to the complexity of our sex/gender system, and (perhaps most importantly) b) that they're drawn with the understanding that in doing so we are making a *sporting* decision (like the decisions that determine an age cutoff date, or that determine how many points you get when you score a touchdown), and not some kind of scientifically ordained "natural" decision. Again, IMO, since the line will inevitably be artificial, and since in contrast to age cutoff dates, sex and gender are inevitably also political issues which I think infuse an ethical component into the debate, the best we can do is try to balance inclusion with reasonable standards of "fairness" ...all with full knowledge that the rules we're making are, ultimately, still arbitrary and imperfect.
This is only tangentially related, but your example also reminds me of that book "Outliers," whose author's name I'm blanking on, in which he talks about how it's not a fluke that professional hockey players are unusually likely to have been born in the first few months of the year... evidently, professional hockey is full of players who were always the oldest in their age groups for their leagues growing up and thus tended to have a bit of a physical advantage.
On a still less related note, I've always hoped that some day I would hear tell of a professional FTM jockey (which would delight me especially since FTMs are probably be the most categorically screwed-over by sex segregation rules no matter how they're formulated). I'm only 5'4" and sometimes I'm like, "damn, if only I didn't like to eat so much I could make it big!"
ok that's all I have to say about that!
I think I agree with everything you just said.
Good luck with the Jockeying. Equestrian events are one of the few where men and women compete against each other in only one division at the top level. So, you have a better chance of seeing it in that sport than many others.
This is such a good, good essay. Pretty much all professional athletes have genetic advantages that all them to perform at the level they do - high lung capacity, large muscle development, ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fibers, etc. At what point is an advantage too advantageous? In the particular case of Ms. Semenya, she did test high for testosterone. But - nowhere near the levels of a typical, XY male athlete. If Ms. Semenya had more typical feminine features, like a less pronounced brow ridge and a softer jaw line, I wonder if her testosterone levels would have spurred gender testing or rather more advanced doping testing. So while the question of "how much advantage is too much advantage" is a valid one, we must carry feminist critique on to the methods we use to determine the answer if we wish to avoid societal bias.