Laurie and Debbie say: Tomorrow is the Daytona 500, and Danica Patrick stands a pretty good chance of winning it. For those who don’t follow race car driving, the Daytona 500 is a major NASCAR (stock-car driving) race, and Patrick is the first woman NASCAR driver to make the very top rank in the sport. [...]

Laurie says: This blog is a huge fan of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, as athletes and as world changers. I saw Serena winning the US Open and then found this poem in a post on A Philosopher’s Life. .. .. The Change by Tony Hoagland The season turned like the page of a [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We both love the Olympics, especially the sports you never see on TV except during the Olympics. And neither of us has a TV right now, so neither of us is seeing as much Olympics as we would like. Other folks are watching and commenting, however, and here’s some of what [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We were deeply struck by this interview with Keelin Godsey, Olympic contender (who didn’t quite make it) for the hammer throw event. It’s worth listening to the whole thing. Godsey identifies and lives as a man, and competes as a woman, for reasons that he explains clearly in this amazingly open [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Jonny “Jayieh” Saelua was just named “Man of the Match” for his goal assist and 90th minute goal-line clearance which helped lead Samoa to its first victory in 30 consecutive games, and in a World Cup qualifying match at that. The “Man of the Match” is transgender; more specifically, she is [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We’ve been doing Thanksgiving posts since we started this blog in 2005, and almost all of them have begun with some version of a lament for how hard it was in the previous year to find things to be thankful for. This year is very different. Just this week, a very [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Turkey has been having a lot of trouble with fan violence at and after soccer matches, and one of the solutions being tried is all-woman audiences. Travis at Think Progress shared this brief video of a local Turkish soccer game attended by some 40,000 women and children, along with some thoughts [...]

Laurie says: This image of Guy Gayle is from Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes, with my photographs and text by me, Richard F. Dutcher, and Debbie Notkin.  Guy’s words below are from the texts on masculinity that frame the photos. … … I remember the cracking sound as his shinguard shattered underneath his sock.  [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Before the holidays, comic artist Nina Matsumoto blogged an amazing set of photographs of Olympic athletes. The photographs, by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, are studio shots of dozens of athletes from different sports. (The captions give the athletes’ names and sports. You can see them by going to Matsumoto’s blog [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: The Olympics (summer and winter) are, of course, gender-essentialist events, with virtually every sport and competition being men-only or women-only. And yes, there are some good reasons for sports events to be gendered, though the truths of different abilities are a lot more subtle and complex than they are generally presented [...]