Body Impolitic

Category Archives: sports

Post-Olympics Link Roundup

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Debbie says:

Coverage of the Rio Olympics led me to a substantial number of fascinating articles. Now that the event is over, I’d like to share some of them with you:

This really well-designed New York Times quiz has you match Olympic and Paralympic athletes with their sports. I confess I only got five out of 16 right, but the point — that all different kinds of bodies can be athletes’ bodies — is made, and made well.

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The quiz pairs well with Ragen Chastain (often quoted in this blog), writing about fat Olympians at her blog, Dances with Fat. Ragen breaks down five unreasonable assumptions which people sometimes draw from the existence of fat athletic competitors. Here’s her list, plus her full comment on one I thought she did particularly well.

This proves there’s no excuse not to be fit at any size

This proves that anyone of any size can be an Olympian

This proves that everyone of every size can be healthy

First, don’t confuse athletically successful with healthy.  Many athletes push far beyond what would most support their bodies’ health – risking  and getting expensive sports-related injuries that they wouldn’t otherwise be at risk for – in order to be successful at their sport.  They are absolutely allowed to do that – their bodies, their choice (though that doesn’t meant that we shouldn’t be asking questions about the way that sports are managed/judged and what is really “required.”)  Moreover, health is difficult to define, multi-faceted, not an obligation, not a barometer of worthiness, and not entirely within our control or guaranteed under any circumstances.

This proves that anyone of any size can be an athlete

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Female Olympians face their own set of challenges. As menstruation becomes more talked about around the world, Zheping Huang at Quartz discusses Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui’s radical acknowledgment.

When China’s favorite swimmer Fu Yuanhui openly mentioned her menstrual cycle on Sunday (Aug. 14) at the Rio Olympics, it was the first time many Chinese people realized it is possible to swim while being on your period. …

“I feel I didn’t swim well today. I let my teammates down,” Fu said, between gasps of breath. When asked if she was having a stomachache, Fu said: “Because my period came yesterday, I’m feeling a bit weak, but this is not an excuse.”

Just like that, Fu broke a great sporting taboo by talking about menstruation in public. During the 2015 Australian Open, British tennis player Heather Watson blamed her poor performance on her period after losing in the first round. At the time Watson’s remarks shocked the sports world and later sparked initiatives to break the silence on the issue.

The article goes on to discuss Chinese attitudes towards menstruation, tampons, and virginity. I learned a lot.

It’s no secret that people of fluid, indeterminate, or challenged gender have a daunting set of Olympic challenges. We’ve written here about Castor Semenya and Dutee Chand. Dana Moskowitz, writing at Deadspin, makes the question very personal.

What is it, exactly, that makes me a woman? Is it my breasts? If so, is it because they are a certain size? Is it that I have a womb? Does it matter that I have no idea if my womb works because I’ve never tried to get pregnant? Is it my two X chromosomes or my level of testosterone? I have no idea the status of either my chromosomes or testosterone for the simple reason there’s never been a good medical reason to test them. Asked to prove that I am a woman, I’d probably come up with this—everyone says I’m one.

I find myself returning to that thought exercise as Caster Semenya competes in the 800 meters this week. Semenya was told her entire life that she was a woman. Until she wasn’t….

Sports reporters have found ways of dancing around what this is. That’s why you’ll see the word “fair” in so many headlines about Semenya….

See, ladies, this is just about fairness! About leveling the playing field! About following the rules! Geez, women, calm down. We’re trying to make your races more fair for you!

One tactic, used by SI among others, is warning that this could be the end of women’s sports, as if this and not underfunding, sexual violence, and harassment were what kept women out of sports. Reporters will harp that this is about maintaining women as a protected class, ignoring that the legal term protected class means a group you cannot discriminate against—making this the bizarre act of asking if Semenya is too manly to be a woman, in which case she would receive the bizarro right to be discriminated against.

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But if your body size and shape is culturally acceptable for the Olympics, and you aren’t menstruating (or don’t care to talk about it) and no one has challenged your gender, the media still gives itself complete license to analyze and criticize your religious attire. At Al-Jazeera, Rachel Shabi has a biting response:

Witness the countless headlines breathlessly hailing the first United States Olympian to compete in a hijab: the fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad.

To help us get to grips with this dazzling achievement – the hijab, obviously, and not the fact that she’s ranked eight in the world – we had BBC World tweeting about the incredible phenomenon as: “Hijab and a sword” – which, we hope, is the start of a series, continuing with, say: jodhpurs and a riding crop; athlete pants and a javelin; leotard and a chalk bowl.

And then there was the viral image of Egyptian and German women playing against each other at Olympic volleyball, one in a bikini, the other in a hijab.

As the Libyan-American writer Hend Amry tweeted in response [to comments about “cultural clash”], the actual caption to this picture could have been: “Athlete vs athlete”. …

[W]hat has crept into so much of the commentary is a sense of – what shall we call it? – Orientalist awe, as with this Washington Post headline: “Muslim female athletes find sport so essential they compete while covered” as in, wow, these women love sport so much that they’ve even managed to overcome this uniquely disadvantageous Muslim religion thing.

If you’re celebrating the fact that official sporting bodies have stopped being so restrictive over uniforms, maybe spotlighting the hijab each time you see an athlete wearing one isn’t the way to do it.

In the end, so many of these links, and so many other Olympic stories, come down to what should be a very simple thing: what would it take for us to simply appreciate the athletic ability of these amazing people, without making assumptions about them, shoving them into categories, or generalizing from them as individual competitors to everyone else, competitors or not?

I’m about ready for Olympic competition for journalists; and most of them are a very long way from the finish line or the perfect 10.

Lisa Hirsch sent us the New York Times quiz, others are from our general reading.

Excuse Me, Ma’am. May I See Your Gender Card?

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Laurie and Debbie say:

03intersex3-articleLarge“Sex verification” in women’s sports, especially amateur sports, has a long and checkered history. The Olympics required gender cards like the above from 1968 to 1998, subjecting women to humiliating, unnecessary, and scientifically indefensible physical examinations. They relaxed their policies somewhat in the late 1990s–for a while.

As Ruth Padawer reports in the New York Times, chromosome testing has been replaced by monitoring testosterone levels–only in women, and generally in women who are either extremely fine athletes or have some “male” physical characteristics, or both. Women who have never  given a moment’s thought to questioning their gender are put through a grueling process to prove that they are not somehow “too male” to compete.

When [India’s outstanding runner Dutee] Chand arrived in Delhi, she says, she was sent to a clinic to meet a doctor from the Athletics Federation of India — the Indian affiliate of the International Association of Athletics Federations (I.A.A.F.), which governs track and field. He told her he would forgo the usual urine and blood tests because no nurse was available, and would order an ultrasound instead. That confused Chand, but when she asked him about it, she recalls, he said it was routine.

Chand had no idea that her extraordinary showing in Taipei and at a national championship earlier that month had prompted competitors and coaches to tell the federation that her physique seemed suspiciously masculine: Her muscles were too pronounced, her stride was too impressive for someone who was only five feet tall. The doctor would later deny that the ultrasound was a response to those reports, saying he ordered the scan only because Chand had previously complained of chronic abdominal pain. She contends she never had any such pain.

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Because of her exceptional athletic abilities, Chand went through a grueling and invasive series of tests, only to be told that her testosterone levels were “too high” and that she could not compete as a woman.

After her results came in, officials told her she could return to the national team only if she reduced her testosterone level — and that she wouldn’t be allowed to compete for a year. The particulars of her results were not made public, but the media learned, and announced, that Chand had “failed” a “gender test” and wasn’t a “normal” woman. For days, Chand cried inconsolably and refused to eat or drink. “Some in the news were saying I was a boy, and some said that maybe I was a transsexual,” Chand told me. “I felt naked. I am a human being, but I felt I was an animal. I wondered how I would live with so much humiliation.”

Pradawer’s long, detailed article is an excellent overview of gender testing, particularly in amateur athletics, since the 1930s, including discussion of the well-known case of South African runner Castor Semenya, who “established her gender” sufficiently to win a silver medal in 2012 and who will be competing in Rio. Like Semenya, Chand chose to fight her case:

In court, the I.A.A.F. acknowledged that men’s natural testosterone levels, no matter how high, were not regulated; the rationale, it said, was that there was no evidence that men with exceptionally high testosterone have a competitive advantage. Pressed by Chand’s lawyer, the I.A.A.F. also conceded that no research had actually proved that unusually high levels of natural testosterone lead to unusually impressive sports performance in women either. Nor has any study proved that natural testosterone in the “male range” provides women with a competitive advantage commensurate with the 10 to 12 percent advantage that elite male athletes typically have over elite female athletes in comparable events. In fact, the I.A.A.F.’s own witnesses estimated the performance advantage of women with high testosterone to be between 1 and 3 percent, and the court played down the 3 percent figure, because it was based on limited, unpublished data.

Chand’s witnesses also pointed out that researchers had identified more than 200 biological abnormalities that offer specific competitive advantages, among them increased aerobic capacity, resistance to fatigue, exceptionally long limbs, flexible joints, large hands and feet and increased numbers of fast-twitch muscle fibers — all of which make the idea of a level playing field illusory, and not one of which is regulated if it is innate.

Other female athletes have had medical treatment for testosterone reduction, and also surgical treatment to reduce clitoris size, just so they will be allowed to compete.

Chand has provisionally won her case:

… the judges said that the I.A.A.F.’s policy was not justified by current scien­tific research: “While the evidence indicates that higher levels of naturally occurring testosterone may increase athletic performance, the Panel is not satisfied that the degree of that advantage is more significant than the advantage derived from the numerous other variables which the parties acknowledge also affect female athletic performance: for example, nutrition, access to specialist training facilities and coaching and other genetic and biological variations.”

The judges concluded that requiring women like Chand to change their bodies in order to compete was unjustifiably discriminatory.

However, the I.A.A.F. has until July 2017 to bring new evidence and change the policy, but meanwhile Chand pushed herself to the limit to overcome her lost time, and will be the first Indian woman to run the 100-meter race in the Olympics in just over 25 years.

However, many other women (as Chand repeatedly says in the article, most of them from poor backgrounds) face similar humiliation, oversight, and potential defeat–especially if the I.A.A.F. manages to overturn the ruling next year.

Once again, an arbitrary, unscientific “standard” is imposed only on women who have the temerity to do something that society codes as “male.” The women targeted are usually the ones with the fewest resources to fight back. And once again, primarily male rulemakers get to decide what women can and cannot do with our bodies. Women keep fighting back, winning remarkable victories which are then so often negated by the next generation of arbitrary standards.

We’ll be rooting for Dutee Chand in the 100 meters … and in the 2017 court challenge.

Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the link!