Tag Archives: gender identity

Trans American Revolution

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 conversation with Ann Schatz.  The International Olympic Committee has had clear rules (the “Stockholm Consensus”) since the 2004 Summer Games. These rules are pretty stiff–to compete in the gender you were not biologically born into, you have to have had both top and bottom surgery and been on gender hormones for two years (if transitioning to male) and one year (if transitioning to female). The rules are also very gender essentialist, and don’t help in cases of indeterminate sexuality (such as Castor Semenya). At the same time, the very existence of clear rules for trans athletes was a major step towards legitimacy.

This year, Godsey was the first out American transperson ever to be a serious Olympic contender. As such, he was featured in a superb and sympathetic article in Sports Illustrated by Pablo S. Torre and David Epstein:

At 5’9″ and 186 pounds, Godsey is tautly muscular. He wears glasses and is dressed in black from his sneakers to his knit cap, which sheathes his blond, spiky hair. Over and over, from in front of a chain-link backstop, he grips the hammer’s handle and whirls in accelerating circles until it’s no longer clear whether he is spinning the ball or the ball is spinning him. His target distance, 226’4½”, is out on a gravel path beyond the frost-covered craters.

Godsey only learned the word transgender when he took a freshman seminar taught by Erica Rand, a women and gender studies professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Soon after, in another class, Godsey was shown a survey that had been administered by psychiatrists to judge gender identity. “In my head I was circling the answers,” he recalls. “I was like, Oh, crap.”

In the spring of 2005, shortly after shattering the Division III women’s championship hammer record (by throwing 195’4″), Godsey tackled his biggest challenge to date. After confiding in Rand, the then junior e-mailed Bates’s dean of students and athletic director to notify them of an impending change: Beginning with the fall semester, Kelly would permanently become Keelin and wished to be referred to as he.

Godsey still can’t remember what he said when he stepped in front of the bleachers that fall and informed his women’s track teammates of their captain’s new identity. … “It was a nerve-racking experience. I kind of blacked out.” All he knows is that the 30 or so girls around him were “pretty awesome” when they heard the news.

The article also includes a detailed survey of the history of trans athletes, from Renee Richards, who transitioned in the late 1970s, to a young soccer player, identified only as “Jazz,” who at eleven is living as female and fighting for her right to play competitive soccer in her chosen identity.

Looking at (and listening to) Godsey, we are struck by how difficult it is for him to choose between his deeply-felt identity as a championship track and field athlete–an identity which got him through years of bullying and harassment in high school and later–and his deeply felt identity as a man, which he believes is in some ways at odds with his athlete identification. He has consistently said that he would start medical transition after this year’s Olympic trials, whether he made the games or not. But now that he’s come so close, he’s not so sure. Transitioning will undoubtedly change his abilities. He’s in the uncomfortable (but familiar to many, and not only in sports) position of having to choose one “primary” identity over another. And he talks about it with remarkable candor.

In the article, we see something else. Sports Illustrated, the most mainstream of all sports journalism venues, has published a thoughtful, informed article about talented and likable trans athletes. This article says on every page, “These people deserve to be who they are.” That Torres and Epstein wrote the article is laudable, that SI published it marks an ongoing sea change in the world of sports.

Seeing this article called out on the cover of Sports Illustrated is both surprising and vindicating. The  article surveys close to a dozen sports figures, in different sports, in different roles in the sports world, from different generations. All of these people have made or are making their life in the world of sports, being public about their birth genders and their current genders. This kind of social change can only happen when advocates are working tirelessly behind the scenes for change; at the same time, it only happens when the world is ripe for the advocacy.

Collecting Good Health Data: An Important First Step

Debbie says:

As Jos at Feministing says,

“The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) announcement yesterday that they plan to begin including sexual orientation and gender identity in health data collection probably doesn’t sound that exciting unless you’re a total data nerd.”

But it is exciting. Here’s Jos again:

There is a lack of data on LGBT folks, who we do know face disparities in health and access to health services. Without federal health data, it’s practically impossible to direct federal government resources to focus on health inequalities. Including sexual orientation in data collection will go a long way towards showing what LGB folks face.

The problem is especially stark for transgender and gender non-conforming folks, and the potential for positive change is huge.

Collecting data about trans folks is not easy. We’re a relatively small community, we’re spread out, and we’re difficult to reach since we face such immense barriers to access. Just figuring out the right questions to ask is complicated, when you realize language that makes sense to lots of trans folks doesn’t make sense to lots of cisgender folks – so how do you phrase a question that can be included in a general survey? HHS’ efforts to determine best practices for collecting data related to gender identity have the potential to change the problem, creating a body of knowledge about trans and gender non-conforming folks. And with data comes the ability to point to a problem and direct government resources to solving it.

I’m not quite a total data nerd myself (but some of my best friends are). And I’m a deep believer in the value of data, for exactly the reasons Jos states. Without the data, we can’t solve the problems. And yet, I’m inevitably aware that there are comparable populations on which the United States does have data–good data. AIDS, cancer, heart disease and stroke are all more common in ethnic minority populations, including African Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hawai’ians and Pacific Islanders. Researching this post, I discovered that health disparities seems to be an under-reported area in which both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have been doing serious work, but it’s not clear whether or not the data shows encouraging results.

So while I laud the new data collection initiative, I have to be skeptical about what we’ll do with the data. Maybe it’s because I also read this article:

Nations seeking to compete for well-paying jobs in research, development and manufacturing are now adding proven critical thinking activities developed in America to their science courses.

Meanwhile, more and more American teachers are postponing scientific experimentation until after the last [memorization and detail-oriented] state test has been completed.

Scientists spend little time memorizing details. They spend more time experimenting and interpreting the results. They know the details relevant to their own work because they use the information every day to reason about dilemmas. When they need a detail from another field, they tap the Internet.

To be sure, scientists need to know what information they are missing before they can look it up. Identifying gaps in knowledge is part of critical thinking.

The data the HHS is collecting can help fill those gaps in knowledge. Major props to Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for taking this step. I’m just hoping that people with good sense, critical thinking skills, and good hearts get to decide how that data gets used.