The Paradox of Being a Sport Feminist. A Response to Cahn’s “Testing Sex, Attributing Gender: What Caster Semenya Means to Women’s Sports”

Abstract

I want to thank the NCAA Scholarly Conference organizers for asking me to respond to Susan's paper. I have always admired her writing, but we have never met. I am grateful for the opportunity to, not only meet Susan, but to tell her how much I appreciate her work and how much it has informed my own thinking. In the 1970s when I was swim coach at the University of Massachusetts, I was deeply involved in the fight for equality for women's sports. The women coaches at UMass plotted and planned together, spoke out, organized petition drives and confronted the Men's Athletic Director to point out the many ways women athletes and coaches on our campus were second class citizens. We were united in a cause we saw as just and our assumption that we knew who we were talking about when we spoke on behalf of " women's " equality in sport. Little did any of us understand then how complicated the fight for women's sports equality would be 40 years later. Back then, we felt pretty confident in our assumption that biology and gender identity were related in consistent and predict-able ways. Now, we find the ground under us shifting as we struggle to live up to our social justice ideals in the face of challenges to our assumptions of whom we mean when we talk about women athletes. In her paper, Susan invites us to dig into this complicated question, which is at the heart of how we move forward from this point in the on-going quest for women's equality in sport. She asks us to think about how we approach the ques-tion of sex difference and how we organize sport. " Do we accept some notion of either natural or social sex/gender difference and work with a two-gender model in sports, or do we argue that all differences are artificial and endeavor to create alternatives to sex segregated sports? " She also invites to consider how it is that, despite the astounding increase in the acceptance and sheer numbers of girls and women in sports over the last four decades, both academic studies and casual viewership indicate that many women athletes believe other people still question their femininity and sexual identity— jeopardizing their status as a " normal " woman. 50 Griffin Susan ties these two questions together by arguing that the problems of every-day women with regard to sexist and homophobic assumptions about women athletes have everything to do with the torment of athletes like Caster Semenya and the strategic dilemma of how feminism tries to liberate women's bodies of all kinds. Clearly, the sex/gender binary needs to be challenged. The binary is a child of sexism. Homophobia/heterosexism and genderism are its cousins. Trying to force ourselves (and our athletes) into two separate, impermeable gender boxes defies the spectrum of sex and gender diversity we know exists in real life. But should we abandon the sex/gender binary in sport? Should we throw open the gym doors to anyone who wants to try out for any team without regard for what kind of body they have, how they identify their gender, how they express their gender, who they have sex with? Or should we fortify the gender/sex borders to guard against unauthorized intruders? Let's explore these options.