Reproductive ideology and the apartheid of "sex"

[drwex]

"Sex" in the sense of the (false) dichotomy of "two sexes", not meaning the acts people engage in.

I wanted to call peoples' attention to a thoughtful post by Andrea James in boingboing on the Caster Semenya situation and its larger implications for gender boundaries.

Andrea is very unsympathetic to people who want to enforce strong attempts to genderize sports, and has some sharp words for bad science reporting along the way. Given who reads my LJ this is probably preaching to the choir, but given the wide range of comments and Andrea's thorough posting I thought you'd enjoy reading this, as I did. It's also worth noting, as some of the boingboing commenters do, that Andrea has no proposal for solving the problem of what to do about segregating sports. If not for segregation by sex, men would dominate many if not all strength-based competitions. That doesn't seem fair to women either.

As always, I leave comments turned on for any who want to express a response, either pro or con.

Comments

oh?

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

kids making explosion noises - must investigate

Was it good or bad?

Re: oh?

[drwex]

Innocent games. They were pretending to blow things up in their game, not in the actual house.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

I want to see the gender line eliminated in baseball. The major leagues need more pitchers, and they already allow non-overhand pitching styles (which would work against women).

But if you look at the racing times from the history of the Olympics, yeah, you wouldn't see many medaling women if that gender line were to drop. Except, of course, for women who are like the South African runner (Caster Semenya) in question, who have "male" physiques.

Also, exactly which events go into a gymnastics routine varies by gender: men get rings, women get uneven parallel bars (for example).

[selenite.livejournal.com]

If you want to recognize skill without letting it be overwhelmed by muscle mass there's the boxing approach--multiple weight classes with champions designated within each. Probably still going to favor men for some sports given the typical ratio of upper body strength to total mass. Not something I'm going to worry about though. As far as I'm concerned sports can stay totally unjust. The more unjust it is the more likely people are to move on to more productive pursuits.

But we expect our sports to be "just"

[drwex]

The commenters on the post are doing a good job of exploring this issue, I think. One of the reasons we have weight classes, and pro vs amateur, and so on in many sports is because we think people ought to compete on what seems like an equal or fair basis.

The question to hand, though, is why a physical outliker like Yao Ming is considered an OK variant that doesn't distort the fairness of basketball while Caster is being vilified for being an outlier of a different sort.

Re: But we expect our sports to be "just"

[drwex]

Sigh. "outlier" not "outliker". Fat fingered that one.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the article yet, but I had to say that I love your current music!

proud to be an equestrian

[quietann.livejournal.com]

You know that at the Olympics, the equestrian sports are the only ones where men and women compete against each other as equals, right? (Oh, also male and female horses compete as equals :)

Re: proud to be an equestrian

[drwex]

I didn't know it was the _only_ one. I thought, for example, pairs ice dancing might qualify. Also, do the shooting competitions segregate?

But yeah, not so much strength-based.