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Elizabeth Kate Switaj
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Elizabeth Kate Switaj
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In the wake of the recent mistreatment of Caster Semenya, there has been some discussion of whether dividing sports based on sex or gender is really appropriate. Most of this debate has focused on how it effects elite athletes such as Ms. Semenya. While this makes sense when talking about the Olympics, World Championships, and professional sports, these are not the only organizations which segregate athletes based on gender or sex. The question of the gender divide needs to consider school and recreation leagues, and the less-skilled athletes who play in them, as well. On a surface level, it might seem that eliminating this division would benefit less-skilled male athletes and harm less-skilled female athletes. Speaking as a woman who was one of the slowest girls on her high school swim team, however, I am not sure that’s true. The fastest girls on my team were so far beyond me in terms of times, that I doubt adding the boys into the mix (as long as there were more heats to accommodate larger numbers of participants) would have made much of a difference for me. (Note that for swim team we did not have a junior varsity team, only exhibition heats during the regular meets.) The summer league I swam for did more to ensure equal levels of competition. In addition to sex-based divisions, there were “A” and “B” meets; which one you swam in depended upon your times. If instead of dividing age groups based on two factors, they had simply made four time-based divisions, would it have been any less fair? I don’t think so. Indeed, my gender had far less to do with my slow times than the amount of training I did (most of the best swimmers did year-round competition) and certain physical characteristics such as height and arm-length. If any of these factors were used in place of gender to divide young athletes, there would be more opportunities for the non-elite athletes among us to compete in events we have a chance at winning. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=15c141a2-201c-41b3-965e-81f2e0094c9e) Possibly Related Classroom Projects From
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Posted on 16:23, September 8th, 2009 by 
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hmmm- not sure I understand where you would draw the line between elite and non-elite. Having coed sports competitions in school definitely would have changed my experience. I was the fastest girl on my high school and college cross country and track teams, but my times weren’t anywhere close to the top dozen or so guys, so I would have missed out on all the cool experiences like being able to compete at the national and state meets. I’m not an “elite” athlete in the sense of being good enough to go pro or anything, so I’m not sure whether you intend to include people like me in this post. But there are plenty of girls in my position (i.e. good varsity athletes in high school & college) who would have missed out on the chance to get a college scholarship if sports weren’t gender-segregated.
So I’m sympathetic to the idea that for many recreational athletes (e.g. school intramurals and kids’ developmental leagues), gender-neutral competitions would be great, but for women and girls who are good but not world-class, going coed would deprive us of a lot of the cool experiences and monetary rewards of participating in sports.
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I wouldn’t draw a stark line between elite and non-elite; it’s definitely a spectrum, though I’m speaking from pretty close to one end of it. Sorry I didn’t make that clear.
And thank you for sharing your experience. I can see two ways to use that to refine my thoughts about what would be a more ideal setup: schools could have gendered varsity teams but be co-ed lower levels or, alternatively, they could use some other factor more directly related to performance (muscle mass, ratio of slow-twitch to fast-twitch muscle – though I don’t really know what would work best for track). To be honest, I tend to favor the latter solution because it doesn’t penalize people who don’t fit easily into the gender binary. With most of these metrics you’d see that one division would be mostly male and another mostly female, so as far as I can see it wouldn’t necessarily deprive young women of the sort of experiences you describe (unless I’m missing something).
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This is a good point for swimming, but I’m sort of curious-how would it work out for things like soccer, which I played pretty physically in high school, or football? or even, like jess is talking about, track?
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To be honest, for track and soccer I don’t know enough about the sports to speak with any authority, though I suspect that if you made divisions based on things like muscle mass and/or leg length it might have a similar effect to what I suggested for swimming.
For football though, there aren’t typically HS opportunities at all for girls (I remember trying to get a tackle team started – it didn’t go well), but I don’t see any reason why a girl couldn’t at least play kicker.
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to be fair, I don’t know what sports would or would not be hard to integrate. Probably not all. and true about the kicker, but really, that’s still regulating females to one small role.
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A small role would still be better than nothing, which is what you see right now.
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Swimming at the high school level is often a “no-cut” sport. So even the slowest swimmers will have a chance to be on the team. Other sports, often track and field or cross country are the same. So I think the cut sports and no-cut sports should be separated to understand the impact of keeping only the X number of top athletes in the cut sports. Even with no-cut sports, the less competitive athletes will typically have less opportunities to compete. Whether they’re entered in fewer races or events you will still always see a difference in involvement compared with the top athletes in the team.
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Good point: that’s a dimension I hadn’t thought of.
Actually, I have some major issues with sports at the high school level having cuts at all (at the very least, they should have practice squads for students who can’t play on varsity or JV teams), but really that’s a whole other post.
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this I do actually have a problem with-want to bet on who’s going to be on the varsity squad and who’s going to be just practice squad? This was the entire reason that title IX tries to cut funding differences-women in sports are already seen as backburner
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I’m not sure that requiring schools to serve all students who want to participate in athletics, which is what I was talking about here, is going to cause that to be an issue. Integrating sports in general might, but the solution then is to find coaches who are going to focus on winning and pick the best athletes regardless of gender.
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no, requiring all schools isn’t going to cause the problem, but yes, I think just integrating sports will. There are some sports that need aggression and power. Lots of women learn that through high school sports. Is that going to change soon? I don’t think so. but, when they are cut to make room for boys who are already encouraged to learn that, it’s going to be tough for them to ever learn.
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That’s a really good point that I honestly hadn’t thought about (since, for various reasons, aggression has always come easy for me); this is helping me better understand some of the other points made here, too.
If we try to work on fixing that disparity while keeping sports gender segregated, what do we do until that goal is reached to protect the rights of people who can’t easily be fit to the binary or appear not to fit it though? I mean, obviously saying that people who live their lives as women should be allowed to compete as women solves some of the problem (assuming it’s enforced), but what about people I’ve known who present as women one day and men the next?
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