Let’s just ignore the size differences
Oh gawd I’m listening to today’s Woman’s Hour, the segment about trans women in women’s sport, and it’s excruciating. It starts around 11 minutes in, with a recorded discussion between the host Jane Garvey and an academic, Beth Jones. Jones starts with burble about estrogen and testosterone and uses the word “cis” so Garvey asks her to explain it. It means people who are satisfied with or don’t question their gender, Jones says. So that would be hardly anyone then. Garvey points out that 99% of women are not trans and Jones is all “Oooooooh I wouldn’t say that, we don’t know, wibble wibble.” Garvey says at any rate the vast majority of women don’t call themselves cis; Jones says yes that’s right, most women are cis. Jones is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Around 14:30 Garvey says should we just do away with sport divided by sex? Jones says in a perfect world that would be great but it’s probably not “feasible” now…but she doesn’t say why and Garvey doesn’t ask. Why isn’t it “feasible” now, though? What’s the obstacle?
Jones says we have mixed sport already, people on weekends in parks and things play together, it works a treat. Garvey says but in professional sport surely women would be pushed out, and Jones pretends to think there is no reason to think so at all, she just can’t imagine what Garvey means. She is thick as two planks.
Yeah, people in parks play mixed social sport. Much of that is played for fun in the spirit of togetherness. Males tend to pull their shots and be less physical against women players in those circumstances because the games are social. In competitive sport on the other hand, there is no shot pulling, no being less physical. It’s competitive for fucks sake. The aim is to win, using whatever skills and attributes you have at your disposal. Ask any serious sports player or fan, they will tell you even rules against adverse contact mean little. Sure, you will get penalised if caught, but there are many many ways to cross the line and remain unpenalised most of the time.
As for Jones. She might be thick. Then again she might be simply blocking a verbal shot that she knows there is no truthful acceptable answer to.
And most co-ed sports leagues, even “just for fun” ones, have rules requiring a minimum number of women on the field/court/whatever.
Back when I participated in such things, it was always a struggle to get enough women to show up for your games, and the ones who did had to play the entire game or close to it. Meanwhile the men had to substitute in and out because there were more of us than the allowable slots.
I thought that might have changed in recent years given the growth in women’s sports, but I read an article and discussion recently that suggests that isn’t the case. Women may be more interested in sports than decades ago, but they’re not (much) more interested in co-ed sports. Reasons that were cited included the overcompetitiveness of men players and being pestered for dates.
Screechy, that last point I have observed. When I was an administrator in a sports organisation that was 95% male membership, I had to take several members aside and threaten one with expulsion, because every time we had a prospective women member turn up they were pounced on like fresh meat thrown to jackels. Then people would wonder why we couldn’t keep new women members…
Sure, many men pull their punches against women when in social games, but in actual competition against women IME they only become more viscous. They pick this up early on, it seems; I remember dropping out of karate classes as a child because sparring against male competitors was downright frightening, and not because they were bigger… at the time I was a ‘pre-teen’, so was similar-to-larger in size than my male sparring partners were. Problem I ran into was that they’d do absolutely anything they had to to avoid being “beaten by a girl”, regular standards and rules be damned.
Regarding mixed team sports, I played female only netball as a kid, teenager and young adult. Then in my early 20’s I started playing mixed netball as well. I could speak alot about how men behave towards a female opponent, particularly when that female opponent is holding her own on speed, stamina and leap, whilst being grossly outmatched for size, height and strength, but you can probably guess how that worked out on your own.
What was particularly interesting was the umpiring. Almost all netball umpires are women by the way, and many seemed to have two different standards, one for men and one for women. Women players with a male opponent would be treated to a very severe interpretation of the no-contact and obstruction rules, and so would be ‘pulled up’ (and her male opponent receive a ‘free pass’ penalty) quite frequently. On the other hand, a male player playing on a female opponent seemed to be able to physically push their female opponents around without being pulled up. I don’t know if it still happens, but a couple decades ago it was really obvious in my corner of the social netball-playing world.
‘Cis’ means “people who are satisfied with or don’t question their gender“, does it? So when a transwoman days that their gender is not up for question, that individual is now a cistranswoman? Once a person has left their old, ‘unsatisfying’ gender behind and is now parading around in their new, nice fitting gender(s), does that qualify for cis-status?
Never mind, I will always have the memory of being asked by my then 10-year-old daughter’s (male) teacher if I might speak with my daughter about her insistence on playing football in sports lessons (the only girl in the small village school who did), because of the ‘physical aspect’ of things.
After speaking with my daughter later – not to discourage her, just to get the thing explained to me in plain English rather than the hand-wringing, ‘skirting-the-truth’ way in which her teacher had approached me – it turned out that the ‘physical aspect’ was that my daughter refused to take any shit from the boys, who obviously couldn’t have a girl run rings around them, couldn’t stop her fairly and had taken to trying to kick lumps out of her. Trouble was, if one of them kicked her a foot in the air, she’d make sure that she kicked him two feet up the next time. The poor liittle darlings were terrified of her and were complaining to the teacher that she was too rough and was hurting them.
Long story short, I told her teacher that my daughter was perfectly happy with the ‘physical aspect’ and had my full support in playing whatever sport she wished.