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Take Gender out of Sports


After winning the world title for the 800 meters, South African Caster Semenya will have to submit to gender testing before she can safely keep her gold medal. Her detractors think she is either a man or an intersexed person. If she can't prove she is a biological woman, she loses her medal. The case assumes rigid gender boundaries that nature doesn't actually provide, and it highlights for me why we shouldn't have gender-based sports at all. I'll be brief.

You probably think that we know that the average is woman is slower than the average man, which in turn would justify the fairness of separating men and women for at least some sports competitions. We don't actually know that. Any claim about average men and women would have to be based on a random sampling of men and women from all over the world. Most of our tests of these sorts of things come from studies that examine only men and women from the US or from European countries. To be sure, researchers in South American, African and Asian countries have conducted similar tests with their own populations, but without a large worldwide study, we cannot make claims about average men and average women.

Undoubtedly, any such claims would then have to grapple with the enormous variation amongst men and amongst women (including trans men and trans women), as well as the variation of intersexed persons.

Furthermore, and this is key, any legitimate claims about male and female averages has to come from a study where conditions are such that all other things are equal so that gender is the only true variable. That isn't possible. Before any research subjects show up for such a study, they have lived in cultural conditions of tremendous inequality that include unequal educations, differing cultural expectations, women's over-representation amongst the poor, rampant physical and sexual violence against women, and highly segregated jobs. The degree and type of gender disparity is also different in every society around the world.

So, since we can't prove that men and women are incapable of having the same achievements, I argue that we can't justify segregating sports. That would be one small step towards equalizing the conditions of women and men.

Read: Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender or start with this selection.
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