Know nothing about sports, basketball included, but this was a fantastic read. Thank you for making it readable even to basketball newbs who care about gender!! And extra thank you for the succinct response to transphobia elsewhere in the comments 💗💗
As for "For a little while women’s agency, safety and inclusion felt urgent. Pressing. That urgency has waned and a kind of malaise has replaced it. A sense that there’s nothing to be done..."
Having lived through the seventies, including playing Stanford and pro basketball then, I know what you mean, but a renewed sense of urgency has in fact arisen as males who think of themselves as women have insisted on their rights to play in the female sports category - in every sport, at every level, taking opportunities and prize money and victories from women. They and their allies claim that these males have no unfair advantage, or it doesn't matter if they have an advantage, or that transwomen are women, so actual women should be kind and move over and sacrifice their own athletic goals so that the men feel better about themselves.
Infuriating though this is to longtime feminist athletes such as Martina Navratilova, Nancy Hogshead, Donna de Varona, Donna Lopiano, Doriane Coleman, Linda Blade, Sharron Davies, Mara Yamauchi, Paula Scanlan, many others, and me, we do notice a newly invigorated women's sports movement that is centering women and girls.
Gradually, sport governing bodies, state governments, and parents are boldly asserting something we used to agree was obvious: girls and women in every sport deserve the same all-female category that WNBA players depend on for their success. (I'm also old enough to remember when Ann Meyers was invited to try out for the Indiana Pacers. A televised public humiliation.)
Currently competing female athletes, including young ones, are also beginning to speak out - not only about their right to fair, all-female competition but also their right to the privacy and dignity of all-female locker rooms.
As soon as one strong, tall, trans-identifying male gets a women's basketball scholarship to a prominent college team or shows up in the WNBA, the fairness and physical safety issues will immediately become clear to college and WNBA fans too, and to the players themselves. Currently there is no rule against it.
I hope you and others will join us in this effort to keep female sports female. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for reading, Mariah. To be as concise as I can, I'll refer back to this line: "The irony is the only other group of people we tend to other like we do women, or groups of people we actively want to remove agency and personhood from, are athletes."
I consider transgender folks a group that is othered in order to remove agency and personhood from. When I write about women, it includes trans women.
Hi Katie, Okay. Thanks for explaining. Guess I can't persuade you otherwise.
But just in case others are curious about this exchange, I'll respectfully note that almost seventy percent of transwomen have not taken any related hormones. And 84 percent have not had surgery. (Washington Post survey, 2022.) Most people don't realize this. They're thinking of the transsexuals of old. But in the vast majority of cases, the people known as transwomen have male bodies with no physical alterations whatsoever.
People with male bodies are generally known as men. They can refer to themselves other ways, and they can dress as they please, as we all can, but female sports are for people with female bodies.
As soon as people with male bodies line up against us, female sports become coed sports - and fair competition for women disappears.
I do sympathize with people with gender dysphoria. But that's not even required anymore in most sports. Any man can enter women's events. All he has to do is say he's a woman.
And when these men claim that they "must" compete in the female category because to compete against women would be too psychologically painful?
Clearly this is not true because transMEN (people with female bodies) almost always stay in the female category (where they are welcome, if they have not taken testosterone) -- because they know that's the only place they have a chance of winning. That's where they belong. And they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "I feel like a man but I'm playing with women because my body is female."
Men could do that too - and some do. I hope more do in the future. They could. That would restore female sports to females - which is why the female category exists.
I hope this doesn't sound like a rant. I've gone on a while! Passions run high, mine included. I respect your right to delete this if so inclined. Meanwhile, thanks for reading. I'll remain a fan of your work.
Love and agree on the crucial concepts of this article- when discussing this with my partner who’s more versed in NBA and WNBA lore than I am, they disagreed on “we don’t consistently tell NBA athletes they owe their livelihoods to LeBron James or Steph Curry” as a lot of fan culture surrounding the NBA loooves to joke about how star players are carrying the team/the sport etc. (made us think of this SNL skit https://youtu.be/d9HGjZd_Fm8?si=wSax2P7n9_gRAPbU ) This same phenomenon happening in the WNBA with Caitlin Clark as the draw for success and viewership specifically seems to be trying to translate that culture over but it of course takes on the capacity for misogyny to be the undercurrent of the joke.
There's certainly truth in the vein that NBA athletes, not even just stars, get pegged with carrying their teams. But in my time covering the NBA I've never experienced players being chastised for risking the league's ratings (and by extension, it's profitability) because of their behaviour — either on its own or toward one another (and either on or off the court). The personal responsibility is absent and so is the guilting over it, which springs from that undercurrent of misogyny, to your very apt point.
Know nothing about sports, basketball included, but this was a fantastic read. Thank you for making it readable even to basketball newbs who care about gender!! And extra thank you for the succinct response to transphobia elsewhere in the comments 💗💗
Insightful and too true. Well expressed.
Excellent article, Katie.
As for "For a little while women’s agency, safety and inclusion felt urgent. Pressing. That urgency has waned and a kind of malaise has replaced it. A sense that there’s nothing to be done..."
Having lived through the seventies, including playing Stanford and pro basketball then, I know what you mean, but a renewed sense of urgency has in fact arisen as males who think of themselves as women have insisted on their rights to play in the female sports category - in every sport, at every level, taking opportunities and prize money and victories from women. They and their allies claim that these males have no unfair advantage, or it doesn't matter if they have an advantage, or that transwomen are women, so actual women should be kind and move over and sacrifice their own athletic goals so that the men feel better about themselves.
Infuriating though this is to longtime feminist athletes such as Martina Navratilova, Nancy Hogshead, Donna de Varona, Donna Lopiano, Doriane Coleman, Linda Blade, Sharron Davies, Mara Yamauchi, Paula Scanlan, many others, and me, we do notice a newly invigorated women's sports movement that is centering women and girls.
Gradually, sport governing bodies, state governments, and parents are boldly asserting something we used to agree was obvious: girls and women in every sport deserve the same all-female category that WNBA players depend on for their success. (I'm also old enough to remember when Ann Meyers was invited to try out for the Indiana Pacers. A televised public humiliation.)
Currently competing female athletes, including young ones, are also beginning to speak out - not only about their right to fair, all-female competition but also their right to the privacy and dignity of all-female locker rooms.
As soon as one strong, tall, trans-identifying male gets a women's basketball scholarship to a prominent college team or shows up in the WNBA, the fairness and physical safety issues will immediately become clear to college and WNBA fans too, and to the players themselves. Currently there is no rule against it.
I hope you and others will join us in this effort to keep female sports female. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for reading, Mariah. To be as concise as I can, I'll refer back to this line: "The irony is the only other group of people we tend to other like we do women, or groups of people we actively want to remove agency and personhood from, are athletes."
I consider transgender folks a group that is othered in order to remove agency and personhood from. When I write about women, it includes trans women.
Hi Katie, Okay. Thanks for explaining. Guess I can't persuade you otherwise.
But just in case others are curious about this exchange, I'll respectfully note that almost seventy percent of transwomen have not taken any related hormones. And 84 percent have not had surgery. (Washington Post survey, 2022.) Most people don't realize this. They're thinking of the transsexuals of old. But in the vast majority of cases, the people known as transwomen have male bodies with no physical alterations whatsoever.
People with male bodies are generally known as men. They can refer to themselves other ways, and they can dress as they please, as we all can, but female sports are for people with female bodies.
As soon as people with male bodies line up against us, female sports become coed sports - and fair competition for women disappears.
I do sympathize with people with gender dysphoria. But that's not even required anymore in most sports. Any man can enter women's events. All he has to do is say he's a woman.
And when these men claim that they "must" compete in the female category because to compete against women would be too psychologically painful?
Clearly this is not true because transMEN (people with female bodies) almost always stay in the female category (where they are welcome, if they have not taken testosterone) -- because they know that's the only place they have a chance of winning. That's where they belong. And they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "I feel like a man but I'm playing with women because my body is female."
Men could do that too - and some do. I hope more do in the future. They could. That would restore female sports to females - which is why the female category exists.
I hope this doesn't sound like a rant. I've gone on a while! Passions run high, mine included. I respect your right to delete this if so inclined. Meanwhile, thanks for reading. I'll remain a fan of your work.
Love and agree on the crucial concepts of this article- when discussing this with my partner who’s more versed in NBA and WNBA lore than I am, they disagreed on “we don’t consistently tell NBA athletes they owe their livelihoods to LeBron James or Steph Curry” as a lot of fan culture surrounding the NBA loooves to joke about how star players are carrying the team/the sport etc. (made us think of this SNL skit https://youtu.be/d9HGjZd_Fm8?si=wSax2P7n9_gRAPbU ) This same phenomenon happening in the WNBA with Caitlin Clark as the draw for success and viewership specifically seems to be trying to translate that culture over but it of course takes on the capacity for misogyny to be the undercurrent of the joke.
There's certainly truth in the vein that NBA athletes, not even just stars, get pegged with carrying their teams. But in my time covering the NBA I've never experienced players being chastised for risking the league's ratings (and by extension, it's profitability) because of their behaviour — either on its own or toward one another (and either on or off the court). The personal responsibility is absent and so is the guilting over it, which springs from that undercurrent of misogyny, to your very apt point.