Fair go, sport!

February 19, 2018 3:32 PM

“The irony of athletes from Great Britain, which spent £275m on preparations for the Rio games, raising fundamental questions about fairness in a race against an athlete from a country that spent less than £1.9m has somehow been lost” wrote the South African author and commentator Sisonke Msimang. Grauniad link.
posted by spaceburglar (5 comments total)

From black bodies being racialized, to black women being outright denied womanhood, to the nonconsensual denial of intersex people autonomy over their bodies, and to the classist bullshit which undergirds it all, Caster Semenya carries each of those enormous historical burdens into the Olympic Stadium, where instead of being allowed to fairly compete, she is instead subjected to fair-skinned cisgender scorn.

Salt upon wound indeed.

And yet, she persists.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:14 PM on February 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

Peter Sonksen, a retired professor of endocrinology, notes that the “feminising” procedures of clitoral mutilation and partial gonad removal are “unethical”

The United Nations special rapporteur on health, Dainius Pūras, has condemned clitoridectomies – a so-called “feminising” treatment performed on four female athletes at the time of the London Olympic Games – as a form of female genital mutilation.


Chand was promptly banned from competing, unless she agreed to undergo hormone treatment. She refused.

Janice Raymond wrote the wrong damn book, she should have wrote the "The Cissexual Empire".
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:26 PM on February 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

"... clitoridectomies – a so-called “feminising” treatment performed on four female athletes at the time of the London Olympic Games"

What the hell is this monstrous bullshit!?! Amputating a woman's clitoris has nothing to do with her athletic performance. It's a purely cosmetic surgery with eminently predictable adverse physical/sexual/emotional effects that serves no purpose here besides appeasing people who are uncomfortable with non-comforming bodies. That women are compelled to submit to that pointless procedure in order to continue their athletic careers gives me nothing but rage.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 7:27 PM on February 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I've always felt that the Winter Olympics in particular was just an excuse for affluent athletes to have a big party and give each other trophies for skating in circles the fastest.
posted by Brocktoon at 8:32 PM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Olympics is a shitshow of bullshit around these issues (as amply demonstrated by the examples given in this article) but this is some naive "just asking questions" weirdness

So why should gender be singled out for regulation?

Gender is singled out for regulation because the Olympics is split by gender in order that women (in the majority of sports) have a chance of competing. Even if (when? Hopefully it /will/ happen) women’s sports received the same investment as men’s sports in terms of training & development that will still remain the case.

As the trans movement gains ground & more trans athletes compete this is only going to be thrown into ever sharper relief. Expect pushback, because it’s coming.

(Quite why sports where men & women compete on equal ground are still split by gender I don’t know: To protect the poor men from having to compete with women? It’s probably some kind of weird bullshit along those lines.)
posted by pharm at 2:24 AM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]