Transgender people have longed to find their rightful place
in society, let along sports. In a world, when certain places and things are
separated by sex, transgender people have a hard time fitting it with their physical
sex and the sex that they identify with. Sports are one area in society where
we completely separate men from women in the effort to achieve “fairness”, but
does it is truly the only way to achieve fairness in sports? And where does
that leave room for transgender athletes?
The article “The Transgender Athlete” was co-written by
Pablo Torre and David Epstein for an issue of Sports Illustrated and featured
Transgender Olympic Athlete Keelin Gosdey, the first transgender athlete to
qualify for the Women’s Olympic Track & Field Team. Keelin lives his life
as a man, but competes as a woman. Sports are the only area of his life that he
cannot truly be who he wants to be, but can there be a change? The
ground-breaking court case came in 1977 with Renee Richards, the first
transgender athlete who underwent surgery in 1975 to become a woman to win a
court case and was allowed to compete in the Women’s US Open. Since then, there
hasn’t been much uproar on the topic of transgender athletes in sports but as
more and more athletes begin to express their sexual identity and achieve
higher standards in sports, the topic will no longer be able to go unresolved.
I believe that an athlete should be able to compete in the sport that they so
choose as the sex that they so choose. There are ways to make competition fair
including monitoring testosterone levels for all athletes. Transgender athletes
can also open the door for more professional, competitive inter-sex sports to
develop worldwide.
Shantel Fair
KIN 577
I was first exposed to this story upon seeing a post on the Los Angeles Dodgers Facebook page regarding a cover story featuring its team. Eventually, commenters’ eyes focused on the words “The Transgender Athlete” on the upper-right corner. Comments quickly turned from ones of excitement about their team to an almost disgust about the cover including these words. Jokes were made about opposing players and this was the extent of their understanding regarding the story.
ReplyDeleteThis is indicative of society’s understanding of the transgender population—an unwillingness to learn the necessary details, instead making jokes and presenting a mentality of “Why does this matter to me?”
The Sports Illustrated article does a good job of at least giving a cursory look at the problems transgender athletes have. Ultimately it comes down to what former George Washington women’s basketball guard and first openly transgender Division I athlete Kye Allums said: “Basketball is basketball… If I can play, I can play.” This assessment goes along with what former Nuggets general manager Kiki Vandeweghe said regarding gay athletes and how basketball skills are what evaluators look at, not sexual orientations. I may be naïve, but I tend to believe this. It comes down to how the media chooses to represent LGBT athletes and what action sports fans take as a result. Sports Illustrated has taken a proactive stance and I hope its readers will be able to formulate their own opinions through a new understanding.
Andrew Sinatra
KIN 577