Wait, what?

psychetimelapse:

iaccidentallythepatriarchy:

unashamedandsacrificial:

sparkamovement:

Olympics struggle with ‘policing femininity’: 

There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.

Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes.

Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was so fast and muscular that many suspected she was a man, exploded onto the front pages three years ago. She was considered an outlier, a one-time anomaly.

But similar cases are emerging all over the world, and Semenya, who was banned from competition for 11 months while authorities investigated her sex, is back, vying for gold.

Semenya and other women like her face a complex question: Does a female athlete whose body naturally produces unusually high levels of male hormones, allowing them to put on more muscle mass and recover faster, have an “unfair” advantage?

In a move critics call “policing femininity,” recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.

If it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring. So far, at least a handful of athletes — the figure is confidential — have been prescribed treatment, but their numbers could increase. Last month, the International Olympic Committee began the approval process to adopt similar rules for the Games.

There’s a lot going on here, but here’s what jumped out at us immediately: Women, particularly women athletes, are constantly told they’re not as strong or fast as men—and now that they’re proving otherwise, they’re being forced to undergo hormone treatments. We don’t think it’s a coincidence that women of color are coming under fire for this more than white women. From the article: “Lindsay Perry, another scientist, says sometimes whole teams of African women are dead ringers for men.” This is a clear example of how we’ve constructed a very particular, very narrow ideal of femininity and womanhood that devalues and casts aside black women in particular. 

So these women are doing incredibly well…and we’re punishing them for doing well

huh

that doesn’t remind me of anything

Women aren’t allowed to challenge common notions about femininity at all: not in terms of performance; not in terms of appearance; not in terms of hormones; not in terms of their own personal advancement and self fulfillment. Ever.

Women are allowed to have their own segments in sports, but they’re not allowed to do well enough in a way comparable to men. Because competition and sex-segregation in sports is not about providing opportunity for women athletes to excel, it is not a matter of creating equality within athletic competition—instead it is about having a feminine version of a sport to contrast the masculine version with the intent of emphasizing the masculine version’s apparent superiority. Sex-segregation is embraced because it can be used to expose women as clearly weaker, lower-performing athletes. A problem arises when women start to perform on the same level as men because it challenges the very logic in keeping sex-segregation in the first damn place as opposed to an inclusive approach welcoming athletes of all gender (the thinking tends to go something like this: well, we need to include women in sports to be fair, but we need to also keep women and men separate because if not then women will never win anything, there would be no fair competition—men and women are just SO damn different). Women performing in a way that’s comparable to men isn’t seen as nearing equality or the setting the bar higher in regards to athletic rigor—no it’s a threat to the very structure of the competition. So since the stereotypes can’t sustain naturally themselves because women’s performance is diverse and dynamic (despite the limited abilities society presumes them capable of), the IAAF seeks to enforce them and punish those who seek to defy them. Because if women can perform in a way comparable to men in any way then there’s something wrong with those women (instead of the IAAF), so obviously we need to fix them (instead of the IAAF). Female inferiority and male superiority as are supposed to be indisputable facts, not ones to be challenged especially not by women of color of all folks.

Honestly, it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for institutions treating female advancement in a field as a threat. This isn’t even exploring the binarist, transphobic bullshit involved in this all. So yeah. Fuck the IAAF.

On the topic of binarism, it’s interesting to me (in a “bleh” sort of way) how people are reacting to running smack into evidence of assigned sex being more of a spectrum than the male/female concept allows for. Even people without something as blatant as being diagnosably intersex so clearly don’t fit into completely separate and distinct categories if you root around in their biology.

And yet these shits are so desperate to keep everything clearly divvied up that they’re actually altering the biochemistry of the targeted women to try and squeeze them back into their categories. Brings back the old argument: “If it’s the natural order of things, why do we have to put so much effort towards maintaining it?”

(via feuillyandselfdeliverance)