Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Transgender Athlete
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From the course by Duke University
Sports and Society
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Meet the Instructors
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
So I wanted this lecture to open up the issue of transgender athletes and
what's been called the intersex condition.
And when we think about the words male and female,
we tend to imagine them as the two ways that one can be human.
You're either a man or you're a woman,
that these are the two identities that humanness offers to us.
But when you think about it a little more deeply,
it's actually a little more complex than that.
And there's something more like a continuum between male and
femaleness than this abrupt divide.
And this is true most obviously biologically.
So men are X Y in their chromosomal makeup.
Women are X X.
But there's a certain percentage of human beings that are XXY in their chromosomes,
and they occupy what's students of human biology would call
the inner sex conditions.
Somewhere between malemous and femalemous biologically.
And then you have other people, for example, women who for
different reasons their different things that can cause this,
not necessarily taking performance enhancing drugs, but stuff that you're
conditions that you're born with, where women who produce a lot of testosterone.
Like male levels of testosterone,
now testosterone of course is a hormone that produce these male like qualities.
Like bulging muscles, not that I have bulging muscles, and facial hair.
But some women have more like male levels of testosterone, so
biologically you see the existence of the intersex condition, and
culturally you see in different cultures around the world examples of societies
that have more than two gender role possibilities open to their members.
So for example, the Plains Indians in the United States
had this form of identity called the Burdash.
The Burdash was a person who was biologically male, and
yet dressed and acted like a woman.
So in plain sight you had men, women, and then people in this Burdash role.
Or in India, you have the figure of the Hijra, who's also this biologically
male usually, but dressing and performing these kind of female functions,
this intersects kind of space that's being occupied.
So we have the reality that sexual and
gender identity don't just divide into maleness and femaleness, but
this idea that in fact you're either a man usually a heterosexual man and
a heterosexual woman, that these are the two proper alternatives is so
engrained in Western culture, and not just in Western culture, but
in many Middle Eastern societies, in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America.
This sexual dimorphism in terms of imagining these two separate
categories of being being the only possibilities.
That kinds forms of sexual identity that
don't conform to these two standards tend to produce anxiety,
sometime disgust, worry, anger, and all the rest.
And this is true in sports and has been true in sports.
And perhaps the most famous example come from the 1970's, and
the figure of Renee Richards.
Renee Richards was a tennis player.
She was born Richard Raskin, a man, but had a sex change operation.
And Richard Raskin, a pretty good, not a fantastic, but
a very good tennis player who played in male tennis leagues.
After he becomes Renee Richards, she,
Renee, wants to play in female tournaments.
And she actually sues and finally wins the right to play in the US Women's Open.
And she loses in the first or second round, she doesn't go very far.
But the fact of Renee Richards playing in this female tournament
creates this giant uproar.
And there are other female competitors who say, I'm not going to play because
Renee Richards is really a man, and this is unfair, and we can't tolerate this.
This reflects the way that society certainly back then, you know,
and still in ways today is uncomfortable with people who
aren't fitting in these prefabricated gender sexuality identity molds.
A more recent case is the case of Caster Semenya.
Caster Semenya won the 800 meters in the 2009 World Track World Championships.
She's South African, but
it later leaked out that the International Amateur Athletics Federation
had doubts about whether Caster Simonya was really a woman, and
that they had subjected her to this, to forms of gender testing.
Exactly what they did or whatever, you know, who knows,
gender testing actually has this weird history in human experience.
For example, popes were always supposed to be men.
And there was a special chair in the Vatican where the pope,
before taking office after he was elected by the cardinals, would sit on this chair
and one of the other cardinals would look to make sure that he had two testicles,
because God forbid, they couldn't have a female Pope.
So gender testing,
presumably there are some more scientific ways of doing this now.
But gender testing has this somewhat strange and checkered history.
Now, Caster Semenya was gender tested, and
there was a lot of outcry about this, because
there were concerns that maybe she'd been targeted because she was a black athlete.
And there were also concerns about why this whole thing had, and
this was the central concern, leaked out in the first place.
How did it become broadly known in the media that these tests had been performed?
Isn't that a kind of invasion of her privacy?
In any event she was tested, the results of the test were never exactly released.
And in the end Caster Semenya became a kind of Heroine for
a feminism, transgender rights movement.
And in 2012, the South African
olympic team had her at the 2012 olympics in London,
had her carrying, the honorable position of carrying the South African flag.
But again, the Caster Semenya case 40 years after Rene Richards,
still reflected this anxiety and an unease and this need to establish
who's a man and who's a woman, and a discomfort with the intersex condition.
Not to say Castor Semenya was necessarily intersex.
I don't know. It's none of my business what she was, but
these issues are still there, and one could argue that there is real reason for
concern about transgender athletes and the categories of men's and women's sports.
You know men in general are stronger and faster than women.
That we have a certain minimal genetic advantage in those areas of human
physiognomy.
So you know, if you're a female boxer, do you want to go into the ring where
the transgender boxer is born male and he has this more physical male attributes.
You know, is that a serious issue or not?
Some people have argued that actually instead of men's and women's sports,
we should test every athlete for their testosterone level, and
all the of the ones who have testosterone over a certain level,
which gives them certain advantages in terms of building muscles,
should be in one category of competition, and
all of them who fall below a certain level of testosterone in the other competition.
So you might have people who biologically male and
female on both sides of this testosterone divide.
I don't think that's ever going to happen, I think we're going to stick with male and
female as categories for sporting competition,
they have such cultural, and traditional weight.
I would argue, in general, that the fears around transgender athletes,
and what's going to happen if these biologically male the guys get
sex changes and start playing in the women's professional tennis league and
whatever that they're going to win all the prize money.
The biological evangelists.
I mean, get real.
You know, we're not going to see this whole wave of sex change
operations just to win some tennis prize money.
The whole thing, really the discomfort, with transgender athletes and
their sex condition says much more about our kind of cultural biases and
our difficulty still in getting our mind around the fact
that there are more identities in the world than just male and female.
And I will say that even in the west, in the United States,
which often likes to fancy itself as very progressive on issues of
women's rights and gay and lesbian rights, you still see these anxieties.
And I was struck returning to sports a few years ago,
the most popular ad at the American Super Bowl.
That big football, glitzy championship, which is also a kind of championship for
advertisers, because advertising money costs so much.
And it's sort of where the fancy ad agencies trot out their best ads.
One of the ads there was about featured a guy
dressing up like a woman and dancing around.
You have to see the ad to get the full gist.
But the idea was that there was something funny and
laughable about a guy wearing women's clothes.
And, you know, really?
I hate to be too politically correct about it, but
do we laugh when we see somebody wearing the clothes of the opposite sex?
But, the reality is that cross dressing and also transgender and
other forms of alternative identities still make a lot of people nervous.
And when we're nervous we laugh, and you can make jokes.
And that's what this Doritos ad was playing off of.
We'll see whether there were always cultural attitudes around gender and
everything else during the processes of change.
We'll see if attitudes around transgender identity and
the intersex condition change in society and in sports.
It's an open question whether and how they will.
I'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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