We live in a world of deep gender segregation and sports are no different: from elementary school, we’re taught that there are boys teams, and there are girls teams, and that the two can’t play together. In the grown-up sports world, gender segregation is maintained in most sports, both amateur and professional.
But roller derby is breaking the mold. From the beginning, roller derby has broken the acceptable boundaries of who gets to participate in sports and what it means to be feminine and masculine – and its “do-it-yourself” and “for the skaters, by the skaters” ethos has fostered a wide-ranging inclusivity in the sport.
Modern roller derby has grown at an incredible rate since what’s known as the “flat track revival” of the mid-2000s: what was once a spinoff of the outlandish pro wrestling-inspired derby of the mid-century has turned into a full-fledged amateur sport, producing real and elite athletic competition. And, at the forefront of derby’s growth have been queer folks and their allies, creating fertile ground for the fostering of queer athletes and especially for transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex ones.
The movement for gender inclusivity within roller derby is growing a breakneck pace. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), the largest governing body of roller derby in the world, and its member leagues are pioneers of sport and, in many ways, are enacting queer politics in very real and substantive way. It’s a movement desperately needs to take hold of the rest of the sports world.
In 2011, the WFTDA unveiled a gender policy which aimed to improve upon the Stockholm Consensus. The Stockholm Consensus governs Olympic competition and requires that athletes have undergone hormone replacement therapy for at least two years, obtained legal recognition of a gender change, and went through sexual reassignment surgery. Under the WFTDA policy, players would only need to meet a hormone requirement. While a huge improvement over the current Olympic requirements, gender is not reducible to hormones, and the new policy doesn’t account for people who don’t fit within the gender binary, such as non-binary, genderqueer, and agender folks.
And although one major benefit of the standard gender segregation in sports can be to empower women to generate their own sports organizations, that’s a very charitable interpretation of their function. The discussion of gender segregation tends to pivot on the question of “competitive advantage”, an argument which says that higher levels of testosterone produces bodies that are more muscular, have higher bone density, have larger frames and are ultimately better in athletic competitions. While the argument is intended to prevent men from competing with women, the same argument has been applied to trans women, gender non-conforming and intersex folks, and women with higher-than-average testosterone levels.
The competitive advantage argument, however, is a fallacious one. The claims that testosterone confers an unfair advantage are not well-supported by medical research. Surgeons and doctors have also argued that after two years of feminizing hormone treatment, the bodies of trans women do not confer a competitive advantage over cisgender (or non-trans) women.
But physiological arguments aren’t the only rebuttals we should be offering against the concept of “competitive advantage”. Hormones are one of many factors which determine athletic performance – and what tends to be much more indicative of performance are social factors. Athletic performance exists at the intersection of social class, race, gender and nationality, in addition to our bodies and genetics.
A middle-class cisgender white woman who grew up in the global North has a higher chance of being able to succeed at sports than a lower-class trans woman of color growing up in the global South because the former has greater access to training facilities, a stable home life, and better nutrition (among many other things) compared to the latter. When it comes down to it, the competitive advantage argument – and every argument for gender segregation – comes down to the simple question of who gender segregation protects. In the worst case scenarios, it is about protecting those who already have the most access to the sport, and excluding those with the least (including trans folks).
One of the radical promises of queer politics has been about pushing (or straight up breaking) the boundaries of the acceptable enactment of sexuality, gender expression and gender identity. Any athlete should be able to participate with a league that is most closely aligned with their gender identity and expression. And so, like many derby leagues, my home league has adopted a policy which allows this kind of inclusivity. In the most far-reaching move, Pioneer Valley Roller Derby has created the United Front, a team which accepts any player “regardless of assigned sex, gender identity (or lack thereof), or gender presentation and expression.”
Gender segregation in sports and a society that privileges cisgender bodies over mine leave no place for me – and no place for my body. Roller derby gave me that place and allowed me to be strong, athletic and trans.