A Word In Edgewise: Kids Just Wanna Play – Will We Let Them?

I grew up on a 97-acre campus of the school of which my father was superintendent and had access to playgrounds and a gym where I spent hours running, dribbling and shooting baskets. A deceptively unfettered, free-ranging childhood.

At school, I found the reality of “girls’ basketball” was a shrunken half-court, “zoned” into strips each player allowed just two steps and two dribbles then a mandatory pass; a hideous and boring waste of time neither real (i.e. Boys’) basketball, nor my solo, harum-scarum shooting-at-will.

Title IX was some two decades away, but its passing in 1972 proved a massive sea-change for girls’ and women’s athletics. I was nearly a decade out of college, but I worked on the University Gazette, so Title IX’s impact was obvious. Down on the Charles River, Radcliffe women’s rowing teams had long been shorted on equipment, allocated shorter racing distances, and generally deemed inferior to Harvard males. One year post Title IX’s access to better training and equipment, the women’s team was off to Moscow, invited to compete in the 1973 European Championships.

Sea-changes kept rolling in. “Transgender” wasn’t coined until the 1960s, so no fraught dinner-table discussions on that topic had disturbed my generation in elementary or high school. Of course, anyone “different” would be tormented, but “Trans” wasn’t yet available for haters to exploit.

This is only one of the many topics addressed in sports journalist Kate Barnes’s new book, Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates. There’s no question that even under the umbrella of Title IX women’s sports require protection and, with the addition of transmen and transwomen athletes, regulations of who can enter what and what protocols should be in place, but Barnes’s research and coverage shows that there is considerable and growing conflict concerning what rules and who will make them.

Consider, for example, two non-transgender elite athletes: Super swimmer Michael Phelps and South African runner Caster Semenya. In 2009, the latter, at eighteen, turned in an 800-m winning time of 1;55.46–fastest of the year. No kudos; the muscular, Black young woman was challenged, taken off for testing. Assigned female at birth, Semenya always identified as a woman, and her testosterone levels, however they registered, were natural to her body. No matter; she was forced to undergo testosterone suppression before to continuing to compete.

As to lionized swimming phenomenon Michael Phelps, his fingertip-to-fingertip “wingspan” of 201cm was greater than his height; his ankles could bend 15 degrees farther than the average, enabling his size-14 feet to propel maximally, and his body produced half the normal amount of lactic acid, a fatigue-inducing substance. All combined to fuel his fantastic breast-stroke superiority. “Why,” asked Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse quoted in Fair Play, “was Michael Phelps a Marvel, and Caster Semenya a Mutant?”

Well and good if you entered a terrific horse in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, but Secretariat won by 31 lengths and two minutes, 24 seconds, records still unbroken for a mile-and-a-half on dirt. Sports themselves aren’t always fair, so it behooves the human element to raise that factor, not place barriers in the paths of varied young athletes. Fair Play is a good read and a start on getting a handle on the broad athletic world that is becoming more strictured, politicized, and monetized than is healthy for the athletes, of whatever age or skill.