Sports Biblio Reader, 8.1.21
Also in This Issue: The Transgender Delusion; Dina-Asher Smith; Mia Hamm; Martina Navratilova; Diana Taurasi; Remembering the Houston Comets; Carmen Pomiès; Lucy Harris, Janet Guthrie and Flo-Jo Films; Ancient Artworks and Olympic Origins
Billie Jean King’s new memoir, “All In,” is being published shortly after the Tokyo Olympics culminate next week, and as the state of women’s sports is open to many questions about its future.
The tennis luminary discusses so much more than her sports career, of course, being a transformative figure for women’s and LGBT rights who actively pushes for greater social progress on those and other fronts.
At the age of 77, King is going deep on her long journey to be her “authentic self,” after decades of battling entrenched sexism in sports and beyond, confronting a harsh public spotlight on the revelation of a same-sex affair and embracing her lesbianism.
An early review of the book comes from Publishers Weekly.
“All In” figures to be engrossing, given King’s vibrant, uplifting personality and compelling life story, played out against the backdrop of rapid cultural change.
She was behind the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation, and started Women’s Sports magazine with her then-husband at a time when no marketplace supposedly existed for women athletes.
Like she did in her notable defeat of Bobby Riggs, King proved her critics wrong. As she shifted to larger platforms for her activism, critiques of the women’s sports movement and her impact began to fade.
An exception is a 2015 book, “Game, Set, Match,” by Susan Ware, who wasn’t afraid to be critical at times of King (especially in her admission of the extramarital affair with Marilyn Barnett, her hairdresser), and who provides a fair-enough assessment of what has transpired in women’s sports since the 1970s, mostly in the United States.
But Wade’s book is weakened by her trying to wish away biological differences between males and females that are becoming contentious issues in society, and in sports in particular.
At the time, I didn’t think anything of that perspective. It was too ludicrous to take seriously. But a growing number of women’s sports activists, especially those fighting for Title IX, were worried that women could not be treated equally if they were seen as different, even in the purest biological sense.
A few years before that, feminists Laura Pappano and Eileen McDonagh laid out that delusion in a full-length book, “Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports,” expressing an alarming hostility to Title IX in reinforcing sex-separate space for sports.
I didn’t sense that this might be softening the ground for what’s come about more recently, and that threatens to corrupt the competitive boundaries for girls and women in sports.
In “All In,” King delicately addresses the subject of transgender rights (more below), and to me it’s a disappointment, as she tries to reconcile her advocacy for women athletes with a desire to be “inclusive” to biological males in female sports.
As I wrote earlier this year, the best compromise that can be made is to create a separate category or allow transgender women to compete in an open category.
This isn’t about keeping them out of sports—they have every right to compete, but not against biological females.
That’s not enough for the “inclusivity” forces, who’ve enlisted King and other LGBT athletes to support trans women in the female category.
If King is reluctant to draw a line there, then who will? Other women athletes and coaches have signed on to the “inclusion” movement as well.
It’s been a decade since I wrote a blog series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” as I spelled out a different vision to counter the politically partisan dynamics that have infused this movement.
Was I delusional about what was to come, because the movement isn’t really about female athletes anymore. It’s about something far beyond what King and others worked hard to create: the redefinition of what it is to be a woman.
I didn’t write a word in that series about transgender issues, because it was unthinkable to me that something like the present scenario would ever come to pass.
This time next year we’ll be treated to plenty of celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX. It’s a law that granted women in the U.S. enormous opportunities in education and athletics, and it’s one of the shining successes of American society in my lifetime.
Women’s sports as spectator sports are on the rise, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, and they are on no larger stage than they are now in the Olympics.
But as I concluded my blog series 10 years ago, invoking the spirit and symbolic presence of Billie Jean King, I hope we don’t forget what drew girls and women to sports in the first place: The sheer joy of stepping onto a field, or a court, or in a pool, and experiencing the joy of play.
It was a radical notion she and women of her generation have made commonplace: Just get in the game.
I don’t know how the game will change over the next few decades, but keeping female-only spaces in sports needs to continue to be part of it.
A Few Good Reads
On Monday Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand begins competition in women’s weightlifting as the first openly transgender athlete in the Olympics. Born a male, Hubbard, now 42, changed gender identity at 35 and in the run-up to this highly anticipated event, the IOC is praising her “courage and tenacity” in the face of criticism over her inclusion. Really? What’s courageous about any of this? Of bumping a real female from an Olympic spot? The tenacity of reducing to a testosterone threshold that’s still well above the norm for biological females? An individual who had never competed at a high level as a man but now is in the Olympics, where women have only been allowed to lift weights in recent years? The Guardian’s Sean Ingle, one of the reasonable journalists covering this saga, admits there’s no easy way out of this impasse. But the blame for this should be on the IOC for revising the rules in 2015 with very scant scientific data about biological advantages conferred on males during puberty;
The IOC’s hand was forced in large part a lawsuit by Canadian transgender cyclist Kristen Worley, who claimed that excluding her was discriminating against female athletes. No, seriously. Naturally, she’s also being called “brave” for her activism, which includes a book and a career as an “inclusivity educator.” One can spout “trans women are women” all they like, but it doesn’t make it so. There are those proclaiming this to be “end of women’s sports.” Whether Hubbard wins a medal or not, an important line has been erased, and it’s not likely to be redrawn without an ugly fight. A third way needs to be devised, but as long as “inclusion” hardliners insist upon their delusion, I’ll hold to the ageless reality of biology;
It’s been 40 years since Martina Navratilova was inadvertently thrust into the role of feminist and gay sports icon, during a time when neither role was lionized as they are today. At The New York Times, Matthew Futterman recounts her journey as a cultural pioneer, but strangely omits any mention of her most recent controversy over transgender athletes in women’s sports;
Here’s a trailblazer who was ahead of her time in sports and beyond: Carmen Pomiès, a Frenchwoman who played for two of the most important women’s soccer teams in Europe between the World Wars, the Dick, Kerr Ladies of England and Femina Sport of Paris. She also starred in the first Women’s World Games, one of the pioneering events of early 20th century women’s sports in Europe. During World War II, Pomiès went undercover with the German High Command as a member of the French Resistance, and was a translator at the United Nations. At Playing Pasts, much more from Steven Bolton, whose grandmother, Lizzy Ashcroft, was a former Dick, Kerr teammate and longtime friend of Pomiès;
Several films are in the works about more recent female athletes, including Janet Guthrie, the first woman to drive in the Indianapolis 500, the late Olympic champion Florence Griffith-Joyner, and Lusia Harris Stewart, an early star of women’s college basketball with tiny Delta State of Mississippi and who’s in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Somebody ought to put to the screen the fascinating life of Pomiès;
Great read on five-time Olympic basketball gold medalist Diana Taurasi, near the end of a glittering career that in recent years has included some unlikely journeys into parenthood and going vegan;
As Olympic track and field takes the stage in Tokyo, British springer Dina Asher-Smith is voguing on the cinders and in the fashion magazines;
Retired soccer legend Mia Hamm had a “rookie card” when she first made the U.S. women’s team in 1992, thanks to SI for Kids. That card, issued a year after the first Women’s World Cup, recently fetched $34,440, nearly doubling the previous record for the most expensive female sports card;
Meet the black women who are reppin’ the Michael Jordan brand in the WNBA, the largest group of Jumpman endorsees in the history of women’s basketball;
A number of those players weren’t even born when the WNBA came into existence in 1997. As the league turns 25, a remembrance of its first dynasty, the now-defunct Houston Comets, who won the first four league championships, with Sheryl Swoopes, Tina Thompson and Cynthia Cooper leading the way. They’re all in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, along with their coach, Van Chancellor;
From the Cleveland Museum of Art, Seth Pevnick, a curator of Greek and Roman Art, examines ancient artworks stemming from events that inspired the modern Olympics, including sculpture, ceramics, silver and other artifacts from the museum’s collections;
The 1936 Berlin Olympics weren’t the only global sports event scheduled for that summer. From Red Pepper, a look back at the People’s Olympiad, which never came to pass after being cancelled in Barcelona after a coup by fascist forces of General Francisco Franco.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 246, published Aug. 1, 2021.
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