Sex and Gender in Sports - Part Two

In my previous article I considered the distinction between male and female athletes competing in top competitions such as the Olympic games. Right at the nub of the issue is whether women with naturally high levels of testosterone have an unfair advantage against women with lower, or "normal" levels of testosterone.

But what about transgender or transsexual athletes? Those born in an apparently ordinary male body, who legitimately transition to the female sex? What happens to them?

Renee Richards

Renee Richards is the first example I have to offer. Born Richard Raskind, the child of two doctors, Richards was a successful male athlete, and also obtained a medical degree. In 1975 (which puts her age at 41), she pursued a career as a professional woman tennis player. However, in 1976 the US Tennis Association had introduced Barr body testing (a type of genetic testing) that year. Richards refused to take the test, and was therefore banned from top tennis tournaments, the US Open, Wimbledon and the Italian Open that year.

Richards took the US Tennis Association to court, alleging discrimination by gender in violation of her human rights. She won her case, and was allowed to play in the 1977 US Open tournament.

Richards' tennis career was quite short-lived, and she retired from professional tennis in 1981, just 4 years later, and returned to medical practice in ophthalmology.

Richards' case provoked considerable discussion. Official sports governing bodies were very uncomfortable. According to Wikipedia, the US Olympic Committee stated:

IOC: There is competitive advantage for a male who has undergone a sex change surgery as a result of physical training and development as a male.

And indeed, it's hard to argue with that viewpoint. But in addition to official perplexity, Richards faced consternation from the general public too. My correspondent Rhonda wrote "I recall it being said that Renee had an advantage because she competed in a new category, unique to her: 'Mixed Singles'." And even her own fellow athletes were unhappy: when Richards was allowed to play as a woman, 25 of 32 competitors promptly withdrew in protest from the Tennis Week Open.

In this article describing her life and career, written by Emily Bazelon, Richards herself comments on her status as a transsexual athlete. I quote the final paragraph in its entirety:

Bazelon: The science of distinguishing men from women in sports remains unsettled. And Richards has come to believe that her past as a man did provide her advantages over competitors. “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” She adds, “There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is to play professional sports in her chosen field. She can get married, live as woman, do all of those other things, and no one should ever be allowed to take them away from her. But this limitation—that’s just life. I know because I lived it.”

Michelle Dumaresq

Wikipedia has a list of transgender athletes, both female-to-male and male-to-female. There are, unsurprisingly, few Olympic type events, though there are cyclists, such as Canadian mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq, and fighters, such as American mixed martial artist Fallon Fox. Caitlyn Jenner is of course mentioned.

In 2003, the International Olympic Committee drew up regulations to cover transsexual athletes. To me, at first glance, they seem pretty reasonable:

1. The athlete must have undergone sexual reassignment surgery, including changes to the external genitalia and gonads.
2. The athlete must be legally recognised in their desired sex.
3. The athlete must undergo hormone therapy for at least two years.

These guidelines were modified in 2015, due to recognition that it might not be acceptable to require surgery in otherwise healthy people, and that some countries refuse to grant legal recognition to people who change sex. Therefore, the regulations were changed. The requirement for surgery was dropped, and the only stipulation now requires that the athlete's testosterone level be under 10 nmol/l. (See my previous article for why this might be problematic).

Chris Mosier

As for these games, the UK Daily Mail reported that two unnamed male-to-female athletes were considered for inclusion in Team GB to compete in Rio, but the Internet has been silent about whether they managed it. Meanwhile, Chris Mosier competed as a triathlete for team USA. As a female-to-male, Mosier needs to take testosterone, though a Therapeutic Use Exemption means it's acceptable. The Wikipedia article states that "two closeted transgender athletes competed" at Rio.

The first transgendered sportsperson I recall ever hearing about was Mianne Bagger, a professional golfer from Denmark. According to Wikipedia, Bagger was only the second high-profile transgendered athlete who won recognition from sports' governing bodies to compete in their desired sex, after Renee Richards. A 2004 article from the Guardian newspaper reports that Bagger experienced a slightly warmer welcome from her fellow professionals than Richards did. Subsequently, Lana Lawless sued the Ladies' Professional Golf Association in 2010, which at that time was clinging to a rule that women golfers were required to have been born female. In 2014 another doctor, Bobbi Lancaster, was permitted to play in an LPGA tournament, and this article describes her as the first transgender woman golfer to compete in such a tournament.

So much for the professional athletes. What about those lower down? Una over at TransasCity has produced a couple of relevant articles, and you can read them here and here.

Judit Polgar

I want to close this double article with a shout out to one of my heroes, Judit Polgar. Polgar, 40, is the strongest female chess player in history. The youngest of three sisters, the Polgar girls were intensively coached in chess by their polymath father, Laszlo Polgar, who believed that "geniuses are made, not born".

Everybody "knows" girls aren't as good at chess as boys. Even FIDE, the world chess governing body, awards separate women's titles. The Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title is easier to attain than the Grandmaster (GM) title. But try telling that to the Polgar sisters. They refused to compete in woman-only tournaments, from the beginning, bringing them into some conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation. However, the Polgars persisted. Laszlo wrote:

Laszlo Polgar: Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men. Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect.

And his daughters went on to prove him right. Judit achieved an astonishing series of accomplishments: she achieved the rank of full Grandmaster (not WGM) at the age of 15, then the youngest person ever to have done so. She was ranked 55th best player in the world at age 12. She is the first ever (and so far, only) woman to achieve an Elo rating of greater than 2700, and she peaked at number 8 in the world in 2005. Now, of course, FIDE allows players of both sexes to compete in tournaments, but of 1441 GMs in the world, only 31 are currently women, so the women do have some catching up to do. And I bet nobody even bothers about their testosterone levels.

I wonder how much chess is like golf. In most Olympic sports, muscle mass, lung capacity and other physical measures of fitness really matter. In that circumstance, one could say that the extra physical size of someone born male could offer an advantage if they transitioned. However, in golf, this is less obvious, and Mianne Bagger has insisted that she has no physical advantage from being born male.

In chess, of course, physical fitness is irrelevant, provided you can deal with the stress of the games and tournaments. I believe that the low number of female grandmasters is not a reflection of women's ability to play chess, but a reflection of how few women take up chess seriously. I did a quick Google search for transgender chess players, but didn't turn anything up. As always, comments are welcome. Meanwhile, whether it's golf, chess, cycling or whatever, keep doing your thing.

Sex and Gender in Sports - Part One

It's just been Olympic time again, and that means we are overdue for a topic which I have been considering for a long time: how do you separate male and female athletes? This article was prompted by the Olympics, but has relevance to sporting competition in all spheres.

The modern Olympic games has been going for more than a century. Revived by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896, the modern games started to allow women to compete in the 1900 games, held in Paris. But it took until 2012 (the London games) before every competing nation sent women athletes to the games, and the 2012 games were also the first to have women competing in every sport in the programme.

It turns out that men do better, in general, than women at sporting events. As just one example, the four-minute mile has been routinely broken by men, since it was first achieved by Roger Bannister in 1956, but no woman has ever achieved it; the fastest woman is still 12 seconds away. So it makes sense to segregate male and female athletes, so that the competition is fair.



Dora Ratjen

This throws up some problems. First, how do we actually decide who is a man and who is a woman? It hasn't ever been easy. Dora Ratjen was an intersex individual, born with ambiguous genitalia, assigned female at birth and raised as a girl. Ratjen competed for Germany in the women's High Jump in the 1936 Summer Olympic games, and finished fourth. In 1938, Ratjen competed in the European Athletics Championship, and won a gold medal in the high jump. The following year, Ratjen broke the World Record for the High Jump. After an official investigation (following a complaint from another athlete), Ratjen was, at that time, discovered to be working as a male waiter under the name Hermann. He was stripped of his title. Ultimately Ratjen chose the name Heinrich, and lived out the rest of his life as a man.

Wikipedia mentions two other athletes from this period, Zdenek Koubek, and Mary Weston, with similar biographies. These were intersex people with ambiguous genitalia, raised as girls, who competed as women. In common with Ratjen, Koubek and Weston each later transitioned to male.

US Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage called in 1936 for a system to be set up to examine female athletes to make sure they were actually female. Unfortunately, physical examination was the only way to do this. I do not doubt that those examinations were undignified, uncomfortable, and unreliable.

It took another 30 years for chromosome testing to be adopted, in 1968. Surely this would sort everything out, using hard science. Everyone knows that human males have the chromosome pattern 46XY, and females have the chromosome pattern 46XX. So there's your answer.

Maria Jose Martinez-Patino

Except that it isn't. Most individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome have the chromosome pattern of a male, 46XY, and produce testosterone. However, their bodies are not sensitive to the testosterone, which means they develop as women. Such women are infertile, and lack a uterus, but are externally indistinguishable from 46XX women. Spanish athlete Maria Jose Martinez-Patino was disqualified from competition in the 1988 Summer Olympic games because she failed such a chromosome test, though she was reinstated for competition in the 1992 games. She has since become an academic, and has written about her experience here in the Lancet.

Likewise, some people have the chromosome pattern 47XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), or are mosaics (in other words, not all their cells have the same chromosome pattern).

So, once again, the testing lets us down. The problem is that, even at the chromosome level, the actual level of the DNA itself, humans don't fall neatly into male and female categories.

In 2011, the IAAF came up with yet another idea: that athletes should be separated according to how much testosterone they have. There is a good discussion of this ruling here. The focus on testosterone is because it's considered that a high level of testosterone is what provides men with their athletic advantage. The IAAF ruled (among other things):

Athletic competition will continue to be divided into men’s and women’s categories

A female with hyperandrogenism who is recognised as a female in law shall be eligible to compete in women’s competition in athletics provided that she has androgen levels below the male range (my italics)

The new testosterone limit was set at 10 nanomoles per litre of blood. This level was chosen because it's three times higher than the upper limit of normal for women, and it was reasoned that very few women would naturally have a testosterone level this high. It's at the very bottom of the normal range of testosterone for men under 50.

This does solve some problems. It does away with examining physical characteristics and chromosomes (though not the indignity of subjecting someone's identity to detailed scrutiny). It even allows for athletes to potentially change sex and still compete as their new sex, provided their hormonal profile fits.

Caster Semenya

But once again, there are different problems. Enter Caster Semenya. This South African athlete became the centre of another humiliating sex-testing furore in 2009 aged 18, when she won the 800m gold medal. She was cleared by the IAAF to compete as a woman in 2010, and has, most recently, won Olympic gold in Rio in the 800m event.

Details of Semenya's medical profile are somewhat sketchy, because she her test results have (rightly) been ruled confidential. The BBC reports that she has hyperandrogenism, which means her testosterone level is much higher than an ordinary woman, and even higher than many ordinary men. Indian athlete Dutee Chand has hyperandrogenism too.

The pressure on athletes to succeed at the top level, where the difference between success and failure can be measured in milliseconds or millimetres, is enormous. Therefore, it's understandable that athletes want to take every possible step to maximise their performance (and understandable--but not forgivable--when some resort to cheating to make this happen). And it's understandable that their opponents may be angered by what they perceive as an athlete with an unfair advantage being allowed to compete against them.

Because of the 2011 ruling, female athletes with hyperandrogenism were sometimes required to take medication to lower their testosterone to the "normal" female range. But it gets worse still. In 2016, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on health reported that "a number of athletes have undergone gonadectomy (removal of reproductive organs) and partial clitoridectomy (a form of female genital mutilation) in the absence of symptoms or health issues warranting those procedures". In other words, some athletes have been having surgery they don't need in order to ensure they don't fail a sex test. The UN is outspoken in its condemnation of this, and there are some more details here.

The testosterone restriction was removed for the 2016 Rio Olympics, allowing Semenya (and other hyperandrogenic women) to compete, free of testosterone suppression, because the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that the limit should be abandoned for two years to study whether testosterone provides an unfair advantage to athletes. But the debate continues, and there is a powerful article here.

All of the athletes we have discussed have been competing as women. There seems to be no restriction on anyone who wants to compete as a man. The IOC released a statement in 2012 which said this:

IOC: In the event that the athlete has been declared ineligible to compete in the female category, the athlete may be eligible to compete as a male athlete, if the athlete qualifies for the male event of the sport.

Faster than Caster: Usain Bolt

The next point I want to make is that nobody here is cheating. Dora Ratjen was raised a girl through no fault of her own, and competed as a woman at a time when intersex conditions were poorly recognised or understood. Maria Jose Martinez-Patino has androgen-insensitivity syndrome. And Caster Semenya has hyperandrogenism. None of those people has deliberately done anything to improve their performance other than training. The notion that Semenya and other hyperandrogenic women should have their testosterone levels deliberately suppressed seems no more "fair" to me than the notion that Usain Bolt should have some of his thigh muscles removed, or his legs shortened, to make his performance "fairer". Intersex people have a long history of being "normalised" by medical treatments.

But Joanna Harper, herself a transgender athlete and medical physicist, argues differently. My quotes come from Sarah Barker's excellent article here:

Barker: ...success in sports is one of the greatest advancements in women’s lives. If we value women’s equality, it is imperative that we protect the ability of all women to succeed in sports. I believe that billions of potential female athletes deserve the right to compete with some semblance of a level playing field, and that requiring all women to compete within a given testosterone range is the best way we currently have to create such a playing field.

Is testosterone everything? Surely not; otherwise Caster Semenya would surely be able to run a four-minute mile. The exact role of testosterone remains unclear; there is even a 2014 paper which analyses testosterone levels in 693 elite athletes. It discovered that 16.5% of men (and remember, we are talking about elite athletes) had low testosterone levels, while 13.7% of women had high levels, overlapping with the men. The papers authors concluded:

Healy, et al: Hormone profiles from elite athletes differ from usual reference ranges. Individual results are dependent on a number of factors including age, gender and physique. Differences in profiles between sports suggest that an individual's profile may contribute to his/her proficiency in a particular sport. The IOC definition of a woman as one who has a ‘normal’ testosterone level is untenable.

So the debate clearly has a way to go. I think my bottom line is this. If you are going to separate men and women in athletic competition, you need to draw the line somewhere. This will--inevitably--provide advantage to some people and disadvantage to others. If you draw that line as the body you were born with, then hyperandrogenic women like Caster Semenya will surely come to dominate women's sports. If you draw it at an arbitrary level of testosterone, then you will force some athletes to take medications (and in extreme cases, to have surgery) in order to compete.

No easy answer. I had planned to include transgender athletes in this article, but, as usual, I have found too much material, so I will split this article into chapters. In the next section, I shall consider transgender (rather than intersex) athletes.

===
If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in my article about Female Bodybuilding.

Caitlyn Jenner

No doubt anyone in the world with access to a television has become aware of Caitlyn Jenner (whether they like it or not).

Born William Bruce Jenner in 1949, and known as Bruce Jenner for many years, Jenner (now 65) is probably the most famous openly transsexual person in the world. Jenner was an Olympic athlete, winning the gold medal at the Men's Decathlon in Montreal. Earlier this year, Jenner publicly came out as a transwoman, changed her name to Caitlyn and underwent a highly publicised transition (although there had been some signs for a long time). I dare say she will figure prominently in the reality TV schedules for some years to come. (And, no doubt, the wearisome jokes and mockery will continue for a while longer).

Trying to be Bruce

But you already know all this. Why am I troubling to write about it?

Lately I've spent quite a lot of time reading and writing on Quora. It's a wonderful website for people like me, who are curious about all sorts of things, and have an opinion (and occasionally some pertinent knowledge) about all sorts of things. (You can find my Quora content here). Although I have added links to Quora content throughout this article, I am not sure if you will be able to access them all without registering to the website.

Someone posted this question:

What is the appropriate name and pronoun to use when talking about things that Caitlyn Jenner did in the past, while she was known as Bruce and thought to be a man? 

That really got me thinking. Who won that gold medal?

From one point of view, it's pragmatic to say that the winner of the medal was Bruce Jenner. The competition was the Men's Decathlon. Therefore the correct pronoun to use is "he"; he won the medal. On the other hand, Jenner herself says she struggled with gender dysphoria her whole life, even when competing and winning that medal. And now the person who won the medal is Caitlyn Jenner, and takes female pronouns. Therefore she won the medal.

Call me Caitlyn

There was a reasonable amount of discussion in the responses to the question. As one might expect, some people felt quite strongly about the matter.

Tessa Norris writes:

The correct way to refer to a transitioned trans woman is to refer to her with her current name and pronouns, and to abandon her old name and pronouns.

Tamara Wiens writes:

Referring to a trans person by their "dead name" is usually taken to be very offensive. Personally, it's bothersome in an ill-defined way - when anyone says it, it makes my skin crawl, and I want to be ill, so it's fortunate that it is happening less and less all the time.

Katie Anne Holton writes:

My preference is that no one use my former name, ever.

Whatever I did under another name, I did it. Katie was born in 1963. Katie married in 1990 and divorced in 2006. Katie fathered two beautiful children.

In the same sense, Caitlin Jenner was an Olympic athlete. She won a gold medal in the decathlon. She got married. She fathered children.

I disagree with Tessa Norris. There isn't, as yet, a "correct way". There is only a society struggling to agree on a way to get a linguistic handle on what is, for many people, a comparatively new phenomenon. I accept there are ways that some people would prefer over other ways, but that isn't the same thing as a "correct way".

I must say I had never heard of the term dead name or deadname before this discussion, and it struck me as a term laden with powerful connotations. It reminded me of the notion that in mediaeval times, a "funeral" service would be held for novice nuns and monks on entering their religious community, to symbolise their "death" to society; that the person who had previously lived was now gone. I don't really know how often this actually happened, but it seems terribly barbaric.

More from Vanity Fair

I can understand Katie Anne Holton's perspective. Nonetheless, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. When Bruce Jenner competed in the Olympics, everyone thought he was a man. He presented externally as a man (regardless of his inner feelings). All the documentation at the time used male pronouns. (In fact, even in the recent Bruce Jenner Interview With Diane Sawyer, Bruce agreed to be called Bruce and asked for masculine pronouns to be used even though transition was already underway).

Then there came a change, which was initiated by Bruce himself. He has asserted a new identity and changed his name. I think that we should now respect Caitlyn's new name and identity, but for me this doesn't apply retrospectively.

One's innate preferences and choices do not, in my opinion, compel the rest of society to rewrite the past. (And by preferences, I don't mean that gender is a preference, but I do consider that how people act and present is a preference and a choice. I think that Bruce was choosing at that time to try to be Bruce, even though that was difficult and painful).

I tried to take the discussion further, but the fact that I somewhat disagreed was met with some hostility at first:

Tessa Norris: You have the "right" to refer to my past against my express wishes in any way you choose. But only in the sense that you have the free speech right to call me a "tranny faggot" if you want.

Then came an answer by Elliott Mason, which I think was extremely pertinent:

How would you refer to the sports accomplishments of Muhammad Ali before he changed his name? It's an interesting parallel case to think about, because at the time his change was just as shocking and just as much of a media circus as Ms. Jenner's name change is now.

Also, very many female Olympians have married and changed their last names after their athletic careers are over. I don't think I've ever seen anyone make a big deal about using their maiden name to refer to their accomplishments in their former athletic career. One mention near the top, at most, and the rest of the article in their current name.

It certainly seems right to compare Muhammad Ali and Caitlyn Jenner, although Ali's name change came before much of his sporting success. I am not aware of any situation where Ali would be referred to by the name Cassius Clay, except in articles which say something like "Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay)".

What could they make me look like?

Elliott goes on:

Would you apply the same rule in the same way for people who changed their name for any other reason? When referring to childhood accomplishments of, for example, movie stars who use a screen name (Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Queen Latifah, and Judy Garland come to mind), do you insist on always pointing out their old name and saying that they changed it?

If you do not, then the only reason for a difference in how you treat them and Ms. Jenner is that you have some issue about her name change that you don't have about theirs, and you should think about that.

My response to this is much easier. All those names are stage names. A stage name is deliberately chosen for its attractive or unique qualities. A stage name is something one adopts for a stage persona, not a personal identity.

Do Olympic stars have their names engraved on their gold medals? I don't know. But suppose they do. Will Caitlyn Jenner have hers changed? I think probably not. To me it would seem as ridiculous as Laurence Tureau having his junior school Bronze Swimming Certificate changed to the name of Mr. T.

But I guess my final point is this. I can only comment from my own perspective. I don't consider myself to be a woman. I prefer to be treated as one when I am presenting as fem, but I regard this as a privilege which I need to merit, not a right.

Right now, I am not sure about what the future holds. Maybe I will transition at some point (say Jenner's age) and maybe not. Suppose I do, I would be quite happy to acknowledge my former identity; in fact, I quite like it (my current identity), which might be one reason why I don't feel I need to transition.

I don't see, if you could compare me to Jenner at an equivalent age, that there would be much difference between us. I have tried to suppress my feminine side; I have struggled (and still am) to find some balance.

And yet, I don't consider myself to be a woman, though I certainly don't consider myself to be an "ordinary" man either. I can understand how trans people might feel uncomfortable about their previous lives, but nonetheless those lives existed, objectively, sometimes for decades.

I would argue that one should respect an individual's choice of name and gender presentation. To me this is a facet of basic human understanding, tolerance and compassion. On the other hand, I don't think it's OK for an individual to insist that the past be rewritten just because its existence makes them uncomfortable.

As always, this is an ongoing discussion, to which your contributions would be welcomed.

Female Bodybuilding

I was going to include this topic in my post on Androgyny, but the more I read about it, the more I thought it was worthy of a post by itself.

I am supportive of women's equality with men in every arena. Female police officers, firefighters and soldiers wouldn't provoke the least reaction in me. Likewise, I am supportive of women's equality in the intellectual fields: science, academia and politics. But, I must admit, I find female bodybuilding to be a puzzle.

Something inside so strong?

Let's take men's bodybuilding first, and in a Darwinian sense. If we take mammals as a whole, males demonstrate (and in some cases prove) their reproductive suitability to females by physical prowess: by jousting with other males. Nature tends to have equipped males with more powerful musculature; a stronger frame; bigger teeth, tusks or horns; and with a tendency to aggression which includes a willingness to fight. From a female's point of view, it makes sense to mate with the alpha: his genes will tend to make the offspring stronger and more robust; more able to fight off predators, more able to withstand harsh conditions, and in their turn, more likely to pass on their genes to their own offspring.

Humans are exempted from none of this. Until the last couple of centuries or so, human reproductive success still favoured physical robustness, and our leaders tended to be great big lads who were handy with a sword. Speaking as a physical weakling, I like to think that we are getting to the point where we can recognise other measures of reproductive success, such as intelligence ("Brainy is the new sexy").

So I can understand why men want to compete at trials of physical strength. Rugby, for example, is a ritualised form of warfare, where the sides are deliberately matched, and the blades and cudgels left out, but the aggression, the grappling, and the testosterone persist. Other football variants permit different quantities of physicality, though the basic premise remains. In part, men are driven to compete by their genes; people who cheer from the sidelines are competing vicariously, and their emotional involvement can be dramatic and intense.


 Bodybuilder Debi Laszewski in 2011

We call it "brute strength" because we tend to associate great human physical strength with coarseness, animal behaviour, and a lack of finesse or intelligence (as in the phrase "brute force and ignorance"). None of this is necessarily true, of course.

Bodybuilding is not entirely about strength, but about display; the tanned, waxed, oiled skin; the deliberate poses and choreography; and the delineation of every last fascicle and fibre of the musculature (and what is it with those veins?). There is a clear difference between the physique of the bodybuilder and that of the weight lifter. But for me, bodybuilding is all about masculinity, and the display of physical strength is a very masculine trait. And they are not judged on their strength or athletic prowess, but merely their appearance.

Enter the women. According to the Wikipedia article, female competitive bodybuilding only really got going in the last 30 years, and is on the rise. Female bodybuilding competitions are now routinely staged alongside male bodybuilding competitions, although the prize money is approximately 1/10 as much.

Women: muscling in?

Female bodybuilders may claim that they are attempting to achieve a balance of athleticism, fitness, flexibility and strength, rather than simply to bulk up with beef. Bodybuilder Debi Laszewski comments: I believe I have an incredible amount of mature muscle on my frame and, that said, a balanced physique. I also try to maintain my feminine lines.

Has she managed this?

Afghanistan and Malaysia have banned female bodybuilding outright. And some female bodybuilders use anabolic or androgenic steroids as a way of increasing their muscle mass. Steroids bulk you up all right, but also threaten fertility and can produce masculinising side-effects, including deepening of the voice and male-pattern baldness.

That rigid diet and punishing exercise regime, designed to cut out body fat and replace it all with lean muscle, inevitably causes breasts to shrink and all but disappear. Female bodybuilders either need to accept that, or get breast implants.

In 1992, concerned that female bodybuilders were too muscular, the International Federation of Body Builders attempted to feminise the sport by introducing rules which penalised excessively muscular contestants. Later, in 2005, the IFBB introduced the controversial "20% rule", which was "that female athletes in Bodybuilding, Fitness and Figure decrease the amount of muscularity by a factor of 20%". The memo stated that the request "applies to those female athletes whose physiques require the decrease". It seemed that even bodybuilders thought the women were getting too big.

A picture of vulnerability?

So what do I think about all this? First, back to the men. I can understand the idea of a man wanting to be big and strong, and to look big and strong. On the other hand, for me, it isn't aesthetically pleasing in the least: I think those inflated physiques look unattractive and off-putting. Though I learned today, with a certain weariness, that there is a sexual fetish associated with touching or rubbing the bodies of highly-muscled people, and that some impecunious bodybuilders submit to this as a means of supplementing their income.

For a woman, then, it's hard to think of anything conventionally feminine about bodybuilding at all. I totally understand the pursuit of health, tone, flexibility and fitness, but to me, this path leads to the physique of a rower, rather than a bodybuilder. Women who bodybuild have the distorted physiques of the men, but in addition, they have the lipstick, the heels, and the long hair (and sometimes the obvious breast implants). This juxtaposition of masculine and feminine features sometimes makes these women very strange to look at indeed. It's worth taking a look at this page, in which celebrity photographer Martin Schoeller takes portraits of female bodybuilders (I have borrowed two for this post). Schoeller writes: I am trying to show the vulnerability that I see and feel in the subjects when I am with them, to get to the complex emotions behind a mask of extreme physical expression.

What are those complex emotions? What form does that vulnerability take? What are those women searching for? How do they feel about themselves? I don't have those answers; you will need to find your own.

Strong Arms of the Ma

My final point is this. If women want to compete in bodybuilding, and they want to bulk up their bodies in this way, they should be allowed to do so unfettered. In the statement above from the IFBB, what they were really saying was "some of you are too big and too muscular; you need to cut back by 20%. Who does this apply to? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You know who you are". I couldn't find the full statement to read, so there may have been explanations, but perhaps their own sport's governing body was telling bodybuilding women not to get too muscular. Not, perhaps, for health and safety reasons, or other understandable, if wearisome, competition regulations. No, just perhaps because even the sport's own governing body thinks female bodybuilding is unladylike.

For a different but related subject, I refer you to my article about Women with Beards.

Addendum: 30th December 2014

Over the last couple of months or so, this post has become one of the most popular on this blog. On the other hand, nobody has left a comment for ages. If this subject interests you, or upsets you, or arouses you, please leave a comment for discussion.

I came across an episode of The Simpsons entitled Strong Arms of the Ma, in which Marge gets mugged. As a result of feeling vulnerable, she takes up bodybuilding to feel stronger and safer. Though she builds a lot of muscle, unfortunately the steroids cause her to become aggressive and mean. The critics' response to the episode was largely negative. When done well, The Simpsons is a powerful and insightful parody, but it doesn't look like they hit the sweet spot with this episode.

Gay Football Players

Perhaps just a quickie for this one.

One of my favourite radio programmes is More or Less, a mathematics and statistics programme produced by the BBC. I heartily recommend the podcast, which I adore. A shout out to regular presenter Tim Harford, who is brilliant, funny, quirky and fascinating. Another shout out to series producer and frequent guest presenter Ruth Alexander, who has one of the most beautiful voices ever to tickle my eardrums.

The program styles itself as a guide to the numbers "in the news and in life", and is very, very good at sniffing out numerically dubious reports in the news, claims by politicians, and interesting angles on problems, such as the Tuesday Boy problem, or the wonderful question (answered definitively): if you stacked a 4x4 Lego brick on another one, then added another, and another, how tall would the stack become before the bottom brick is crushed by the weight of the stack on top? (*)

So one of the questions they tackled was this: how many gay professional football players are there? (Of course, you know I mean soccer when I say football). How many can you think of? Not many, I'll bet. The most recent openly gay professional footballer in Britain was Justin Fashanu, and that was 20 years ago. Wikipedia devotes a whole article to the question. Football statistician Bill Edgar, of The Times did some analysis.

First, Edgar made the assumption that the rate of homosexuality among professional footballers was the same as in the general male population. He found varying estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality, so chose the lowest reasonable estimate he could find: 1.5% (see my discussion here), which is still a bit higher than the 1% figure which I suggest.

Looking specifically at Premier League football players, there have been 3,200 of them in the last 20 years. The statistical chance of none of those men being gay is 1 in 1 thousand million million million; 1 in 10 to the power of 23.

Okay, so numbers this large make my head hurt. What does that mean? More or Less says it means that if the whole Earth's surface were covered in white drawing pins touching edge to edge. and just one of them were red, the chance of you picking the red one, at random, is 200 times higher than the chance of there not being a gay footballer somewhere in the Premier League over the last 20 years.

So, mathematically speaking, we can say it is exceptionally unlikely that there hasn't been a gay footballer in the Premier League. We cannot, of course, say how many there have been; we cannot know if the prevalence of homosexuality in Premier League footballers is the same as in the general male population.

It may mean, of course, that gay men are excluded, either overtly or covertly, from the Premier League. It may mean that gay men can become professional footballers, but remain in the closet for fear of hostility from fans, managers, clubs, or media. And Justin Fashanu's career definitely suffered after he came out.

What it shows to me is that acceptance of homosexuality is not as far forward as we all like to think it is. This is bad news for any group seeking integration and equality with what we like to call the "general population".

(*) The answer is 375,000 bricks; a vertical tower of 3,591m (or 2.17 miles) tall.

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Addendum: 26th January 2014

Thomas Hitlzsperger

Top NZ rugby player Ryan Sanders has come out and admitted he is gay, after his professional playing career was over. In the interview in the NZ Herald, Sanders admits to having feigned relationships with women to conceal his homosexuality. The elite rugby players here are the national team, the All Blacks, and Sanders believes at least one of them is gay (and he may be including past members). Statistically speaking, he is almost certainly correct. According to this article, there were 1109 men in 2011 who had played for the All Blacks. That's not far off the figure (3200) used to calculate the British odds, as above.

This article also drew my attention to Thomas Hitzlsperger, a German by birth who played in the English Premier Division. Hitzlsperger came out as gay only a couple of weeks ago, after officially retiring from football in September 2013. According to Wikipedia, Hitzlsperger had a long-term girlfriend, Inga, from whom he split in 2007, just before they married.

What these men have in common is (seemingly) concealing their homosexuality during their careers, only coming out after they have retired. Each has concealed his homosexuality by dating women. Whoever the gay footballers are, they are still keeping it quiet while they are in the public eye. I feel certain that Hitzlsperger is not the only gay Premier Division footballer. Where are the others?

Addendum: 23rd February 2014

Stoney

Well, it's like buses. You wait for ages, and then three come along at once.

The England Women's Soccer team captain, Casey Stoney, has just come out and revealed she is gay in the last couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, across the pond, NFL player Michael Sam has announced he is gay. Almost predictably, anti-gay campaigners protested openly in public (methinks they doth protest too much?), attempting to picket a ceremony at which he was to be honoured. But their protest was drowned, heroically, by 500 students who formed a human wall between Sam and the small group of vocal protesters. This is an extraordinary gesture, and you can read the full story here.

And it has just been announced that NBA player Jason Collins has been given a contract with the Brooklyn Nets. Collins announced he was gay last year-- but found himself without a team. Admittedly, his contract is only for 10 days, but it's a start.

Collins, Stoney and Sam are still within their playing careers; in fact, in the ascendency. Does this mean that a floodgate of gay sports people is about to open?

I am indebted to Rachel for drawing my attention to Casey Stoney. Please feel free to tell me about any other gay sports people you may hear about.

Addendum: 30th April 2014

I have just become aware of the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame, which was established in 2013. It's inaugural list of inductees is very sparse, and includes at least one dead person as well as several organisations (rather than individuals). And, of course, it's limited to the US, though it is (apparently) open to trans people. Nonetheless, it's a step forwards.

Addendum: 5th May 2014

Star player: Saeluah

I didn't think I would be able to do this, but finally, I can introduce a transgender international soccer player. Jaiyah Saeluah plays for American Samoa, officially one of the weakest international football teams in the world.

Saeluah is a fa'afafine, one of a culturally-accepted third sex which exists in the Pacific Islands. In simple terms, fa'afafine are usually boys raised as girls. I have blogged about them twice already, here and here. She is also one of her team's star players. She is fully accepted by her team mates, and her manager, although she is known as "Johnny" when out on the pitch, and she was rejected from the college soccer team when she went to study in Hawaii.

Admittedly, as a player for one of the most inconspicuous teams in the world, it's unlikely that Saeluah will make much of a dent in the status quo. But nonetheless, hers is a triumphant story. They've even made it into a movie, which I can't wait to see.

With thanks to Peter, I can direct you to a Guardian interview with her here.

Pinnacles of masculinity

Surely it cannot be true that men have football instead of emotions? --Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

As an academic with an inquiring mind, I find myself interested in a great many things. There are very few things which I have no interest in whatsoever, but field sports is one of them. One of the earliest things which I realised marked me out from among the "normal" boys was my complete disinterest in football. (For the avoidance of doubt, the football I mean here is soccer).

Where I grew up, football was ingrained. Knowledge, understanding and appreciation of football was essential for peer acceptance. I possessed none of those.

While I found it easy to learn the binomial nomenclature of living things, I found it impossible to learn anything about football. Conversely, boys in my class who struggled with the simplest of arithmetic and grammar knew seemingly everything about football: all the names of all the players in all the teams. And the peripheral information too: the managers, the grounds, the histories. Who beat whom in the semifinals in 1982, and what the score was.

Of course, I played football at school. The alternative was complete isolation, which was worse. But lacking any enthusiasm for the game, I was basically rubbish at it (yes, I was always the last kid picked for the team). I still don't understand the offside rule. As soon as reasonably possible, I gave up football completely.

I laughed out loud when I read this extract from the wonderful book, Long Way Round, written by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman. In 2004, they made a trip round the world on motorbikes, telling everyone they were going from London to New York, "the long way round". I saw a new side to Ewan McGregor which I found I really admired, and I found myself deeply moved at many of the situations they found themselves in. I often wish I could do something similar.

In this extract, Ewan and Charlie have just been stopped by the police at a border:

"Are you German?" one of the policeman said.
"No, British. He's English and I'm Scottish", I said, pointing to the flags on our helmets.
"Arsenal!" the policeman exclaimed.
Not a football fan, I nevertheless realised that I should play along. After all, Jamie [their security advisor] had told us there were two English words that were understood the world over: fuck and Beckham.
"Yeah, Arsenal," I said, smiling and trying to look enthusiastic about a team of which I knew nothing.
"Chelsea!" the policeman said. I racked my brain. I knew Chelsea had recently played a team from somewhere in Europe.
"Three-one," the policeman said. "Monaco three. Chelsea one."
I was lost. Football, the male lingua franca, and I couldn't speak a word.

I've had similar conversations with other men my whole life, in which I attempt to feign knowledge or interest in this most uninteresting subject.

My problems are not limited to football, but also rugby, which was played at my secondary school in preference to soccer. Football, they say, is a game for gentlemen, but played by hooligans. Rugby is a game for hooligans, played by gentlemen. Either of those sayings may be true in some circumstances. From my perspective, both seem to be games for hooligans, played by hooligans.

New Zealand is a wonderful country in all respects: outstanding scenery, amazing food and wine, delightful people, and a welcoming, egalitarian society which made me feel instantly at home. I have spent several years there. The national game of NZ is rugby, and the national team is the All Blacks, who won the most recent Rugby World Cup in 2011.

As a student, I knew very little about New Zealand. My girlfriend of the time had been to many more rugby matches than I had, and one day told me about the haka. I had never heard of it. It was, she said, a war dance performed by the All Blacks before their international fixtures. A way of intimidating the opposition, it sounded ridiculous and comical: surely something to provoke amusement rather than intimidation.

It took some years before I eventually witnessed a haka. My jaw dropped. Take a look:

This is very similar to the haka which I first saw. In fact, on YouTube there are dozens of clips to choose from. Even the All Blacks' haka is not a concrete thing, but there are different versions which are performed from time to time.

Clearly it is a Maori war dance. The All Blacks have been doing a haka for over a century, so it's not a new thing. In fact, other island nations have similar intimidating dances which they perform before their games. The history and the translation can be easily found on Wikipedia.

But if you knew nothing of any of this, you would just need to watch it. The haka speaks clearly on a level which transcends all language, culture and geographical boundaries. It is the language of the midbrain, the language of pure testosterone-drenched aggression. Fifteen or so of the toughest, strongest and most powerful players in the world line up, roar, stomp, slap themselves and glare at you with expressions of pure hostility. It looks like rage. It looks like violence. It looks like pain. And it is doesn't contain any of these things!

When I first saw it, I thought it was one of the most thrilling and frightening displays I had ever seen. It still makes me want to run away and hide. I surrender! The reason I find it so powerful is that I know that I would have no meaningful answer to it whatsoever: no threat or physicality to offer in return; this is not true of the opposing team, who are also fifteen or so of the toughest players in the world.

I think the haka is an astonishing thing. I totally get it: I understand its popularity, its longevity, and its widespread imitation. I feel quite strongly, however, that it is unfair for the All Blacks to have the psychological advantage of performing the haka, but according to official rules the other team is not permitted to perform any act of defiance or retribution.

When looking for a pinnacle of masculinity, the haka must be pretty close to it. As someone who is not aggressive or traditionally masculine in any way, even I adore it.

How does one respond to this level of masculinity? You can't fight fire with fire, but you can fight it with another masculine gesture, and a dash of wit: