Sex differences and sex segregation

This essay is Part Two of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays.

One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT.

Here follows a series of brief essays, hastily written in conversation with Dr ——–‘s own examination of sport as a cultural phenomenon. These five essays are unedited, but organized in a way that, I hope, leads one to find something of a coherent narrative, and a path to how the long-form essay I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way came about.

Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies
Sports, socialization and the construction of gender | Sex differences and sex segregation | Sex and drug testing | Race and sports | Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Sex differences and sex segregation

Coerced sex segregation does not protect women, but ghettoizes their sports and reproduces narratives of masculine physical and mental superiority. Yet plans to fix this inequality need to acknowledge that this is a discursive negotiation that must be handled with care.

How, then, are we to fix coerced physical sex-based segregation? The obvious answer is to simply stop it, perhaps using the legal system to extend discrimination laws to sporting environments in the same way as other workplaces. Even ignoring the problems with liberal legislation (though it does seem important in this context to note that such measures are discursively productive, often sustaining the differences they aim to tackle and so failing to enact substantive change), the truth is that immediate integration would be a difficult task in the current sporting environment. Quite simply, the current disparity at the highest levels of sport may be such that integrating women into sports as shared spaces would reinforce rather than counter the discourse of male superiority. Thus, the moment of integration is vitally important. The vicious cycle of integration is such that there’s a sense that women would have to prove they belong at the highest level, even if legislation existed to grant them that right.

The truth is that, despite emotional reasoning from its advocates, there is very little argument for sex-based segregation. Sports often delight in grimaces, and attempts to protect women from the rigors of sport betray the expectation that women are incapable of enduring the very conditions that serve as a foundation for sporting endeavor, or else simply refuse to accept attempts to renegotiate female bodies away from being seen solely as objects of desire. That this renegotiation requires evidence is an unfortunate fact of the discourses surrounding sports.

Related reading:

The Sex Difference Question (McDonagh & Pappano)
Reconstructing Sexual Equality (Littleton)
What’s the Problem? (McDonagh & Pappano)