Book Notes — FAIR PLAY: HOW SPORTS SHAPE GENDER DEBATES
Most competitive sports are segregated by sex, but should they be?
I explored this question while researching the postmodern sporting body and trying to figure where to focus my dissertation on adult learning and women in sports. As a competitive swimmer, I have trained side-by-side with males for my entire 30+ year swimming career, as an age-group, high school, college, and master's swimmer. As a master's swimmer, I have also often raced side-by-side with men (often beating them, too!), though competitive scoring remains segregated by age and sex categories.
The purpose of segregating the scoring by categories like sex and age is to give competitors with similar biological characteristics the opportunity to compete on a fairer playing field. But, I asked during my preliminary research, if those categories can provide a competitive advantage, why stop there? People with longer arms have a biological advantage in swimming over people with shorter arms, so why isn't arm length a category?
It was an interesting thought experiment that I ultimately didn't pursue for my dissertation but have often thought about since then, particularly with all of the debates about transgender athletes in the past few years. Katie Barnes' new book Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates addresses this question and more. Barnes, a reporter who identifies as nonbinary and used to play basketball, writes that "sports and our enjoyment of them are wrapped up in identity and gender." Fair Play effectively unpacks these concepts and the sporting policies governing identity and gender.
Through a combination of stories about athletes from a variety of sports -- from basketball to wrestling to gymnastics to track to swimming and even to Ninja Warrior, statistical data, and personal anecdotes -- Barnes shares the current debates about gender and sports, ensuring they provide a balanced report on all aspects of the debates, as a truly objective reporter would do. They give readers a lot to consider and space to choose their own stance.
In this book, I see Barnes as more of a researcher than a journalist, and I believe they might see themselves that way, too. At the end of the book, they acknowledge that although they gave a balanced view of the effects of gender and identity in competitive sports today, they write, "No one is neutral." Barnes states that they don't like people making assumptions about their beliefs, so they shared their biases, just like a good qualitative researcher should.
Fair Play is, of course, perfect for anyone interested in the intersection of gender and identity in sport; but it's also essential reading for anyone trying to better understand sport history, sports policy, and/or the future of competitive sport.
