Here's something to fight over.
(I haven't even read it yet)
Shira Mandelzis fell in love with flag football while playing on her middle-school team. An avid snowboarder and all-around athletic kid, she loved the energy she felt while on the field, and the camaraderie engendered by the intensely physical game. So last summer, heading into her junior year at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Mandelzis decided to sign up for football. She would be the only girl, but it was a no-cut, no-tryout team, so she figured the worst she’d have to deal with would be not feeling welcomed by the team. Instead, soon after she’d filled out the enrollment form, Riverdale’s athletic director reached out to Mandelzis about specific requirements she would have to meet in order to join the team.
Because Mandelzis was a girl trying to join a boys’ sport, she had to abide by a set of “mixed gender” sport regulations that the New York State Education Department passed back in 1985. These rules, which were developed in part to protect girls from harm during competitions, required that Mandelzis submit a record of her past performance in physical-education classes, a doctor’s physical documenting her medical history, and assessments of her body type (height and weight, joint structure) and sexual maturity level (breast and pubic-hair development measured according to a medical guideline known as the Tanner Scale). Once she passed a fitness test, including a one-mile run, sprints, push-ups, and curl-ups, she sent her scores to a closed-door panel including physical-education staff, other administrators of the school’s choosing, and a consulting physician. The panel then set out to determine whether Mandelzis was, essentially, strong, developed, and athletic enough to play a contact sport with boys—even though those boys needed to prove no such thing.
Although Mandelzis’s exact experience may seem rare, it exemplifies the way many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex. School sports are typically sex-segregated, and in America some of them have even come to be seen as either traditionally for boys or traditionally for girls: Think football, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball. However, it’s becoming more common for these lines to blur, especially as Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether. Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.
Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email. She said that this complexity means it doesn’t make sense to separate sports by sex in order to protect women athletes from getting hurt. “If safety was a concern, and there was evidence to select certain bodily characteristics to base safety cut-offs on, then you would see, say, shorter men excluded from competing with taller men, or lighter women from competing with heavier women, across sports.” We do see weight-class separation in boxing, rowing, and wrestling, yet it’s far from the norm across all sports, and isn’t typically seen as a method of integrating athletes of different sexes—though it could be. Old notions of sex as a marker of physical capability are changing, and more research is making clear that sex differences aren’t really clear at all.
Regulations like the ones Mandelzis encountered in the Bronx don’t affect girls alone. Colin Ives, who graduated from Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, this year, “basically had a [field hockey] stick in my hand for my whole life,” he told me on Zoom. His mom, Jenny Leffler, is an English teacher and field-hockey coach at the school, so Ives grew up attending practices and games, and took to the sport. Around the world, field hockey is played mostly by men, but here in the U.S. it’s typically seen as a girls’ sport. So Ives had to go through the same New York State mixed-gender-competition rules to get on the team. He was approved by his school’s panel to play during his freshman and sophomore years (the pandemic canceled his junior season). But last year, Ives went through the process, and just days before his first league game his head of school informed Leffler that Ives was not allowed to play. Hackley had approved his petition to play, but the other private high schools that make up the Ivy Preparatory School League, which Hackley is a part of, voted to not allow Ives to play.
As with many kids who play sports in school, Ives’s teammates were his close friends, and they wanted to play together. Ives told me that the girls on his team (as well as on opposing teams) expressed support for him to play because the idea that he was “too good” to play with them felt discriminatory toward them. “It’s belittling to them to know that their own heads of school or their own athletic directors or whoever they would credit for making these decisions didn’t think that they were strong enough or had the physical capabilities to play against me,” Ives said. Just as Mandelzis told me that she could take a hit as well as the boys on her football team, Ives said the assumption that he’d be a danger to girls is an oversimplification. “There are players on teams that we play that are faster than me, that are stronger than me, that can hit the ball harder than me. So I knew that [the league’s] arguments didn’t really have any basis in that regard.” (A representative of the Ivy Preparatory School League did not respond to requests for comment.)
In recent years, the question of who can play on what team has developed into a full-blown front in the culture war, based in large part on the fear that transgender girls will unfairly take over girls’ sports because of sweeping generalizations about biological athletic advantages. As of this writing, 18 states have passed laws to ban trans girls and women from playing on certain school teams (some laws ban trans boys and men from certain teams as well). But perhaps what’s missing most from that debate is the question over why there are rigidly segregated girls’ teams and boys’ teams at all.
(I haven't even read it yet)
Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense
Though school sports are typically sex-segregated, a new generation of kids isn’t content to compete within traditional structures.
www.theatlantic.com
Shira Mandelzis fell in love with flag football while playing on her middle-school team. An avid snowboarder and all-around athletic kid, she loved the energy she felt while on the field, and the camaraderie engendered by the intensely physical game. So last summer, heading into her junior year at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Mandelzis decided to sign up for football. She would be the only girl, but it was a no-cut, no-tryout team, so she figured the worst she’d have to deal with would be not feeling welcomed by the team. Instead, soon after she’d filled out the enrollment form, Riverdale’s athletic director reached out to Mandelzis about specific requirements she would have to meet in order to join the team.
Because Mandelzis was a girl trying to join a boys’ sport, she had to abide by a set of “mixed gender” sport regulations that the New York State Education Department passed back in 1985. These rules, which were developed in part to protect girls from harm during competitions, required that Mandelzis submit a record of her past performance in physical-education classes, a doctor’s physical documenting her medical history, and assessments of her body type (height and weight, joint structure) and sexual maturity level (breast and pubic-hair development measured according to a medical guideline known as the Tanner Scale). Once she passed a fitness test, including a one-mile run, sprints, push-ups, and curl-ups, she sent her scores to a closed-door panel including physical-education staff, other administrators of the school’s choosing, and a consulting physician. The panel then set out to determine whether Mandelzis was, essentially, strong, developed, and athletic enough to play a contact sport with boys—even though those boys needed to prove no such thing.
Although Mandelzis’s exact experience may seem rare, it exemplifies the way many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex. School sports are typically sex-segregated, and in America some of them have even come to be seen as either traditionally for boys or traditionally for girls: Think football, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball. However, it’s becoming more common for these lines to blur, especially as Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether. Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.
Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email. She said that this complexity means it doesn’t make sense to separate sports by sex in order to protect women athletes from getting hurt. “If safety was a concern, and there was evidence to select certain bodily characteristics to base safety cut-offs on, then you would see, say, shorter men excluded from competing with taller men, or lighter women from competing with heavier women, across sports.” We do see weight-class separation in boxing, rowing, and wrestling, yet it’s far from the norm across all sports, and isn’t typically seen as a method of integrating athletes of different sexes—though it could be. Old notions of sex as a marker of physical capability are changing, and more research is making clear that sex differences aren’t really clear at all.
Regulations like the ones Mandelzis encountered in the Bronx don’t affect girls alone. Colin Ives, who graduated from Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, this year, “basically had a [field hockey] stick in my hand for my whole life,” he told me on Zoom. His mom, Jenny Leffler, is an English teacher and field-hockey coach at the school, so Ives grew up attending practices and games, and took to the sport. Around the world, field hockey is played mostly by men, but here in the U.S. it’s typically seen as a girls’ sport. So Ives had to go through the same New York State mixed-gender-competition rules to get on the team. He was approved by his school’s panel to play during his freshman and sophomore years (the pandemic canceled his junior season). But last year, Ives went through the process, and just days before his first league game his head of school informed Leffler that Ives was not allowed to play. Hackley had approved his petition to play, but the other private high schools that make up the Ivy Preparatory School League, which Hackley is a part of, voted to not allow Ives to play.
As with many kids who play sports in school, Ives’s teammates were his close friends, and they wanted to play together. Ives told me that the girls on his team (as well as on opposing teams) expressed support for him to play because the idea that he was “too good” to play with them felt discriminatory toward them. “It’s belittling to them to know that their own heads of school or their own athletic directors or whoever they would credit for making these decisions didn’t think that they were strong enough or had the physical capabilities to play against me,” Ives said. Just as Mandelzis told me that she could take a hit as well as the boys on her football team, Ives said the assumption that he’d be a danger to girls is an oversimplification. “There are players on teams that we play that are faster than me, that are stronger than me, that can hit the ball harder than me. So I knew that [the league’s] arguments didn’t really have any basis in that regard.” (A representative of the Ivy Preparatory School League did not respond to requests for comment.)
In recent years, the question of who can play on what team has developed into a full-blown front in the culture war, based in large part on the fear that transgender girls will unfairly take over girls’ sports because of sweeping generalizations about biological athletic advantages. As of this writing, 18 states have passed laws to ban trans girls and women from playing on certain school teams (some laws ban trans boys and men from certain teams as well). But perhaps what’s missing most from that debate is the question over why there are rigidly segregated girls’ teams and boys’ teams at all.