Division by Fractions
I suggested earlier that a troublesome assumption underpins the gender-binarist rules of pairs skating: that men always have maximum athletic potential. I now want to present that assumption more broadly as part of a recurring willingness to think of some human beings as fractions of an ideal human whole. This component of hierarchical thinking has a long, inglorious history. In the United States, it appears most baldly in the 3/5 rule of the Constitution (ratified in 1789), which dictated that population assessment would count an enslaved person as 3/5 of a free person. It has continued, less numerically, in one strategy after another, from Jim Crow to mass incarceration, that work to deny Black and Brown people, just to start, full participation in public life (DuVernay 2016; Alexander 2012).
Fractional human hierarchy helps to explain gender binarism in the figure skating disciplines of pairs and ice dance, as well as those other sports I mentioned earlier, like doubles tennis and Quadball, all based on the idea that men embody maximum potential. But I first started thinking about pairs this way after learning more about a branch of sport that sometimes literally relies on the use of fractional calculation: para sport. The term para sport refers to organized sport for people with particular disabilities whose competitive opportunities are ultimately governed by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and its “IPC Athlete Classification Code” (International Paralympic Committee 2021, 3). The rules vary across sport, and only some sports assign people percentage-based numbers. Wheelchair basketball, for example, classifies athletes based on a scale from 1 to 4.5 with a maximum 14 points represented on the court at any time, while skiing sorts people based on types of impairment.
All para sports, however, must administer a three-part categorization procedure, involving medical sign-off, tests of function, and observation in competition. They must maintain, as well, processes for charging someone with “Intentional Misrepresentation,” encouraging practices of scrutiny and judgment that extend far beyond official evaluators. As Danielle Peers explains, by way of their own Paralympian experience with wheelchair basketball, these rules contribute to a culture of policing and self-policing in para sport venues. Don’t let anyone see you walk a few steps if your classification indicates that your legs can’t hold you up in competition (Peers 2012).
That kind of scrutiny is hardly unique to para sport. “The appearance of wheelchairs, crutches, or even the faint trace of a limp or lisp,” Peers writes, “often incites a whole series of formal and informal examinations by quasi-experts, strangers and friends: surreptitious looks, stares or full interrogations about the nature, origin and curative possibilities of the disabled body” (181–82). Many people take for granted that they can participate in the practice of categorizing other people’s disabilities.
Yet nothing about the categories or categorizing should be taken for granted, including, in sport, the people targeted for inclusion and the ranking of skills or accomplishments. Sami Schalk writes that dominant, white-dominated disability rights frameworks “have been developed with little attention to the types of disability most common in poor and racialized communities” (2022, 9). This is the case in para sport, where also “the types of impairments and sports that are included in the Paralympic Games tend to privilege men’s participation and exclude large numbers of women” (Dean et al. 2024, 207). In addition, all sports develop in relation to numerous entangled values, including, at higher levels, about who should represent the nation. We’d have a different sports elite if skiing with only one ski pole, or on one leg, were considered the most stunning achievement of the sport, or if playing basketball in wheelchairs were considered the default or most skilled version rather than the compensatory adaptation.
Imagine thinking about it this way: Those people who can’t maneuver a wheelchair and have to shoot a basket by running at it—too bad for them. What if we put them in a consolation category for athletes less adept at incorporating tools like wheelchairs into proprioception? Proprioception is the term for someone’s ability to sense the placement and movement of their body in space. A complex system—involving your brain’s interpretation of input that can come from muscle, joint, and tendon receptors, as well as vision and inner ear—it’s the sense that helps you balance and know how much force to use for a particular physical task (Proske and Gandevia 2012). It is also one key factor in coordination, helping you do things like, in the classic test, touching your finger to your nose with your eyes closed. Proprioception often requires adapting to attached tools, and the term extended physiological proprioception is sometimes used to describe when proprioception extends past someone’s physical body to incorporate, for example, the tools they hold, like a cane or a screwdriver, or attachments like prostheses or footwear.
Extended physiological proprioception is at work when (or if!) you come to walk around on stilettos without having to think about it, and it’s a sense that figure skaters depend on. My comment earlier about maneuvering on knives as if they were an extension of my feet: that was only partly a flourish to plant the idea of figure skaters as badass. An integration of person+apparatus makes facility at skating possible. This can be most apparent when new skates, angry feet, or the wrong sharpening disrupt habituated connections—a disruption I really felt in June 2020, when I returned to the ice after almost four months away due to injury and the Covid lockdown. For the first time in several decades, switching from sneakers to skates gave me a weird feeling of being on stilts, with a startlingly unfamiliar horizontal sightline. I realized that I had previously become accustomed, as I have become accustomed again, to living part-time in a version of me three inches taller in the leg, with a slightly raised heel, on a blade with a small curve that changes with wear and sharpening over time.
My point here, of course, isn’t to diminish nonwheelchair basketball or maneuvering on sneakers. Nor do I want to equate using skates and wheelchairs. People become skaters by voluntarily donning footwear that initially impairs learned mobilities, after navigating to ice surfaces in environments built for only some of us to traverse them. That’s a different proposition than starting from unchosen physical and externally imposed barriers.
Instead, I want to unsettle the hierarchies that stack people athletically and to introduce a point well made by Peers and their frequent collaborator Lindsey Eales: to change those hierarchies, we’d need to rethink how we categorize both people and the tools that enable us. As they write in “Moving Materiality: People, Tools, and this Thing called Disability” (2017), which reflects on their arts-based and movement-based research practice, the cultural meanings attached to tools solidify constructed binaries between abled and nondisabled. Onlookers often interpret crutches to signal that the user is temporarily injured, while interpreting wheelchairs to signal more enduring barriers to mobility. Or interpret the absence of visible tools as no tools, and thus no managed impairments, erasing possible situations of mind, mood, and body that benefit from interventions such as medicine. Or categorize people as nondisabled by excluding some tools from the category of disability assists. Maybe I should understand my multicorrecting eyeglasses, they suggest, as one of many tools people use to perform rather than occupy able-bodiedness.
One account of person–tool complexities that really grabs me is Vivian Sobchack’s 2017 essay “Choreography on One, Two, or Three Legs (A Meditation on Movement)”—the legs being one ordinarily developed leg plus crutches, a cane, and/or a leg with prosthesis that she uses in different combinations. Sobchack notes that while some people might expect the two legs with and without prosthesis to be the most desirable combination for ease of movement, one original plus two crutches have one form of functional, aesthetic, and expressive potential unmatched by other combinations. “Indeed,” she writes, “one can move more quickly and with greater exuberance on crutches than on one’s own two legs (whether prosthetic or not). The span of one’s gait increases and there is a cadenced and graceful ‘swing through’ effect that not only covers ground but also propels the lived body forward in pleasingly groundless ways not allowed by mere walking” (59). As she emphasizes, too, “no matter how many or what kind of legs we have,” we experience basic usefulness and the transcending of basic usefulness daily “in an extraordinary variety of bodily pleasures, absorptions, pains and frustrations, and flights of imagination, consciousness, and achievement” (57).
Sorting tools and people into fixed binarizing, ranked categories can obscure a lot about capacities and assists, which, in turn, contributes to mystifying competitive advantage in sport. You might think from all the assertions about gender segregation being required for a level playing field that competitive advantages of all kinds receive consistent, thoughtful attention. Far from it. Many physical attributes that may function as advantages in particular sports—like outlier height, hemoglobin, wingspan, eyesight—are considered biological good fortune rather than monstrosities or reasons for disqualification. No one is trying to prevent seven-foot-four-inch Victor Wembanyama from playing in the NBA because he’s much taller than most competitors for a roster spot.
More broadly consequential, perhaps, sports rarely regulate the most common contributor to physical advantage: the economic resources that can access coaching, training time, nutrition, training centers, sports psychologists, cross-training, and equipment ranging from basic sneakers to more specialized products. Those para sport wheelchairs aren’t any old wheelchairs, a point underscored in Murderball, a documentary about the 2004 US Paralympic rugby team, when we learn that Keith, an injured military veteran who wants to take up the sport, is “saving up $3000 for his first rugby chair.” The accompanying clip, which shows Keith propelling an ordinary wheelchair while a little kid speeds ahead on a tricycle, gestures to the amount of upscaling specialization he needs (Rubin and Shapiro 2005, 1:16:24–30). Those knives that seem to extend from my feet: they’re not any old knives either. Having my own skates, carefully chosen blades, and access to a sharpening specialist make a lot of difference, partly because consistent conditions aid the training of proprioception. The newest skaters often have the biggest equipment challenge, skating on a different pair of rentals every week, maybe ill-fitting or long past needing a sharpening.
The ranking of some people as always, permanently beneath a presumed ideal human unit of one, then, occurs within a context in which all sorts of competitive advantages go unchecked. One self-perpetuating effect of such ranking is to validate the ultimate importance of the categories that do get regulated, gender prominent among them. Most para sport rules, like rules presuming normate participants, consider gender an overarching factor even within the insistence on how many other physical factors matter. Wheelchair rugby, one of a few para sports with “mixed-gender” teams (meaning people classifiable as women or men only), effectively classifies being female as a competitive disadvantage. It classifies all athletes from .5 to 3.5 in ability but adds .5 for every woman on the court in calculating the maximum eight human-ability points allowed (Wheelchair Rugby 2025). Notice that the very specific quantification of gender as a .5 increment of impairment supports the presumption of women’s inferior athleticism and contributes the aura of scientific objectivity that attaching a number often adds.
In validating the categories, we also contribute to validating the knowledge systems that underpin them. Anima Adjepong emphasizes that gender binarizing in sport works to secure the hold of a liberal, white-dominated feminism over more radical thinking, including queer African feminisms. One result, Adjepong points out, is satisfaction with trans inclusion policies designed around crossing between binary, medically gatekept, gender categories (Adjepong 2023). This leaves out a lot of people, sometimes genderqueer, gender-expansive, or agender, who—based on identity, principle, or resources—can’t or won’t wrench themselves into one of those categories.
What gets me sometimes about gender binarism in sport is the evidence all around us about numerous variables affecting performance. Bodily characteristics clearly don’t always map onto gender the way that gender segregation policies allege that they do. Just notice that people assigned the same gender at birth grow up into various shapes and sizes. Competitive advantages unlinked to gender—except to the extent that people assigned male at birth get the most sports support—pop up in common knowledge and daily experience. People of all ages show up to sports activities with or without the benefits of prior lessons, relevant muscle memory, or an early childhood spent with grown-ups who played catch with them. Skates and wheelchairs come in hand-me-down and new, baseline and specialized, maybe even custom-made. People with the fancy stuff can usually do more.
Consider, too, the bodily histories we bring to sport. These are variously affected by harms both systemic—environmental toxins, food apartheid, jobs prone to repetitive-strain injuries, the list here is endless—and individual. I have three more decades than Anna does of routine decline in my proprioceptive sensors. Anna’s active childhood in competitive sports left them with ankle mobility compromised by recurring injuries, not all, in retrospect, well treated.
In the next section I talk about one big contributor to maintaining gender-binarist categories in the face of all this counterevidence: belief in the defining power of testosterone.