Winning

In my experience, plenty of people who support trans inclusion in sport remain suspicious about competitive advantage. They buy the argument that inclusion should be the guiding principle in organized sports. They can situate sports policing within a broader antitrans agenda, which increasingly features in a concoction of antitrans and racist legislative proposals. In Maine, where I live—and where trans protections more often pass instead (Gormley 2023)—2023’s LD 930: An Act to Allow Only Students of Female Gender to Participate in Women’s and Girls’ Scholastic Sports, designed to base eligibility on gender assigned at birth, kept very bad company. It appeared alongside LD 618: An Act to Eliminate Critical Race Theory, Social and Emotional Learning and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion from School Curricula, and other proposals that would disproportionately harm people who are queer, trans, gender-nonconforming, and/or BIPOC: requiring ID for voting; providing a rating system for library books; undoing progress against youth incarceration.

Even so, armed with all this knowledge, people might shyly venture: I’m all for trans inclusion, but what about that swimmer from UPenn who beat all those nontrans women at the NCAA championships a few years ago? Or those trans girl runners in Connecticut? With people like them competing, it seems like I don’t—or my kid, team, school, country doesn’t—have a chance to win. Is that fair? While I can respond by returning to every point I just itemized and others I will elaborate on later, such as the flawed reputation of testosterone, I want to surface something else here that, I think, can make people talk past, rather than with, each other about gender regulation in sport: conflicting values and feelings about competitiveness and the desire to win.

I have noticed these disparate views often in my role, since 2008, chairing the Bates College Athletics Committee, a group of faculty, staff, and students who work to enhance the relationship of academics and athletics. As a result of our coalition work with various stakeholders, Bates became an early adopter of trans inclusion policies in 2011, the very first of such policies to address recreational as well as intercollegiate sports. We anticipated resistance when we initially proposed these policies to the faculty at large, given how new and contested such policies were. We didn’t. Much harder to sell has been excusing students from class for games and meets. Some faculty balked especially at extra absences for postseason play, little moved by testimonies about the excitement of making it to championship rounds.

“What do you expect?” a colleague half-joked to me once, after a contentious faculty meeting, “We’re a bunch of nerds who got traumatized in gym class.” While that hardly characterizes all professors (although it does characterize me), and while class attendance raises many thorny issues without easy answers, there definitely can be an empathy gap around athletic ambitions to win.

Wanting to win, or intently wanting others to win, can be core, secondary, or superfluous to someone’s engagement in sport, whether as a practitioner, coach, fan, or bystander. It can make deep sense or none at all. Like so many activities that sports may center—slamming into people, running really fast, throwing heavy objects, directing objects to targets, hurling yourself headlong into the water, or, of course, twirling around on a blade—to care about winning can seem admirable or unsavory, enjoyable or distasteful, obvious or inexplicable.

Common phrases like “competitive drive” suggest a personality trait located, and maybe born, deep inside us. But regardless of where it starts, it requires a lot to sustain and act on. World champion ice dancer, choreographer, and inclusion activist Kaitlyn Weaver offers a great account of how this might work in a 2023 book-club podcast episode cohosted by The Future of Figure Skating and Anything GOEs. (The “GOE” stands for the “grade of execution,” which contributes to the points a figure skater may receive for a particular element in their program.) The podcast featured guests Joan Ryan, who wrote a sadly still-relevant 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about the often-troubling experiences of high-level child gymnasts and figure skaters, and Weaver, who reflected on her own path, which began in Houston, Texas, where future champions made local news. Tara Lipinski, who trained for several years at the rink in Houston’s Galleria Mall, went on to win the 1998 Olympic gold medal in “Ladies” figure skating at age fifteen. Béla Károlyi’s training center, “Karolyi Ranch,” was an hour away; Károlyi was famous for producing Olympic gymnasts and later for the kind of abuses Ryan detailed.

In that environment, Weaver explained, “Being a competitive child athlete was the dream. Being able to train at the rink, go to school at the rink, live at the rink in the training atmosphere was my goal. And I get chills remembering how excited that used to make me.” Weaver also remembers the televised “fluff pieces” about athletes that captivated her and her mom, the two of them wondering what it would be like to be one of those athletes. “So, in a way, we were absolutely conditioned,” the “we” growing to extend beyond Weaver and her mom: “Raising an athlete, a young athlete, it takes a village, . . . [it] takes a family and a support system” (“Book Club Discussion” 2023, 14:48–15:43). By the time Weaver got to the Olympics, pursuing that dream had involved family relocation, immense expense, coaches, trainers, national figure skating organizations, and her ice dance partner, Andrew Poje.

Weaver’s description stood out to me partly because my own figure skating origin story is so different. I grew up in a family that almost rewarded shunning competitive sport. We didn’t watch, attend, or discuss sports together. None of the kids did extracurricular sports at school, although I did take some “learn to skate” beginner classes at Chicago’s Rainbo Arena. Did I ask for them? How did we know about them? I don’t remember and there is no family lore to help me out. In fact, I needed a concert wiki to help me date those early lessons to around 1969, based on a thrilling moment that did stick with me when a classmate and I broke the oft-repeated rule, “DON’T go into the Kinetic Playground,” the nightclub next door with an access point along a shared wall. One day, peeking in, we spotted bottles and cigarette butts from the night before, befitting the venue’s enticing yet confusing name, and a musician we took to be the weekend’s headliner, blues great B. B. King.

I liked skating enough, however, to skate for about four more years on what I now recognize as a “recreational” versus “competitive” track. I skated once or twice a week, generally getting to a closer rink by spending my lunch money on bus fare while my mom was at work. That’s no picture of deprivation. She could pay for lessons and stock Kraft American Singles, the individually wrapped units of “cheese food product” that I packed for lunch instead, hardly fancy but not the cheapest way to eat either. My monied grandparents even paid to send me to skating camp a few times. Still, we had neither the income nor parental availability for serious training, nor any notion, really, of what wanting or undertaking it would entail. Someone had to explain to us, for instance, that the main form of instruction at camp was private lessons. I’d never had any. Unlike when I took to practice ice decades later, and learned to recognize concentrated, well-capitalized advancement toward lofty competitive goals, I did not understand what was going on around me.

Instead, I fit the dominant family narrative by being “bad at gym,” a narrative that endured long after I became a serious skater in my forties. “I can hardly believe your brother,” my mother used to say. “He’s running every day! No one else in our family is athletic.” “Mom!” I would respond, hearing that exasperated teen voice I hadn’t known was still in me, “What about my skating?! Don’t you remember coming to my ice shows, or the Gay Games, or that book I wrote?” Oh, right. It wasn’t yet her dementia forgetting on repeat. That just wasn’t part of our story.

As Weaver’s account and mine suggest, being competitive in both senses of the phrase—wanting to win and having the wherewithal to do so—depends on far more than an individual athlete’s desire, including others who come to have a stake in your success. Such people often get memorialized in pop culture as objects of ridicule and disdain. Witness numerous films, TV movies, and detective-show episodes (Castle, 2009–2016, had at least five) that turn on a star-adjacent facilitator turned psychopath out to protect their own meal ticket or reflected glory. Band mate, manager, pageant coach, parent—maybe ripped from the headlines, like that Texas cheerleader-murdering mom!

The main problem, however, isn’t individuals gone bad but numerous systemic issues. Everyone should have access to free quality education. No one should have to put their bodies on the line to get it. Yet right now in the United States, many people reasonably understand producing an athletic standout as their best shot to get their kid into and pay for college, either directly through an athletic scholarship or by enhancing an application with impressive extracurriculars. No one’s access to necessities and a good quality of life should be precarious. Yet many people in jobs that serve athletes work primarily as independent contractors, without job security or the benefits, like healthcare and sick leave, sometimes dubiously attached to having certain kinds of employment or being legally attached to someone who does. In figure skating, what coaches can charge per hour and how much work they get depends a lot, in the United States at least, on the success of their students, which is only one variable within a labor situation beset by routine threats to income. If a regular customer gets injured, changes coaches, has a financial setback, or just loses interest; if a blizzard, pandemic, or malfunctioning ice resurfacer (nickname: “Zamboni”) shuts down the rink: all of that represents lost wages that many coaches can’t make up.

Then factor in an athlete competing for the glory of their team, school, sports organization, town, region, or nation, which can involve pressures and desires both external and internalized. Financial support from sponsors or governing bodies may be on the line—to stay on a team or to make it further in competition as expenses add up. Sports ingrain loyalties in all sorts of ways, incorporating rituals of belonging that often feed into bigger-picture values. At my first competitions, it seemed almost surreal when the announcer called me out to the ice by the formula I’d heard on TV: “Pronoun competes on behalf of the X Figure Skating Club in Y location. Please welcome name of skater.” Like learning to care about who sharpens my blades and receiving tossies after my competition skate—trinkets such as stuffed animals that appreciative audience members throw onto the ice—being introduced that way contributed to making me feel like a real skater. It also gave me a glimpse of why top skaters who had been harmed by systemic racism and heteronormativity along their path might nonetheless be motivated or honored to “compete on behalf of the United States of America.”

Or to know it was in their best interest to say they were. When the stakes and stakeholders ramp up, so does the disincentive to rock the boat. As Weaver put it, by the time she became an international competitor, it was still her dream, but she was also “kind of the figurehead on this massive production. And so, I would not do anything to eff that up, . . . to risk that” (29:22–29:58).

For Weaver, who came out as queer after her competitive days had past, the standards she chafed against included norms of blond ballerina feminine heterosexuality that she had learned to perform, both to compete for an ice dance partner, among a sea of contenders for every male dancer, and then as part of her contribution to the dance team’s success. The high cost of departing from those norms, and the way they get perpetuated for singles skaters, too, is well illustrated in A. J. Sass’s middle-grade novel Ana on the Edge (2020), about a nationally competitive twelve-year-old skater who comes to identify as nonbinary. When Ana’s advancement becomes linked to having an expensive choreographer and costume designer, the $1600 price tag on the unwelcome ethereal-princess costume compounds the growing misery that is also compromising Ana’s skating. How can Ana reject a role that her mother works overtime to pay for? Especially when it’s obviously a winning look: “A champion would wear a dress just like this on the top step of the podium” (146–48).

I took up attitudes about winning because I suspected that conflicting and underexamined stakes in it are a roadblock to moving past the belief that gender assigned at birth is the key to competitive fairness, despite evidence to the contrary and the exclusionary consequences of building sport on that foundation. What do you mean “It’s not whether you win or lose”!? What do you mean, you really care about that trophy?! The more we dismiss or appear inexplicable to each other, the less likely we are to move forward on anything. Considering the stakes in winning also surfaces some of the interconnected issues that support maintaining the status quo.

I take those on from different angles in the next sections.