Pairs and Other Multiples

Official rule guides for sport often involve a frustrating contradiction. They bear all the trappings of clear explanation: subsections, itemized rules, definitions of terminology, do and don’t words like can, must, permitted, prohibited. Yet they still might not tell you what you need to know. The particulars may be ambiguous, hard to locate, or unclear without some prior knowledge that rule makers take for granted. Or they don’t seem to apply to everyone. Why can’t Jordan Chiles get back her 2024 Olympic Bronze medal in floor exercise if people who correctly challenged her fourth-place score can prove that they made the appeal within the sixty seconds allowed? Or they just don’t make logical sense. Why does Rule 604 of USA Hockey, the sport’s national governing body, prohibit body checking on teams for women and girls? Sometimes the logic depends on matters like racism and sexism, either patent or hard to prove.

The US Figure Skating rulebook exemplifies this contradiction in usability. The 2025–2026 edition has a daunting 248 pages. Even if you can navigate to the ones you need, you probably need more than what’s in there. Additional rules and technical notifications exist behind a members-only paywall. Some rules change yearly, and people linked to top athletes or training centers have more access to understanding their consequences. Early in the pandemic, I took weekly off-ice spin classes on Zoom (using a spinner device to practice on the floor) from a figure skating coach who, among her other accolades, had coached a recent national champion. Every year after new rules came out, she could get on a meeting to learn more about their consequences, like what judges likely (though no guarantee!) would count as the difficult spin exits that skaters could get bonus points for. The ISU’s clarification that the exit must have “a significant impact on the balance, control and execution of the spin,” leaves a lot of room for interpretation (ISU 2025, 13).

Meanwhile, the USFS rules for pairs skating depend on a gender traditionalism that the rulebook never bothers to justify, although the first sentence of the “Pair Definition” (rule 7020), which follows ISU rule 619 (ISU 2024), might give you a fleeting hope that a better gender model prevails. “Pair skating,” it states, “is the skating of two persons in unison who perform their movements in such harmony with each other as to give the impression of genuine pair skating as contrasted with independent single skating.” So far so good, as far as gender inclusion goes, although some wiggle words like harmony, impression, or genuine might generate concern.

The next sentence, strikingly vague for a rule book, is more alarming: “Attention should be paid to the selection of an appropriate partner.” Paid by whom? According to what criteria? In a sport that used “ladies” until 2021 as the official name for people competing as female, “appropriate” calls up respectability politics, which continue to plague figure skating partly because of contradictory standards about appropriate appearance. For example, in all figure skating disciplines “The clothing of the competitors must be modest, dignified and appropriate for athletic competitions and tests, not garish or theatrical in design” (rule 7031). Yet most people competing as female, including young children, wear skating dresses with supershort skirts and skin-colored “illusion fabric” that helps to fake all sorts of skin reveal. How is that “modest and dignified” and not “garish or theatrical”? Insider codes of décolleté and sparkle, modulated by elitism, racism, and antiqueer/antitrans bias, have long differentiated classy from trashy and manly from effeminate.

With rule 7020’s single subpoint (7020 A with no B), which does not have an ISU counterpart, gender flexibility begins a swift explicit descent: “In pair skating competitions, only pairs of the same composition (woman and man, two women or two men) may compete against each other.” Open-gender devolves to binary gender and competition remains gender-segregated with the addition of a two-person f/m pair as a composite unit of uniform gender. The rules also, like the ISU rules, identify specifically gendered roles for pairs tricks like lifts, throw jumps, and death spirals (7100–7109).

In addition, rule 7221 states that proficiency tests, which require performing a set of required skills within a partnered program, “must consist of a woman and a man.” This adds undue burden to pairs training in any other configuration. Programs involve different actions of each partner, ranging from possibly ungendered choreographic matters, like who’s on the left in side-by-side footwork, to who lifts and throws the other. Learning it all takes time and timing, coordinated muscle memory across two bodyminds. While credentials adhere to the individual skater—I can pass a test with one partner and compete with another—it would add considerable time and expense to train programs with other partners for testing.

What’s with the difference in US Figure Skating between the openness of “two persons” and the barriers to testing and competing in a pair other than f/m? The reference to pairs besides f/m in rule 7020 A, which has been in place since at least 2010, has at least one laudable, maybe intentional function: it allows USFS to endorse competitions like the Gay Games, a multisport competition that occurs, following the Olympic model, every four years. In contrast, the ISU, which regulates international competition, threatened until 2018 to punish skaters for participating (Zeigler 2017). Yet why would USFS stop there, instead of departing from the ISU by broadly allowing all pairings in domestic competitions?

A simple answer is that f/m pairing uses basic math to follow the logic of gender segregation across skating, which is based on the principle that males will outscore females—even at competition levels where the opposite is routinely true. By that logic, a team of two men always has more potential than in any other gender configuration. So, too, with other sports gender-policed in human units of two, like mixed doubles tennis. The US Tennis Association (USTA) goes as far as to insist on binary-based gender division all over its Family Tournament. For example, father/daughter teams can’t compete against father/son teams, and the only other dividing principle for parent/child teams concerns the age of the parent, although surely large age differences among children would matter more often than their gender (USTA 2024b, IV.2).

Even sports policed in units larger than two run the same binary-based calculation. Example: Quadball, a sport combining rugby, dodgeball, and tag that people play with brooms between their legs. Inspired by a fictional sport in the Harry Potter series, Quadball was rebranded in 2022 to distance it from the name-assigned-at-birth by its antitrans creator (and I will not deadname the sport by telling you what that name was.) Quadball categorizes gender by gender identity and allows participants of every gender identity, thus (in theory) avoiding gender-assignment policing and the exclusion of nonbinary people. Yet its celebrated rule Title 9 3/4, which stipulates that at most four of a maximum seven people on the field can share a gender identity (US Quadball 2024), has the same presumption underlying binary-gender segregation: men by definition have an advantage and it’s their number that must be limited.

Besides showing the prevalence of gender binarism, the gender sorting in these multiple-person units shows how many values are promoted in the process of regulation. USTA allows parents to claim ties to children related by “blood, legal adoption, or marriage,” while stipulating that “death does not destroy any step relationship, but divorce does” (USTA 2024a, 57). That queer kid down the block that you care for, your unmarried aunt, the parenting throuple, those stepparents who destroy marriages (note the stigma encoded in that word as opposed to, say, end): no family tennis for them, or for any nonbinary person who wants to participate without being misgendered.

Gender traditionalism is sedimented throughout every aspect of pairs skating, which Anna and I experience from a telling physical disparity. Despite having a pair of gender markers (f/f) and gender identities (f/nb) forbidden in USFS, we have the kind of height difference that f/m pairing is ordinarily used to accomplish. Because ISU bios publicize birthdate and height as relevant vital statistics—plus gender, on display for skating partners through the listing convention of ladies-first versus alphabetical order—I can tell you, courtesy of Anna’s handy spreadsheets, that, for example, the average height difference between pairs at the 2025 World Championships was about ten inches. Our height difference is eight inches, making Anna physically more suited, in at least this one key way, to do the traditional man’s s role of lifter and thrower. Think of those directives to lift heavy objects using your legs versus your back: it’s harder for the shorter person, who might also be the less heavy object, to get the leverage required to lift someone a lot taller. This makes me, in common lingo for people of any age in that role, “the pair girl.”

That said, nothing about gendered role division ever amounts to simple physics. People train specifically to be pair girls or pair boys, whether from childhood or as relatively new adult partners. In our pair, while we both need to work on general athletic tools like core strength, mobility, and balance, Anna is lifting heavy weights from squats to practice lifting me. I’m deep into tricep dips to practice contributing to pushing me up. (One other project especially for me right now: conditioning myself not to freak out when my head is upside down, a prerequisite for learning death spirals.)

Plus, as Anna emphasizes, it’s hard to know what’s possible in any skating discipline without sufficient interest and incentive to invent, learn, and perform differently. What if gender-norm transgressions were explicitly rewarded rather than risky to put in front of judges? What if lifting criteria rewarded unusual models of weight bearing that facilitated taking turns being the lifter? Dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Adriana Pierce, founder of #QueerTheBallet, makes a similar point about her genre. Once you stop thinking of overhead lifts as the be-all-end-all of ballet and start thinking of pointe shoes as tools instead of as gender markers, a world of choreographic possibilities and thrilling physical experiments emerge (Dixon 2021).

Add in, now, the complicating factor that, of course, people of all genders come in various sizes, so mapping height consistently onto gender requires numerous entangling, chicken-and-egg, and/or simply obstructionist factors to double down on gender traditionalism. Organizations, coaches, and parents seeking to develop competitive pairs teams often put together small athletes registered as girls with larger, often older athletes registered as boys. Timothy LeDuc, 2022 US Pairs champion with partner Ashley Cain, came out as nonbinary in 2021 (leaving, I presume, their USFS gender marker intact to make the two still a legal pair). The duo was considered gender-nonconforming partly because Cain is tall for a pair girl at 5′6″.

Gender-assigned physical differences then support ideological traditionalism on and off the ice. Tricks often emphasize male strength and camouflage the strength required to be lifted and thrown. Typical language for training pairs contributes to notions that males should be in charge: lift the girl, throw the girl, put the girl where you want her to be. So does the dearth of male figure skaters altogether, which you can blame on sexist, antiqueer, and antifeminine prejudice: male skaters must surely all be effeminate gays (and, supposedly, that’s bad), so play football instead. With male partners a precious commodity, and potential women partners a dime a dozen, you get a situation ripe for the abuse that also plagues ice dance and ballet (Manta 2021; Angyal 2021).

The resulting cast of characters, in this sport that features storytelling through movement, then lends itself to portraying heterosexual romance. It’s important to recognize that this narrative can be baked into the pleasures as well as the presumptions of pairs skating, for both practitioners and fans. This point is made vividly in the series I Have Nothing (2023), a comedy/documentary created by queer comedian Carolyn Taylor about how she actualizes a fantasy, despite having no relevant skills, to choreograph a pairs routine inspired by the 1988 Olympics, to Whitney Houston’s 1993 song of the same name. That fantasy, as she puts it in one of her stand-up routines, requires the man-and-woman duo built into the sport: “I want to see straight people getting sexy on blades!” (Episode 5, 6:41–7:06). She gets the perfect skaters to work with: Ekaterina (Katia) Gordeeva and David Pelletier, who, besides being married to each other now, both won Olympic gold with other skating partners they married.

More on that traditionalism as I go along. But first I want you to think about your own stake in something that is one huge justification for gender sorting: the chance to win.