T Time

One reason that gender binarism and gender segregation remain so difficult to dislodge from sport—with consequences beyond sport—is the widespread belief, usually portrayed as scientific certainty, that testosterone (or T) levels determine gender and athletic potential. Yet as Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis meticulously document in Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography (2019), nothing about testosterone is so simple or conclusive. While people often call T a “male hormone” or “sex hormone” and refer to “testosterone levels” as if they can be easily measured, none of that holds up. All people have T. It has functions aside from sex differentiation. The body produces multiple kinds of T, which may differ in effect from T produced outside the body. Variables like time of day and athletic exertion can alter T-level measurements (10–11). Meanwhile, although scientists can demonstrate that T may affect components of athleticism such as physical strength and muscle mass, those effects are variable, never fully predictable, and always relational, dependent on other biological factors and social factors as well.

Jordan-Young and Karkazis introduce the extremely helpful term “T-talk” for the “web of direct claims and indirect associations that circulate around testosterone both as a material substance and as a multivalent cultural symbol” (10–11). T-talk can make cultural beliefs appear grounded in science. T-talk can also contribute to shaping scientific inquiries.

One conversation that epitomizes T-talk for me occurred on an early morning in 2008, at the Olympic Arena in Lake Placid, New York, a sports venue for many big national and international competitions. I’d come there to compete myself at the US Adult Figure Skating Championships, or “Adult Nationals.” This does not signal anything stellar about my abilities. My low-level events, like most events at Adult Nationals, require qualifying tests to participate, not competing your way up.

On the way to meet another skater for informal friend-to-friend coaching at her practice session, I came across a medic preparing gurneys for the next skaters who would need them. When I asked how our competition was going for the medical crew, she told me that they were happy to have us, given the two men’s hockey tournaments we were sandwiched between: an adult tournament that had been marked, as usual, by needless alcohol-fueled injuries, and the upcoming tournament of men’s teams featuring eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds that would doubtlessly bring needless injuries fueled by too much testosterone. While figure skating accidents could be gruesome, they weren’t gratuitous or more gruesome than they had to be.

The medic’s comments typify T-talk in several ways. They make testosterone seem like an independent agent, present specifically in men, with obvious, natural, and uniform effects, explaining some aggressive or reckless behavior as an innate “boys will be boys” phenomenon. Yet this only, apparently, applies to a certain kind of male in a certain kind of sport. When the medic and I concurred that a lot of figure skating’s gruesome accidents happen in pairs (this was long before I ever imagined skating in a pair), she didn’t, for example, blame too much testosterone for the desire to skate around holding another human over your head, maybe with one arm.

I’m not surprised. While people often note the muscle involved for the lifter—certainly more than they do for other skaters—that doesn’t override assumptions that male skaters in general are effeminate and/or gay or the understanding of figure skating itself as a feminine sport. Some hardly consider it a sport at all. That’s why Mars, the nonbinary narrator in the middle-grade novel Skating on Mars, makes sure to clarify that their gender identity, not their toughness, separates them from the skating category “girl”:

These girls . . . who wake up at five in the morning to drag themselves to the rink for ice time. Who spring into the air, knowing they will absolutely fall again and again until they get it right. Even though people think of skating as delicate, it isn’t a dainty sport. It’s hard core. And the girls who stick with it? They’re hard core, too. In a lot of ways, I’m like those girls.

But more and more, in ways that seem to matter, I’m not. (Huntoon 2023, 6)

The sport, the girls, and the main character all have gendered reputations to correct.

Other assumptions about who figure skates work against the association of figure skating with T-fueled recklessness, even though we are the ice-sport athletes with a foolhardy lack of protective gear. People often expect figure skaters to be effete social elites, more artistic than athletic. They expect us to occupy racial categories, like white or Asian, that bigotry associates with ideal or inadequate masculinity, respectively. As the authors of Testosterone emphasize, besides making gender binarism seem natural, T-talk builds on, and then reinforces, interconnecting stereotypes with regard to class, race, and sexuality that contribute to ideas about whose gender is irregular, excessive, insufficient, or just right.

Such assessments contribute to hostile judgments and exclusionary practices. Figure skating has a history of women stigmatized rather than praised for muscularity and spectacular athletic feats, especially if, like Surya Bonaly, Midori Ito, Debi Thomas, and Tonya Harding, their distance from aristocratic whiteness disqualified them from ideal femininity by race and/or class. So, too, in ballet. Black and Brown ballerinas frequently cite the combination of race, gender, and muscle working against them. Lenai Alexis Wilkerson, now with the Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre after several seasons each with the Cincinnati Ballet and Ballet Hispanico, recounts that her first ballet school dismissed her at age twelve because she didn’t have “the balletic line” (Clay 2019). Over the years, she came to recognize that as code for short, muscular, and Black, as she was passed over for dancers she trained with who “looked the part” even when her strength enabled her to do things they weren’t capable of (interview with the author, May 4, 2022). Looking the part meant being able to represent the ideal of pale feminine ethereality, part of the unspoken criteria for “aesthetic cohesion” that many dance companies have used for employment in the corps de ballet, the group of dancers who perform in unison as opposed to in starring roles. Since the corps is the point of entry for most companies, this whitens the ladder all the way up (Baker 2021, 11–17).

In highlighting these examples, I’m not trying to suggest a singular racial history or formula. Hockey players are predominantly white, but playing a sport that involves smashing into people, with a long history of brawling, keeps the perception intact that male players have plenty of T. Female-identified athletes of all hues have long faced hostility for displaying inappropriate athletic ability or even interest. Because of the association of athleticism with masculinity, and of gender-crossing with queerness, this hostility has often taken the form of homohatred. (I prefer homohatred to homophobia because “phobia” frontloads individual psychology in a phenomenon that includes systemic violence and discrimination.) Bias against female athletes as masculine-thus-queer abounds and has taken many forms: accusations that all female athletes are gay; discrimination against female athletes who are gay; practices like “negative recruiting,” which is the term for “come play at our school because the coach at that other one is secretly/openly a lesbian.” Then there is the refusal or inability (sometimes even among queers) to recognize feminine or queer femme people as athletic. Female athletes aren’t all masculine dykes. But (1) some are and (2) some are feminine dykes or other feminine people who femme out as expression, not camouflage.

Still, not one issue or ruse I’ve mentioned above has uniform application. People bring different histories and contexts with them, both personal and systemic. For example, as Hari Ziyad writes in “My Gender Is Black” (2017) Black people’s gender never meets supposedly race-neutral standards. “Black gender is always gender done wrong, done dysfunctionally, done in a way that is not ‘normal.’”

In contrast, as Adjepong (2017) writes, whiteness, especially combined with heteronormativity, brings a hold on gender respectability that allows for exiting and returning to it. The white players they studied in women’s rugby could hang onto feminine reputations while participating in a violent sport considered largely the province of men, contributing in the process to cementing rugby’s reputation as a white sport. It’s like the librarian-by-day/slammer-by-night personalities celebrated in the also white-dominated sport of roller derby. Different standards for acceptable roughness also figure in repeated uproars over the supposedly inadequate reverence for women’s basketball standout white, publicly heterosexual Caitlin Clark and the rush to charge other players, often Black or Brown and/or not straight, with undue roughness against her (Travers et al. 2024). As if Clark somehow became a standout playing ladylike basketball herself.