22. Pretending your way to equality

Sports and magical thinking

I feel perennially conflicted about America, which on the one hand I think is far enough away to consider not my problem; and on the other, I continue to very much make my problem. This week I’ve been working on book edits for my American publisher (a book in which eight of the nine subjects are American), had two pieces run in an American outlet, and started reading a book about an American witch hunt.

The problem, and this is not an original observation, is that the US and the UK share exactly enough — language, history, culture, religion — to make it near-impossible to comprehend how vastly different the two nations are. I don’t expect France to have, for example, the same legal apparatus as the UK, or Nigeria to have the same value system. Both those countries are deeply entangled in the history of Britain, and yet they seem “foreign” to me in a way that makes their foreignness not an affront.

America, though… America has the power to constantly baffle me. For example: Title IX. Title IX is about ending sex discrimination in education, but — because America is inexplicable — its most significant application is to sports, because America’s combination of expensive private education mitigated by sports scholarships means equal access to education relies on equal access to sports. Which means that America’s policy on trans inclusion in sport is being determined, in large part, by the Department for Education.

If I’ve explained this badly, I apologise to any Americans reading, but the problem is none of it makes any sense. Why is your education system so punishingly expensive, and why would the route you take to fixing that be through sports, and why would you make the Department of Education ultimately responsible for settling the great existential question of what sex is? And why do I know about Title IX when I’m pretty sure I couldn’t name a single statute from Nigeria or France?

Anyway, two Title IX related things happened this week. Firstly, the Supreme Court blocked West Virginia from enforcing a law that would ban male trans athletes from female sports teams at public schools. Secondly, the Department for Education issued a statement on a proposed change to Title IX:

The proposed rule affirms that students benefit from the chance to join a school sports team to learn about teamwork, leadership, and physical fitness. The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are. The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.

I’ve seen this welcomed by people whose judgement I respect (and who know a lot more than me, i.e. anything at all, about US constitutional law) as balancing inclusion and fairness. I feel intrinsically that any rule which allows males to compete in female sports is, by definition, unfair and exclusionary to the girls and women who will lose their chances to compete and win.

But I’ve also seen the proposed change cause outrage among trans activists, who see the provision that “some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation” as a backdoor through which the unwanted fact of biological sex may be reasserted. It seems fundamentally to me to be a fudge — kicking the hard question down to the schools and making a show of supporting individual choice without offering any framework to guide or support it. How characteristically and bafflingly American.

Sports seems to me the place where physical experience and ideology are most blatantly in conflict

As a longterm follower of the gender wars, the sports issue obsesses me, because it seems to me the place where physical experience and ideology are most blatantly in conflict. It is, obviously, shocking and ridiculous when people claim in the face of all facts (for example) that female rates of criminality are no different to male rates. But at least that’s a position based on denying statistics.

Whereas denying sexed difference in athletic performance involves the careful practice of ignorance about your own everyday bodily experience. Just go out on the street and see whether men or women are taller. Just go to a garden centre and sees who’s most comfortable hefting bags of compost. Just pop along to a 5k and see who runs faster. These are not obscure points of data. They’re things you can observe, easily and directly.

But they’re things that some people — some women — are fascinatingly in denial of. I read a newsletter about female strength training by American writer Casey Johnston, and last week the (female) author declared that the Supreme Court decision on West Virginia “rules”, adding:

a central, if sometimes subtextual, concern of this newsletter is questioning the lines drawn around gender performance. As long as there are people posting that women who lift weights or have muscles “aren’t feminine”, this will remain the case.

The default terf position on women saying things like this is often to cry “handmaid”, but I don’t think that covers it at all. Yes, phenomena like “himpathy” (the tendency to prioritise male feelings over female) are probably playing a part here — it feels more unthinkable to deprive men of their wants than to deprive women of their resources (in this case, fair access to sports). But Johnston here is explicitly seeking to gain something from the denial of sex difference.

Why should the collapse of female sports categories do anything to change “people posting that women who lift weights or have muscles ‘aren’t feminine’”? The proposed causal link is obscure to me and unexplained, but I think goes something like this: sexist social custom demands women be small and weak, therefore we should incorporate more large and powerful people (men) into the category of women in order to undermine that custom. By pretending sex doesn’t exist, sexism can be undone.

This is, of course, magical thinking (and, I suspect, a covert admission from those advancing it that they really do think women are inferior and can only be redeemed by piggybacking on maleness). Sex stubbornly continues to be real, and with it all the sex-based components of performance. I lift weights three times a week, and I’m moderately strong for a woman, but my numbers would be deeply poor for a weight-matched man. If I compared my performance to a male lifter’s — or, worse, used male lifters’ performance as a training guide — I would end up demoralised and probably injured. If you don’t consider sex in sports, women end up pushed out.

As luck would have it, this week offered a clear illustration of what “trans inclusion” in sports can look like when trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney did a partner post with Nike. Mulvaney became famous by performing a mincing parody of femininity on TikTok: squealing, twirling and falling over. Thanks to Nike, Mulvaney is now squealing, twirling and falling over in sports bra. Wow thanks Nike, this is really going to change perceptions about athletic competence and gender.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• The sudden, unexplained, unsuspicious (make your own assumptions about what that means), death of Paul Cattermole of S Club 7 just after the band announced a 25th anniversary reunion tour was very sad. I don’t think fame was kind to S Club, a band designed by Simon Fuller explicitly to give him maximum control after his experience of being dumped by the Spice Girls — from the outset, the intention was that every member should be replaceable, and it was notable that none achieved a solid solo career (I’ll probably do a newsletter at some point about Rachel Stevens, Great Lost Pop Star). Cattermole struggled financially (famously, he sold his Brit award to help cover his debts) and never seemed fully at peace with having been a teen idol. Some great songs, though. I was dancing to the Motown pastiche of “Reach” at a wedding recently, and it felt like the definition of joy.

• I’m sorry to hear that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn split, but don’t pretend you’re not a bit hype for the breakup album.

• Two bits of me from the Sunday Times: what Queen Camilla says about modern love, and the TV column. Apparently every other reviewer loved Rain Dogs but I have to say it is notable that they all popped off for the poverty and did a certain amount of gracious handwaving when it came to the actual drama part.

• And also from me in Airmail: a profile of literary super agent and delightful lunch companion Felicity Blunt.