Fair Play
How Sports Shape the Gender Debates
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“[An] electrifying debut…Through in-depth and compassionate reporting, Barnes breaks down the misunderstood science surrounding sex and gender that has been used to keep cisgender women out of sports and has fueled debate over trans athletes participation in women’s sports.”—Shannon Carlin, TIME
magazine, “100 Must-Read Books of 2023”
For decades women have been playing competitive sports, thanks in large part to the protective cover of Title IX. Since the passage of that law, the number of women participating in sports and the level of competition in high school and college and professionally, has risen dramatically. In Fair Play, award-winning journalist Katie Barnes traces the evolution of women’s sports as a pastime and a political arena where equality and fairness have been fought over for generations.
As attitudes toward gender have shifted to embrace more fluidity in recent decades, sex continues to be viewed as a static binary that is easily determined: male or female. It is on the very idea of static sex that we have built an entire sporting apparatus. Now that foundation is being hotly debated as a result of intense culture wars. Many transgender and intersex athletes, including a South African runner, a wrestler in Texas, a Connecticut track star, and a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, have captured the attention of law and policymakers who want to decide how and when they compete. Women’s sports, since their inception, have been seen as a separate class of competition that requires protection and rules for entry. But what are those rules and who gets to make them? Fair Play looks at all sides of the issue and presents a reasoned and much-needed solution that seeks to preserve opportunities for all going forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
ESPN reporter Barnes debuts with a rigorous exploration of contemporary debates around who gets to compete in women's sports. They explain how efforts to regulate women's sports have proliferated ever since the passage of Title IX in 1972, which created the modern two-sex sports landscape by effectively requiring schools to fund women's athletics if they funded men's sports. Detailing how sports officials have policed who counts as a woman, Barnes describes the ordeal of South African runner Caster Semenya, a cis woman whom the World Athletics federation only allowed to continue competing in the women's category for the 400 meter, 800 meter, and 1,500 meter races if she took medication, which had harsh side effects, to suppress her naturally high testosterone levels. Barnes resists providing definitive solutions on incorporating trans and nonbinary athletes into sex-segregated athletics, writing on the one hand that they're not opposed to restricting trans men taking testosterone from competing in the women's category. On the other hand, the author argues that though trans women who "went through testosterone-driven puberty" may "retain some physiological advantages," such differences in ability are unavoidable in sports and shouldn't necessarily disqualify them. The nuanced analysis captures the complexity of the issue while cutting through bad faith arguments. Searching and timely, this brings clarity to a much debated topic.
