Professors argue sex-segregated sports stem from ‘white supremacist,’ ‘hetero-patriarchal’ ideologies
Professors recently penned an op-ed calling for the end of sex segregation in sports, arguing that it ‘reproduces gender inequality’ and is a ‘racialized ideology.’
The authors claimed that transgender women do not regularly outperform biological women in sports, though one study revealed that they do even after a year of hormone therapy.
Professors recently penned an op-ed calling for the end of sex segregation in sports.
Anima Adjepong of the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Travers, who uses one name, of Simon Fraser University (SFU), argued that sex segregation “reproduces gender inequality” and is a “racialized ideology” in The Society Pages.
“Given the historical and contemporary reasons for sex segregation in sport, there is a heightened need to challenge this practice,” they wrote. “After all, today’s sporting environments are an outgrowth of the European colonial project that positioned sport as part of a ‘civilizing’ project that was white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal at its core.”
A spokesperson for SFU, a Canadian university, told Campus Reform, “The role of a university is to nurture debate and dialogue about important and often controversial issues in the public sphere.”
“An underlying principle of that vision commits SFU to being an open and inclusive university whose foundation is intellectual and academic freedom,” he continued. “While academic freedom supports faculty members in expressing their views, it does not imply endorsement from the university.”
Adjepong and Travers claimed that there is a “sport’s gender panic.” The panic, they said, is “not because [men] regularly outperform cisgender women–they do not–but because sport is the one realm where cultural beliefs regarding fundamental sex and gender differences continue to be institutionalized.”
A study suggested that transgender women, or biological men, are stronger and faster than women because they outperform them in tasks including running, pushups, and sit-ups. Their biological advantage lasted, NBC reported, even after a year of hormone therapy to suppress testosterone.
The authors discussed several bills intended to ban biological men from participating in women’s sports, arguing that these measures “delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways” and are “[b]acked by a constellation of white supremacist, conservative and hetero-patriarchal organizations and movements.”
[RELATED: Texas lawmaker plans to introduce ‘Save Women’s Sports’ Act]
Travers has discussed other transgender issues as a sociology professor and researcher. One of her books, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution, is “meant to open up options for kids’ own gender self-determination, to question the need for the sex binary, and to highlight ways that cultural and material resources can be redistributed more equitably.”
Adjepong teaches in Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and “is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra,” according to The Society Pages.
Her article in The Journal of Men’s Studies “makes a case for a deeper engagement with the erotic” while conducting ethnographic research in different cultural communities.
A summary of “Erotic Ethnography: Sex, Spirituality, and Embodiment in Qualitative Research” reads, “Through a meditation on key eroticized moments from ethnographic research for various projects, the author examines how an embrace of erotic ethnography can produce more ethical, mindful, and human-centered approaches to doing qualitative research.”
Campus Reform contacted Adjepong, Travers, and the University of Cincinnati for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
