Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Trans Basketball and Our Fucked Up Gender Relations

So Kye Allums, a member of the George Washington University Women's Basketball team, is transitioning to life as a man but will continue to play for the women's team. The story for most people seems to be "GWU is playing a transgender person on their team," which I'll admit, is an interesting story. And good on the folks at GWU for being apparently really cool with the whole thing.

But to me, the more interesting story is in NCAA by-laws (isn't that always where the action is at?). It turns out the NCAA not-too-surprisingly doesn't have a very well fleshed-out policy on transgender athletes. But the rules they do have tell us a lot about how the NCAA still views male and female athletes here in the enlightened 21st century.

It turns out female-to-male transitioning people can play for either men's or women's teams, but male-to-female transitioning people can only play for men's teams until they've undergone at least one full year of hormone therapy.

You know, because men are better than women at everything, so while a woman can make a feeble attempt to play a man's game, it's just unfair to all those little, fragile women to let a man play against them unless he's become thoroughly woman first...

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