A Sporting Chance
Intersex kids often get caught in the crossfire of the gender culture war, although they are rarely named or acknowledged directly. The way we gender segregate sports is as much a problem for intersex kids as it is for transgender kids. So, let’s talk about it.
Intersex means someone was born with biophysical characteristics that don’t fit into normative definitions of male and female. This covers primary and secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, hormones, and gonads. These differences are sometimes visible at birth, and sometimes only become apparent later in life. It’s possible to go one’s entire life without knowing they’re intersex. (Some intersex people are also transgender—as I am myself!)
The point at which this becomes a problem in sports is when definitions of male and female are used to disqualify intersex people. A high-profile case of this is that of Caster Semenya, an intersex woman and Olympian middle-distance runner. She has naturally elevated testosterone, which was seen as an “unfair advantage” against peri-sex (non-intersex) women. She was given an ultimatum: chemically lower her testosterone or don’t compete.
Here’s the problem with that reasoning: sports are all about inborn advantages. Michael Phelps produced half the lactic acid that an average human makes—should he have been forced to chemically alter his body to correct for that?
It is frequently the same people who would deny transgender kids hormones and surgery who advocate that surgeries and hormones be forced on intersex kids, even from birth. These are two sides of the same coin: the belief that male and female categories are immutable, and that anyone who falls outside of those categories or seeks to move between or outside of them is a deviation to be corrected, rather than evidence of the frailty of the categories they have constructed.
And there are sex-linked characteristics we don’t disqualify people for that also lead to advantages in sports—cisgender men, on average, are taller than cisgender women. But we don’t disqualify women over six feet tall from playing basketball, a sport where height offers a serious advantage. There’s nothing wrong with the bodies of intersex people, any more than there’s something wrong with the bodies of tall women or short men.
So, how does all this affect kids? Well, intersex kids often are forcibly put on hormones or made to undergo surgery without their consent.
Youth sports can also be a place of considerable discrimination against intersex kids. The locker rooms of my middle school were the first place I was targeted for being intersex. I quickly learned to dread gym class and sports, particularly sports with uniforms that were revealing or tight. As I got older and came out as transgender, I also was functionally barred from joining sex-segregated sports, as I would be forced to compete in the division of my assigned sex. It’s no surprise that I ended up choosing a sport as a child that was coed for youth: fencing.
There are a couple of policies that would have helped, some of which are already being implemented in schools. One of them is locker room choice: allowing kids to choose the locker room that matches their asserted gender. Another is allowing kids to choose to change in a gender-neutral space. (Many schools use the nurse’s office, which isn’t ideal but is nevertheless a good option for schools.)
For the sports themselves, helpful policies would be ones which allow kids to self-select for gender-segregated sports and, when possible, ones which create coed teams for kids to play on. Most of those teams will have to be non-competitive until a significant number of other schools also create coed teams, but having options is the name of the game, here.
In gym classes, encourage coed competition and avoid having “battle of the sexes” games. And please stop lining kids up boy-girl-boy-girl—it’s just unnecessary.
For those who are concerned about sports scholarships—if cisgender, peri-sex girls are at that much of a disadvantage, that points to a more structural issue that needs addressing. Maybe we should reconsider giving scholarships based on the physical ability of children and young adults.
These changes aren’t that big—may even seem trivial—but they can make a world of a difference to the kids they affect. They help change the culture of sports, too. The less importance we put on sex in sports, the better it will be for kids—all kids. ▼
Julian Harbaugh (they/them) is CAMP Rehoboth’s Youth Peer Leader, and a recent University of Delaware graduate. When they’re not writing, they can be found teaching their four rats new tricks, walking their dog, and roaming garage sales looking for antique philosophy books.