The Past and Future of Gender in Sport | Good Sport

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We often take gender for granted as a “natural” division in sports and life. But did you know the first decisions to divide sports into “male” and “female” categories were in many ways the result of women beating men in mixed gender competitions? In this episode, Jody chats with Veronica Ivy, a trans world cycling champion, about the pitfalls of dividing sports by gender. Then he hears from Laura Pappano, a journalist and researcher about the fascinating (and modern) history of gender segregation in sports. Finally, Jody returns to his Ultimate Frisbee roots as he and Raha Mozaffari, a two-time National Champion in the Mixed Division, talk about what we could learn from sports if we stopped using gender as the primary way to categorize athletes -- and explored all the other ways we could create games that are safe, fair, and competitive.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hugh.
0:09.5	Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us, for you.
0:15.5	Topics like Title IX and Equal Pay for Women athletes are in the news a lot these days. But did you know that athletics
0:22.6	weren't always categorized by gender? To understand what's gotten us to this point and how to move
0:28.2	forward, we're bringing you this fantastic episode of good sport. Host Jody Avergan speaks with
0:34.6	trans and cis athletes and journalists to dig into the history of gender
0:38.5	divisions in sports. And what might be possible if we stopped using gender as the primary way
0:43.9	to categorize athletes altogether? If you want more sports content from TED or just want to
0:49.0	see the world through a new lens, check out good sport wherever you get your podcasts.
0:55.3	Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Did you know that it's been 50 years since Title IX
1:05.3	passed in the United States? Or that in 2022, the U.S. Soccer Federation announced that players on the men's and women's teams
1:12.7	would get equal pay for the first time in history.
1:16.2	What about this one?
1:17.1	This year, 2023, for the first time ever, the Women's March Madness title game will air on network TV with a big pregame show and everything, just like the men.
1:28.3	Thinking about those milestones, my reaction is, gosh, it's about freaking time.
1:33.4	And yes, they represent genuine progress that we should celebrate.
1:37.5	We are expanding our notions of who gets to play sports and what kind of resources they
1:42.5	get to do it.
1:43.9	But of course, these milestones didn't
1:45.6	happen without a fight, many, many fights. And looking around, it's not hard to see that there are
1:51.2	still a lot of fights happening about gender in sports. I mean, just look at the debate around
1:56.4	trans athletes, the latest chapter in the long fight around who gets to participate.
	...

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