Women's Sports and Gender Panic

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Almost all of the public conversations about sex testing and sports — or, more to the point, who should be allowed to participate in women’s sports — are pretty bad. In many if not most cases, they’re outright transphobic; even in the “best” cases, they’re still pretty ham-fisted. But Rose Eveleth is having a very different sort of public conversation about sex testing in their new podcast, Tested — one that looks to the way these tests affect the athletes subject to them, and how the concept of fairness in women’s sports has become so fraught. For today’s episode, Rose answers your questions about the history of women’s sports gender panic, why men aren’t subject to the same sex testing, and how the Paralympics imagines “fairness” in profoundly different ways. I absolutely loved this conversation. I think you will too.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Melody, the first thing you said to me is that you've been getting a lot of TikToks for tubal
0:05.9	legation. Yeah, and also moving to Ireland. In addition to just like all of the other processing.
0:17.4	Welcome to the first culture study podcast post-election.
0:21.8	I'm very glad that we didn't have anything come out last week.
0:24.8	Can you imagine?
0:25.5	Nothing would have felt appropriate.
0:26.8	No.
0:27.7	But we are happy to be here.
0:29.3	And actually, this is a perfect episode that I think this is the sort of nuance that I always crave when talking about something as complicated as gender in sports. And this is the sort of nuance that I always crave when talking about something as complicated as gender in sports,
0:40.2	and this is the sort of nuance that I think a lot of people really reject. And I just, I love this
0:46.6	episode. It's fantastic. And I'm really grateful for all of our listeners who are also willing
0:52.9	to lean into the complication. So we're really
0:56.8	happy you're here. Okay, women's sports have never been more popular. And there's also like
1:04.5	endless, seemingly endless public hand-wringing and outright panic about who should be able to
1:09.3	participate in women's sports.
1:12.1	So, Rose, are these two things connected?
1:15.7	Yes.
1:17.6	Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
1:19.8	I think that, you know, if you can ignore women's sports because there's no money in it,
1:24.0	there's no fame in it, there's no cultural power in it, then it doesn't matter
1:27.6	who competes. But as soon as that stops being the case and as soon as you have women athletes,
1:33.7	female athletes, being incredibly culturally powerful and relevant and rich and have all these
	...

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