As a child of the 80’s, movies and music filled my young high school mind. Stories of teen angst, conflict, and even victory fed my soul in ways that still linger today. One such film that contained both inspiration and exceptional music was Vision Quest. It tells the story of a young high school wrestler, Louden Swain (played by Matthew Modine), who aspires to do something great. He aims to defeat another wrestler, Brian Shute, who has been undefeated for a number of years. It’s the high school wrestling version of David versus Goliath.
They filled the movie with countless great tunes, though replayed too frequently. It takes place in Spokane, Washington my new home state. The often dark and dank setting matches what I know about Washington and what I have heard about Spokane. There’s even a scene where Madonna sings live at a bar, possibly for the last time ever, though they never mention who she is. The music by itself is worth the price of admission.
However, the story is what is seared into my memory. On the way, there’s the obligatory romance with a young woman, Carla (played by Linda Fiorentino), who moves in for a while. On occasion you jeer at Louden’s profoundly naïvely boyish behavior, but ultimately you can’t help but to cheer his unyielding dedication to defeating Shute, almost like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick.
Whoa, not so fast…
As the story unravels, Louden naturally excels at wrestling. He explains to Carla that wrestling is more about balance than strength or speed. The preceding year, he excelled as the competed in state. He had every reason to believe that he’d perform even better. There is one wrinkle. Louden weighs 190 pounds; Brian Shute weighs 168 pounds. They can’t compete unless they’re in the same weight class.
By the start of the film, Louden has already dropped to 178 pounds. He wrestles and defeats his friend Kuch in order to get a slot in varsity. He spends the rest of the film obsessively trying to lose the remaining ten pounds. Along the way, he passes out in the hallway and suffers from nosebleeds. Still, he continues, like a speeding locomotive, undeterred by reason.
Isn’t the heavier weight class considered to be better? Not necessarily, in fact, this comes up in conversation:
Carla: I don’t get it. Why do you want to get smaller and wrestle a small guy? Why not get bigger and wrestle a big guy?
Louden: Big guys aren’t better. 168 happens to be the toughest division in the state, maybe in the whole god damn world.
This is a movie, and it’s meant to be inspirational. Of course, he makes the weight, wrestles Shute, and wins. However, that’s not the point of this post.
Why the need for weight classes?
The simple answer is fairness. We don’t believe that a wrestling (or boxing) match between a 100-pound and a 240-pound athlete is fair. Therefore, each sport then proceeds to develop standards by which athletes may compete, and it would seem that, for wrestling, that boundary is your weight. This is not rocket science; it’s been this way for literally decades. We don’t think anything of it. Here’s the clincher:
Both Louden Swain and Brian Shute were men, yet we further regulated how they may compete against each other.
First, we separate the athletes by gender. Second, we separate them by weight class. Here’s the interesting question, if we are perfectly happy separating athletes by weight class, why need to separate them by gender first?
Establishing other rules to enforce ‘fairness’
When it comes to competition, we ultimately want to believe that there’s an underlying fairness to each contest. Sports is littered with examples of these rules. Basketball has goaltending. Football has penalties. Baseball has balks. Most professional sports leagues have a salary cap, to regulate how much a team can spend on their players.
Those who violate these rules are disgraced or punished. Lance Armstrong’s Tour De France victories were vacated. Mark McGwire was disgraced for using performance enhancing drugs, though technically baseball didn’t outlaw them at the time. There are also stories of the Houston Astros, New England Patriots, and Russian Olympic athletes.
We want those events that we watch to be fair; we want ‘our’ team to have a fair chance at winning. Thus, I can understand someone’s apprehension about having trans-women in sports. I’m not saying I agree with it; I’m saying that I understand it.
Trans women are women
Allow me to say it plainly. Trans women are women. To put it bluntly, any of your transphobic haters who maintain that it’s about ‘truth’ or biology or whatever else… It’s just about a way to rationalize your xenophobia. If gender is just about biology, then stop using expressions like “having the balls to do that” or “boys don’t cry”. Gender is also about culture, and maybe a person doesn’t fit into cultural norms.
I have friends who are trans and will fight to defend them. I put my pronouns on my LinkedIn profile and Twitter bio to normalize it. I’ll endure the abuse and ridicule if it makes their life a little easier. There are literally hundreds of new proposed (and some passed) legislation that serve to marginalize this community. I’ll do what I can do oppose these laws.
That said, understand that the suggestion that follows does not detract from the simple fact that trans women are women.
Abolish segregating sports by gender
We have established other metrics to match athletes that segregate within gender. Boxing and wrestling have used weight classes for decades. We have developed some pretty nifty technology that can measure very precisely the potential of any athlete, and this technology continues to improve. Why the need to bucketize athletes into the two groups ‘female’ and ‘male’? It seems so damned imprecise. Much like the menu from the diner in My Cousin Vinny which listed precisely three items (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Are we artificially limited to those choices?
Let’s put it in perspective, we divide high school wrestling into fourteen weight classes; we segregate little league baseball by age. If we can measure hormone levels into minute levels, why not simply have several (say seven) ranges for different levels of hormones instead? Sure, some ranges will contain women almost exclusively, and others will have men almost exclusively. Though inevitably there will be some in the middle that may have both men and women… yes, competing against each other. Think about it, how many 135-pound men would honestly dare to get into the ring with Ronda Rousey?
Trans athletes will simply compete in the category that correlates with their measured hormone levels. And much like Louden Swain, you may occasionally move from one category to the other. It’s the epitome of fairness.
Hint: this also addresses the steroid problem. Athletes may still choose to use steroids, but they’ll compete in their own category (which basically nullifies any advantage they might’ve gained), separate from clean athletes.
What about all those records for athletic achievements?
What about them? Records are always in flux and there are always ways in which someone may rationalize that an achievement is not really a legitimate record. I’m most familiar with baseball, so I’ll give you examples:
- The single season record for most home runs… Did Maris legitimately break Ruth’s record with a longer season? They even made a movie about this debate.
- Did Mark McGwire legitimately break the above record, when we know he took performance enhancing drugs?
- Twenty strikeouts per game! What if some of them were due to the new pitch clock?
- Rickey Henderson‘s single season record for stolen bases. Baseball just introduced larger bases, which shortens the distance between bases by six inches, and furthermore now disallow too many pick-off pitches.
Every rule change will affect an athletic record in some respect. Abolishing the segregation of sports by gender will reset Olympic records that were tabulated by gender…
So what?! We should not forgo doing the right thing, by obliterating the gender line in sports, because we want to ‘preserve those records’. That’s simply a rationalization for transphobia.