We don’t live in an “either/or” world. Most non-sport institutions get this. It’s why Starbucks has unisex bathrooms, why there are forms to change your gender on government documents, why there is even a concept of “preferred pronouns.” But athletics remains stubbornly committed to a male-female dichotomy. Enforcement of that rigid divide is again causing a stir. Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations (the I.A.A.F.) issued new rules for track athletes that will take effect in November requiring some female athletes – those with naturally elevated testosterone – to take medication to suppress those hormones. The requirement applies to females the IAAF describes as “athletes with differences in sexual development” (they call it “DSD”) and only to middle-distance running events between 400 meters and the mile. Athletes would have to take the medication for six months prior to the Olympic and international events the rules govern. The IAAF said...

As I reflected earlier this month on National Girls & Women in Sports Day, it felt different this year. Rather than a pumped-up opportunity to celebrate strides—the sweat, guts, and proficiency of female athletes—my conscience urges reflection. I can’t write about National Girls & Women in Sports Day or the Winter Olympics which opened this week without considering the abuse of young gymnasts by Lawrence Nassar, former doctor for the national team. So far, 140 (140!!!!) women and girls have said that Dr. Nassar sexually abused them under the guise of “treatment.” Somehow their voices were pervasively and effectively muted, disregarded or explained away. Coaches, athletic training programs, and facilities and that exalted sports governing body—the Olympic Committee—failed to protect these athletes from a monster. Yet this is not merely a question of “speaking up” but the problem of whose voice matters. For years, it was Larry Nassar’s. To those young...

Did those female gym teachers back in the early 1900s actually have it right? No one wants to return to bloomers and half-court basketball, but the coalition of female physical educators who ran women’s sports and fought takeover by the NCAA (which took control of women’s college athletics in 1980) were onto something. Their message--that sport should be about self-development, social skills, and fair play--sounds pretty great right now. They found competition unseemly (that's a problem), but their broad recognition of college sport as a life and community-building pursuit is worth a reprise given the mess that has become the NCAA-led college sports world. Right now we’re in the midst of soul-searching about what college sports should look like. A spate of lawsuits ask about the “student” status of student-athletes and whether they should be paid. Last month, the five wealthiest conferences--Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-12, and Southeastern--began a...

This will be the first time that female athletes are allowed to compete in ski jumping at the Olympics so it’s fitting that the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia open Thursday on the heels of National Girls and Women in Sports Day February 5th. The satisfaction goes beyond the glow of victory after a long battle because access for female ski jumpers represents progress in the broader quest for gender equity. As in this case, athletics often carry meaning beyond the competition itself. Sport is both a tool in the quest for political, social, and economic equality and a glass that magnifies the failings of fairness on a societal level. What happens on the field affects and reflects the world off the field (or the slope)-- and vice versa. The cascading events of the 1970s -- the rise of the women’s movement, passage of Title IX, and expanding sport and...

How perfect that National Girls and Women in Sports Day (who invented this cumbersome name?) arrives as the military prepares to lift it’s ban on women serving in combat. The barriers that women have faced to such service sound like the battle for equal access and treatment in sport. How so? Just step back and consider that the barriers, the arguments against women have focused on three central ideas (the three “I’s”): the presumption of women’s physical inferiority, the perceived immorality of women serving alongside men, and worry that women would be injured. Drop those three I’s onto sport and those arguments – inferiority, immorality, and injury – have been the rhetoric used to limit and bar women from equal access to competition, whether it was 1970s Little League or ski jumping (finally to be included in the 2014 Olympic games). In many countries, girls and women still do not have...