Unisex sports: challenging the binary

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses some problems arising with respect to the male/female binary division that has traditionally been central to most sports. One strategy for dealing with this problem is to remove the binary and allow athletes of different sexes to compete together. Firstly, since there are different ways of ‘mixing’ athletes together, a distinction between two major kinds will be introduced: ‘mixed sports’ (sports with an allocated position for a number of males and females in a team, which retains the binary) and ‘unisex sports’ (sport participation of all athletes together based on merit, with no need to distinguish between sexes). Secondly, I shall offer a strategy for the modification of existing sports and the creation of new sports that would accommodate athletes of different sexes in ‘unisex sports’. This means paying attention to how sports are constructed and which abilities/skills they test. For unisex sports, two kinds of logic are suggested: ‘balance of abilities/skills logic’ proposes that we should seek a balance of what we presently understand as female and male (together with sex-neutral) abilities/skills to be included in the sporting challenge; whereas ‘complexity logic’ proposes the creation or modification of sports so as to test for a wider spectrum of abilities/skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• sex segregation
• inclusion
• equality
• complexity

Acknowledgments

This paper was written with institutional support from Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (PROGRES Q19).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. E.g. for cases in contemporary football, in which girls compete with boys for a limited age span, and then are forced to leave, even if they are good enough to continue, see e.g. Edwards, Davis, and Forbes (2015); for an overview of historical cases of females competing with males in the USA, see McDonagh and Pappano (2008, chapter VI).

2. I refer to discrimination in both senses of the word – in the sense of discrimination as distinction and in the moral sense of discrimination as depriving athletes of various possibilities and benefits.

3. For example, small light men have a smaller chance of success in some ‘male sports’, such as, e.g. in basketball, volleyball, American football.

4. See similar conclusions of empirical research: ‘Thus, while sex-integrated sport has the potential to challenge gender ideologies, it appears the strong and pervasive patriarchy of male-centered, male-run, and male-dominated sport culture makes it difficult for its full positive potential to be realized, even with one of the best female basketball teams in the country. However, perhaps if sex-integrated experiences were more common in youth sport, they could provide early and consistent interruptions of the gender binary that might render future sex-integrated experiences stronger mechanisms for feminist resistance’ (Fink, LaVoi, and Newhall 2016, 1329).

5. See also a description of such a society by Schneider (2000, 135f.).

6. A middle way is advocated by McDonagh and Pappano (2008, 215), who favour the possibility of females playing on male teams, for those who wish to do so. They speak in favour of segregated categories on a voluntary basis. See also the ‘open category’ strategy (in Martínková 2020).

7. Hämäläinen (2014) also argued for a handicap system for females to be able to compete with males in ski-jumping from large hills and normal hills. He claimed that, if female athletes started from a higher gate they could compete equally with male athletes. However, this handicap system allows females to be seen as inferior, requiring a handicap (for more problems with this approach see Pakaslahti 2017).