Tag: sports

Back to Mike

Posted by helenboyd – October 21, 2008

It looks like the person we’ve all come to know as Christine Daniels is de-transitioning, and has returned to work as Mike Penner.

Kevin Roderick of highly-respected LAObserved.com reports late Monday that “Eighteen month after writing a column about becoming Christine Daniels, veteran sportswriter Mike Penner has quietly returned to work at the Los Angeles Times, according to multiple sources close to the LAT’s Sports staff.”

Anyone know any more than this? All of the articles/blog posts written by Christine Daniels are gone – sports ones, as well as the ones about the transition.

If anyone has more information, let me know. As far as I know, this is the most famous person to de-transition I’ve ever heard of, and it’s surely going to cause additional confusion to people who are just starting to get why people transition in the first place.

So – why do people de-transition? I’ve met people who did because they couldn’t find a job as a female, especially if/when there were dependents in the picture. Others realize they weren’t transsexual – and that is the point of RLT, after all, & that means it’s working. Any other reasons people have come across?

Stella Walsh

Posted by helenboyd – August 27, 2008

Paul Farhi wrote a really sensitive and smart column about Stella Walsh, IS conditions, and gender testing at the Olympics.

Walsh had no access to steroids in her day. And since her male organs were nonfunctional, Reiner says, she probably had partial or complete androgen resistance, which makes the body unable to produce or use the small amounts of testosterone that most women have. So it’s even possible that Walsh was at a disadvantage compared with her competitors.

Interesting reading, and a nice companion to Jenny Boylan’s op-ed in The NY Times a few weeks ago.

To fill out your gender Olympics reading, try Zagria’s bio of Dora Ratjen.

Jenny Boylan & The “Complementarians”

Posted by helenboyd – August 17, 2008

Here’s an interesting exchange between a blogger,  CWMW (a Christian group), and the NYT op-ed by Jenny Boylan about the gender testing planned for the Olympics:

The issue of the ‘extremely rare’ defects that result from this being a fallen world ‘not invalidating the binary nature of God’s good design of manhood and womanhood’ fails to address this. For if the binary is to hold, then 65 million people need to be categorized as either male or female. Otherwise they cannot logically be assigned scripturally defined gender roles. So what are the standards? Genitalia? Chromosomes? Capability to give birth? If the Bible doesn’t provide the standards, then someone has to. I look forward to CMWM’s answer to this.

Which is an interesting thought: if people are convinced our gender roles are laid out for us in The Bible, then what about the people who don’t fit the pre-existing genders? & What about the eunuchs?

Gender Testing at the Olympics

Posted by helenboyd – July 30, 2008

& CNN covers the gender-testing at the Olympics in an interesting way. I’m curious the way other news media are reporting this, so if you find stories, do send them.

News

Posted by helenboyd – July 29, 2008

To Erma Bombeck, With Love

Posted by helenboyd – July 23, 2008

As many of you know, I’ve been struggling with my weight & fitness for the past couple of years. I was in pretty great shape when I met Betty, & got lazy, for starters, which was then exacerbated by (1) pretty extreme depression after 9/11; (2) quitting a job that was very active for writing, which is not; and (3) getting older and having my metabolism slow. Effectively it’s been a decade since I worked out at a gym regularly, which is embarassing to admit, though I have almost always walked regularly, and some distances, do some yoga, work out with free weights & calisthenics, & of course try to watch what I eat.

Recently, I joined a gym again because watching what I eat and walking a lot and doing at-home workouts wasn’t helping.

But – I know this is going to be a shocking revelation – I am totally out of shape. I go to the gym in my baggy sweats and t-shirt, and get on the Precor elliptical machine, which is kind to my flat foot and bad knees, and start pedaling. In minutes, I notice how much slower I am going than anyone near me, and yet – and yet – my heart rate shoots straight out of any health zone, weight loss or cardiovascular. I slow down a little more, take breaks, watch my heart rate respond, and then notice I have become the literal tortoise to the hares pedaling around me. More→

The Othered Hillary

Posted by helenboyd – June 11, 2008

Someone who has been fascinated with the “I won’t vote for Obama” reaction of some of the ‘Clintonistas’ wrote to me to say that she thought, perhaps, that women of a certain generation are sore losers when it comes to outright competition because they were never taught to compete with grace, and that’s mostly because they were never allowed to play team sports.

I’m pretty sure she’s onto something, because losing with grace takes training & effort.

However, for many of them, and for someone like Hillary herself, there is always this extra burden of not only gaining for yourself, but gaining for ALL women, which is an awful lot to carry into a competition. That is, it’s not about the presidency only; it’s about all women, the history of women, and the future of feminism. Losing all that – and not just her bid for president – is bound to make the stakes higher, which makes it harder to lose gracefully.

Imagine if your average businessman went out in the world every day to earn points of Capitalism. Look at the Cold War for a good example of when carrying an ideology around gets to be absurd.

One of the things that has amazed me is not the bizarre commentary about race and gender that’s gone on, or the lack of it. What amazes me is how much the dialogue about race has changed. Obama is, no doubt, expected to score one for the team. But the burdens of that are not obvious, nor talked about. & I think that’s precisely because he felt forced to address race issues due to Rev. Wright.

I know I was sitting there listening to Senator Clinton give her suspension speech and endorsement of Obama and thinking, “I’d have voted for her if she’d made her feminism a little more obvious earlier on.” It was how she was NOT addressing gender that bugged me, & instead we got Ferraro talking about racism, which didn’t make any damn sense. Because that comment about the glass ceiling having 18 million cracks in it was very empowering and positive; she personalized the politics in a way that spoke to me and to many women, I bet.

The whole thing about being “othered” is that you don’t get to pretend you aren’t. If you’re a woman, you have to be a woman; you don’t get any choice in the matter. You have to address gender issues publicly, all the time. Likewise for being a gay person, or a black person, or a disabled person. It sucks. I’ve complained about having to be a woman writer. But you can’t pretend the world doesn’t see your “otherness” as much as you’d prefer a world like that. & That goes doubly for a woman who is a politician, and who has to deal with the oldest of old boys’ networks and the public policies they’ve devised.

Female Jocks

Posted by helenboyd – May 20, 2008

Wow this is depressing.

When I was a kid, I beat one of my peers at the 50 yard dash. & He challenged me to race his older (by a year) cousin, who I also beat.

& Then I was told, by my teacher, that beating boys wasn’t something girls did. & Yes, it did kinda take the fun out of running for me; I stopped running competitively within a year or so.

& I’ve watched my nieces grow up & kick ass in sports, and it made my heart proud to hear about them getting a face full of mud in order to steal third. But then I read something like this & I wonder, at the heart of it, how much has really changed.

Race + LGBT

Posted by helenboyd – April 17, 2008

I heard Jasmyne Cannick speak at the Bodies of Knowledge conference at USC Upstate, and the focus of her talk was race and the LGBT community. She made a couple of important points about the failures of the white LGBT set in dealing with black LGBT people. I use “black” because she did; she mentioned that she dislikes the phrase “people of color” but didn’t explain why exactly.

One of her main issues was that minorities are often used to trump up “diversity” numbers for primarily white LGBT organizations but aren’t then given any real power to choose issues within those organizations. Gay marriage in particular was way down on her list of priorities, after things like universal healthcare, jobs, access to education, immigration, access to power/politicians, and other issues of poverty. Her point was that in LA, it’s the white LGBT who live in West Hollywood, but that black LGBT people tend to live in their neighborhoods of birth: Compton, East LA, etc., exactly because of the issues of dicrimination and access.

As she put it: “Just because someone doesn’t agree with you that gay marriage is the most important issue doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be at the table.” More→

Get the Chinese to Talk

Posted by helenboyd – March 25, 2008

The Tibetans have been trying to open a dialogue with the Chinese for forever, but with the international pressure now on them because of a potential boycott of the Olympics if they don’t violently crackdown on Tibetans, there’s a new chance to get them to talk.

Sign the petition.

Tim Hardaway

Posted by helenboyd – October 4, 2007

I wish they’d reported what his answer was.

Santhi Soundarajan

Posted by helenboyd – September 12, 2007

Santhi Soundarajan, a female runner in India who was stripped of her Olympic medal has, perhaps, tried to commit suicide. She ingested pesticide but it’s not clear that she did so in a suicide attempt, and may have taken it for stomach pain. There are more details in an India Times article.

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) announced she failed a sex test and implied Santhi had deceived the sporting world by competing as a woman when she was a man, effectively ending her career.

But Santhi, who returned home to live in humiliation, insisted along with her parents and coaches she had done nothing wrong. . .

Seven of the eight women who tested positive for Y chromosomes during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics had AIS. They were allowed to compete.

Because the International Olympics no longer do these tests, exactly in order to prevent this kind of outcome, and The Hindu reports that endocrine test results were probably not in when she was disqualified.

Black Men Can’t Read?

Posted by helenboyd – September 3, 2007

It turns out young black men have a better chance of getting made fun of for reading books than for playing sports. Not news, I know, but the commentary on how that fact intersects with gender is:

John Thomas, superintendent of the Aliquippa School District, said the notion that black men who read books are less masculine is one that should be dispelled in the African-American community. “It’s just as powerful to carry a book as it is to carry a football or a basketball, because the power of knowledge is in the books,” he said. “If we prepare our bodies for the gridiron or the basketball court, to me it’s just as important to prepare your mind to survive in society. The body will soon wear out for athletic competition, but knowledge you have will carry you through life.”

What’s interesting to me is that the cultural forces that would discourage black men from learning – because being brainy isn’t considered “masculine” or “strong” – are exactly the opposite of the ones at play that have historically kept women from learning, who are/were told that being too brainy makes a woman “unfeminine.”

& When cultural forces say being smart isn’t masculine to one group, & too masculine to another, you know there’s something rotten in Denmark.

The Penn State Law Talk

Posted by helenboyd – April 20, 2007

I’m hoping that this talk was recorded as planned and so will be available on Penn State Dickinson School of Law’s website, eventually, because there were a lot of interesting questions discussed in the Q&A after I spoke. Prof. Rains also added a lot of useful legal insight.

I started with a kind of preface in order (1) to define terms like transgender, MTF and FTM, and also (2) to explain that while people like drag queens and crossdressers are considered part of the transgender community, discussions about legal marriage issues don’t always or often effect them; that is, this talk concerns people who identify nearer to the transsexual end of things. that said, drag queens are often already gay and so deal with the same marriage discrimination all gay people do, and crossdressers often suffer with the stigma of being perverts, and one of the reasons they are not out is exactly because they don’t want their wives to divorce them, or lose custody of their children, or lose their jobs, all of which can & does happen to crossdressers who come out.

I never expected that any aspect of my life would cause me to speak at a law school to future lawyers about the odd ways that my life has become complicated by laws about gender and marriage. I’m surprised two-fold: for starters, I never expected to get married, since as a younger and Very Serious Feminist I saw it as a Tool of Patriarchy, symbolic at least of the ways women have always been chattel, and so, not for me. But I also never expected to get married because I was, starting as a teenager in the late 80s, an ally of gay and lesbian people.

& Then I met Betty, who at the time we met presented as male, and as she likes to explain, we knew, both of us, nearly from the get-go that we were supposed to be together. It’s a difficult feeling to explain, and poets have tried, but it took us a few years to decide once & for all that we were in this thing together. We decided to get married because things were so easy between us; on our 2nd date we sat together and read, one of us The Nation and the other The New York Times. When you’re something like an old married couple on your 2nd date, you know that you’re doomed.

More→

Homophobic Coach Resigns

Posted by helenboyd – March 25, 2007

Rene Portland, coach of the Lady Lions basketball team at Penn State, resigned – some say over allegations that she was anti-lesbian. A former player, Jennifer Harris, brought the charges after Portland kicked her off the team for not dressing in more feminine ways.

I have to say I find the whole situation kind of confusing: the idea of a women’s basketball coach being homophobic, I mean. In my experience, lesbians like & play sports at least as much, if not more, than heterosexual girls do. Barring half of your potential players from your team seems counterintuitive, though her record of course proves she is a good coach.

Talent, of course, is no excuse for shitty behavior, though I do find it interesting that this situation came to a head only now – after a couple of bad seasons for the team.

No Love Lost

Posted by helenboyd – February 23, 2007

I’m really astonished at the remarks Tim Hardaway made, in public, as a public figure. I’m glad to hear he got canned from the All Star game as a result, but I’m just really surprised. I probably shouldn’t be: after all, it was the jocks who often made me nervous in high school because I was different. But I also knew a lot of jocks who were really cool guys & who used their status to stand up for people who were different.

But wow. Tim Hardaway is a bigot. For some reason, that’s always so much more disappointing when it comes from a woman or a person of color or whatever other form of minority. & Yet years ago, when I was working at City College, bell hooks told me she’d never teach a class about James Baldwin again because she was so horrified by the homophobia expressed by her (largely African-American) students. I hope she has, & does, anyway.

I hope someone sat him down to watch Brother Outsider by now, at least, and that John Amaechi sells a truckload of books and educates as many basketball fans as Hardaway represents.

White Guilt

Posted by helenboyd – January 20, 2007

I made a cool & unusual discovery the other day: the channel that broadcasts a lot of sports & specifically the Yankees’ games, called the YES (Yankees Entertainment and Sports) Network, also shows old episodes of the show White Shadow at 1am NY time. You folks who are as old or older than me remember it, don’t you? I loved it when I was a kid, but I was kind of surprised to hear it first ran when I was age nine until I was 12. Did I see it in reruns, or did I just not understand a bunch of the jokes?

It’s dated in certain ways – tight, short shorts on basketball players – but it’s a lot better than a lot of crap that’s on now. Little did I know, but it was the first ensemble drama on TV that had a predominantly African-American cast. Only one other show (Showtime’s Soul Food) with a predominantly African-American cast aired for longer, but the current show The Wire is only now about to beat them both.

& That’s pretty damned shocking, imho: only three dramas with African-American casts that had more than a couple of seasons since 1978? That’s just messed up.

Why Women Can’t Jump:

Posted by helenboyd – December 7, 2006

In a nutshell, because the International Olympic Committee won’t let them. They ruled on 12/5 not to allow the Women’s Ski Jumping Event from the 2010 Winter Olympics. They’ve cited the paucity of competitors, but other events, with even fewer competitors, have not been cut.

“The recent IOC decision to block women ski jumpers from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics is blatant discrimination and a stunning move that harkens back to the Dark Ages,” according to Deedee Corradini, the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah and President of Women’s Ski Jumping USA.

You can can more information at the Women’s Ski Jumping USA site:http://www.wsjusa.com.

Five Questions With… Kate Bornstein

Posted by helenboyd – August 16, 2006

Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist. Her latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, came out last month. Kate’s published works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook; and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly Roadkill, written with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Kate’s plays and performance pieces include Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, and y2kate: gender virus 2000. It was both a pleasure and an honor to get to speak with her.

1. I love that you mention in Hello, Cruel World how trans folk are separating themselves into “male” and “female” by using terms like MTF and the like, because I’ve noticed that those of us who are hot for trans folk seem to like the transness, not the ‘target gender’ (or really even the ‘birth gender’) alone. It’s the chaser’s dirty secret. Do you think trans people will start to enjoy being trans, sexually or otherwise?

There are lots of un-named, unclaimed desires that are free from the male/female gender system. Desire for sex with oneself is a sexual orientation in itself, and you can be any gender or no gender in order to have that desire. My former partner felt the most important component for his desire was that his partner be the same gender as him. When he was a woman, he was with women; when he was gender-exploring he was with someone who was also gender-exploring; now that he’s a man he’s with men. I think what you’ve got is an as-yet-un-named sexual orientation: the desire for sex and romance with someone who’s neither male nor female.

Give your desire for transness a name. Then, speak your desire loudly, and proudly and seductively. I think if people hear that, that you’d like them the way they are, they’d be more encouraged to live that place of neither/nor.

As to using terms like MTF/FTM – yeah, I’ve been complaining about that for years. In this new book, I’m just a little less patient about it. It’s amusing and humiliating to admit it, but I still work hard to pass in public. I’m an old fart, and that’s still important to me. Out in the world, I pass to avoid the shame and the danger. But intimately with friends, community, or our lovers? The not-passing is the dance of love. No need for male or female, what luxury!

kate bornstein & betty crow1b. But I seem to upset some transsexual people when I recognize that Betty’s masculinity turns me on – even if it’s in addition to my being turned on by her femininity.

Upset them! When you go beyond either/or, people think you’re a radical, that you’re less safe because you’re less predictable. Speaking or writing down the truth of your desire unlocks the political and moral shackles of desire.

More→

Not Barbie, Skipper

Posted by helenboyd – August 15, 2006

Lisa Hix wrote a nice rant about having an A cup for the SF Chronicle in response to hearing a show where a plastic surgeon waxed enthusiastically about implants. She points out that there are in fact health risks (including possibilities of hematoma, infection, deformity, toxic shock syndrome, plus the usual risks of anesthesia, the chance of losing sensation, decreasing the likeliness of breast cancer detection or the inability to nurse) but moreso points out that having an A cup is having a breast, and tires of the kind of talk that somehow equates A cups with not having breasts at all.

As a former A cup, I can tesitfy that you do in fact have breasts when you have A cups. I really enjoyed having A cups. I miss them.

I’ve found my recent re-sizing something to think about. For starters, I’ve been finding it harder to find nice bras now that i’m a D cup, much as I had a hard time finding ones when I was an A cup. The difference is that with a D, you absolutely do not want to compromise on support – in fact, you can’t. But I also had a moment of revelation while reading the beginning of Gerrie Lim’s book about the porn industry, which had more than one reference to pendulous D cups within 10 pages, and so caused me to think, “Huh, who knew? I’ve got pornstar-sized breasts now,” but the idea didn’t thrill me; I took it more like I would someone telling me I had the perfect size foot for shoe fetishists. Basically, I don’t care, because they don’t do me any good. It might have mattered some when I was 25 and single, but I’m not sure I would have cared then, either. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them; I do. But I’d enjoy them more if I could take them off when I want to go to the hardware store or the grocery or to do other errands, all those times when I don’t want to be looked at. Not wanting your breasts stared at by every guy on the streets is exactly why you can’t sacrifice support at this size: if you do, they bounce more, which is not really what you want unless – ba rum bump! – you’re a porn star.

I find myself wearing a sports bra most days now, actually. Mostly I’ve realized that I’m glad I don’t get to choose, since both sizes have pros and cons, and the only real advantage resides in being one of those grow-up dolls that enabled me to change sizes with a quick, full rotation of one arm.