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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Pairskating often dramatizes the opposition between athletic and artistic. When you have two people, you can bear down on binarism in this really ridiculous way.
Travers:It's like gender nonconformity is more threatening than feminism.
Mary Louise Adams:How do you use the discourses around things that are familiar to people in everyday life to help them see the limitations that they're putting on themselves.
Erica Rand:Hi, everyone. My name is Erica Rand. I'm a professor of art and visual culture and of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College with a focus on teaching and writing in queer and trans studies. I was actually trained as an art historian, but my work diverged almost immediately from things like Barbie's Queer Accessories to queer anti racist alternative tour of Alice Island and the Statue Of Liberty and on from there. Over the past bunch of years I've been teaching and writing especially in sports studies partly based on my own practice and in my growing interest in researching sport as well in other forms.
Erica Rand:We're here to talk about my book that's coming out, Gating Away From the Binary. And I'm really excited to be talking to two people who super influenced my work, Mary Louise Adams and Travers, and I'm gonna have them introduce themselves.
Mary Louise Adams:Hi, I'm Mary Louise Adams. I'm a very recently retired professor from the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University in Canada. My research area originally, like Erica, I switched into sports studies. I was trained as a historian of sexuality and gender, And over the last thirty years, I've certainly taught general courses on sexuality and gender. But I think I am here primarily because about a decade ago, I wrote a book on the gender history of figure skating from about the 1700s into the early 2000s.
Mary Louise Adams:Over the last maybe twenty years of my career, I was involved in teaching courses in sports studies, sports sociology, sport history. I'm also a recreational figure skater, so as I was reading Erica's book that talks a lot about the experiences of an adult who figure skates. I was identifying with a lot of things that she was talking about. But I am really happy to be here and talking about what I found to be a really exciting book.
Travers:Hi there. My name is Travers. I am a sociologist at Simon Fraser University. When I first started out, my expertise was in the area of new information technology and society. So, you know, let this be a lesson to you.
Travers:Don't let what you started out with shape what you do. I've ended up, like I teach a lot of general sociological courses on social theory, etcetera. But in terms of my research expertise, like one of my areas is transgender kids and youth. But I also have a sports specific focus around transgender participation policies and female eligibility policies in particular. That's an area of study, and I also do other things.
Travers:But I'm quite happy to be talking about this book. I do love a slim, beautifully written volume, and I think that's what we have here. Some absolutely great writing. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the way in which gender binarism is structured into formal and informal mechanisms and the way in which it's just such a taken for granted organizing feature of so many aspects of daily life, which are very detrimental to not only trans people, but provide a gender polarity that is harmful to everyone.
Erica Rand:So the first thing I'll say is one reason I started writing about figure skating is I wanted to get brave enough to do more of it. And I had this idea about twenty years ago of competing in the gay games that I'd never been a competitive athlete at all ever. I was a person who was like bad at gym mostly. And I thought I might be brave enough to do it if I wrote about it, which is very labor intensive way of sports training. And a book came out of that called Red Nails, Black Skates.
Erica Rand:And then about six years ago, when I was about 60, a weird age to take up pairs figure skating, I for various reasons decided to take up pairs figure skating with a partner who I had met at the rink, Anna Keller, who's a democracy advocate and figure skating, journalist and has the podcast of their own called Future of Figure Skating. And, it turned out when I asked them that they had always wanted to try pair skating, but they're really tall. And so they would never have had a chance to do it. So we did a little number for a show and got really excited about it and decided to try to be pair skaters. And, it's been interesting because we fit into one set of legal gender markers and female for me, non binary for them gender identity.
Erica Rand:But we have a height difference that slots us right into what is supposed to be the traditional idea of like how to layer gender into sport. First example of binarism, which is we have an eight inch height difference making it logical for me to be the pear girl, and Anna to be the pear boy even though there's no reason it should actually be like this, right? So as we went along, we tried to one, learn this thrilling sport and also fight our way into figure skating, which only allows you to pair up almost all the time, except in Canada, as one m and one f. So our activism around that and our skating and I'll just say for people who don't skate that there are two disciplines of skating that have two people in them and one is ice dance and one is pairs. Pairs is the one where you lift and throw people.
Erica Rand:So, the struggles we had and the joy we had are part of the book. And the book is also really importantly about thinking about ways that the sedimentation of gender binarism really helps you think about anti trans sports ruling and behavior.
Travers:Yeah, it's such a mess. People who are accepting of trans people in non sporting dimensions of life still often fall into believing the across the board athletic advantage that so called men have over so called women. This is despite a lot of overlapping performances and the specificity about particular bodies. I noted, for example, that Gavin Newsom basically said, Okay, I'm supportive of trans inclusion, but trans women in sport, trans girls in sports is a step too far. You know, like this is where you get these ideas of, you know, enormous men and tiny women, you know, despite the fact that the, you know, the range of size within so called sex categories is actually far greater than the, you know, the differences in average between, you know, the so called M's or the so called F's.
Travers:So, you know, but there are so many taken for granted assumptions and beliefs that they're able to be tapped on in the moral panic around the participation of trans girls and women. And one of the things that I find particularly alarming is that it means that all girls and all women are being subjected to more scrutiny than normal. I mean, there's been a long tradition of, you know, like say parents and kids soccer, like wanting to know for sure that the goalie on their, you know, on a girl's soccer team, for example, or a hockey team is actually a girl and not a boy. You know, they're saying somebody's got to do a genital check. You know, you're just like, you've got to be kidding.
Travers:So that's not new. That's not new to anti trans policymaking. That's not new to anti trans moral panic. But there's this assumption that if a girl is really good or if she's not gender conforming and that can just mean she's really tall or she's just really athletically good that perhaps she's not really a girl. And that is an icky dynamic around girls and women's sports that has a long history.
Travers:It has a history of homophobia. And a lot of these assumptions are just being tapped on by moral panic messaging. And I think it's really important to know that there is an enormous anti trans social movement that is very well funded that is working hard on absolutely every level to drive transgender people out of public space. But this is also consistent with constraining the autonomy and opportunity for cisgender women and girls. So it's quite disturbing, notion of across the board unfair advantage and the way that that's playing out, not only for trans girls and women for whom it is, you know, unbelievably threatening and horrifying, but across the board for women and girls in general.
Mary Louise Adams:I guess if I would follow-up with that, one of the reasons we might think that skating might be different, so the male advantage in sports, skating is supposed to look at two compatible but different sets of capacities, right? Like the athleticism and the artistry. And in world organized around binary notions of gender. These are supposed to be distributed unevenly, that the artistic stuff is supposed to be more feminine and the athleticism is supposed to be more masculine. But so here you have a sport that's supposed to look at both and you would think, Okay, well then what is the actual advantage that men have when they are supposed to do this other thing?
Mary Louise Adams:I mean, we don't believe that these are actually divided equally in these two categories. But it seems like you could talk about this sport in a way that you maybe would be more difficult when you're talking about rugby or when you're talking about something else. And yet we don't see that. The way people talk about skating falls into the same kind of assumptions and stereotypes that we would talk about gender and all other aspects of the world. Erica, you mentioned that there are different rules in Canada.
Mary Louise Adams:What are, and in Canada, that rule is not specifically about trans people. It's just that the rules changed a few years ago to allow pairs to be two people. Like it's just a pair, it's two people, an ice dancing team, it's two people. But you had mentioned to us earlier, Erica, that there are now specific rules in The US related to the participation of trans people in skating. Do you just wanna mention what those are?
Erica Rand:Yes, so I'll say just first to respond to a few other things you said, and then I'll get there. The US figure skating rule book has very long had this weird dichotomy, which is it says that a pair is any two skaters, but then it regulates, you know, who lifts and who throws, who can compete against each other, and all of that stuff. And it's been really interesting to me that also pair skating almost often dramatizes the opposition between athletic and artistic because of the idea that one person lifts and throws and presents the other person. So it's a pretty interesting way that almost when you have two people, you can bear down on binarism in this really ridiculous way. The rules have recently changed in US figure skating, which is that up until they didn't publicize it until a little bit after they did it, but the rules now state that people competing in a female category, gender category, which is it's a single skater or in one of these duos, has to have their gender marked as female on their original birth certificate.
Erica Rand:In the beginning of the Trump administration, the first day on January 20, a statement was issued saying that there were only two genders and people were divided into male and female based on their original gender assignment on their birth certificate. And he actually said at conception, which I think they stopped when they realized it wasn't you know, sort of even more definitive but more problematic, just my guess. And then in the February, a statement was issued saying that in sport, only people who had an F on their birth certificate could count as women or girls and compete in those categories. So after that everybody scrambled. The NCAA very soon just said, yep, we're gonna go with that.
Erica Rand:The athletic conference I'm in or my school's in waited two months to say the exact same thing. The USOPC, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee then came out and created the same rule and said that every national governing body for every sport had to follow suit. So at the October, US Figure Skating came out with that very same thing. And to me, in a very insulting terrible way, announced it in an email saying, hey, we love being inclusive and we're so inclusive. And by the way, now we have to do this.
Erica Rand:But don't worry, you can still compete in synchronized skating and some of these other categories. So that's where we are now. And it changed from following policies that also are not ideal for how trans women and girls could compete in sport.
Travers:You're saying that the new USA skating guidelines specify that one of the skaters has to have an f on their birth certificate that was there when they were assigned female at birth. Am I correct?
Erica Rand:This is separate from pairs and dance. Every skater who wants to compete in either solo competition in a women's or a girl's category or compete in pairs or dance in a women's or girl's category has to have an f on their original birth certificate. And what's tricky about the pairs situation is that in theory, the rule book says you can only even take the qualifying test as an m and an f. But Anna and I decided, what the hell? We'll give it a try and see if our test goes through.
Erica Rand:Anna has, originally still has an f. So we're we're testing as two Fs. And what do you know? It worked. Our tests went through the test chair, national person called someone at our place where we tested, who declined to tell us what that conversation was about, but, you know, the test went through.
Erica Rand:Then we tried to sign up to compete at adult nationals, which I'll say is not based on our great skill level or at a low skill level, but tried to do that. And when I signed up, like a red, big red sign came up saying, you must have a partner of a different gender.
Travers:Yeah, and presumably not, you know, a trans person, but, you know, there seems to be a tension there. On the one hand, there's the unfair advantage which like, oh, you know, if two women want to skate together, big deal because, you know, without a dude, they're not going to score well. That's the assumption that a male athlete is always superior to every single female athlete at play. And you could see that. But we're seeing a retrenchment of heteronormativity.
Travers:And there was this brief little moment, I know that Canada changed its policy in 2022 to allow for same sex pairs or to just open it up to gender categories. Which seems really promising because the heteronormativity of figure skating is so acute, isn't it? I mean I just remember despising it so much, probably because I was given white skates that, you know, had me not learning to skate. And when I, you know, was a teenager and I got hockey skates everything went much better. But also I'm not a feminine person.
Travers:So the whole model really offended me. But it seems so persistent now and we're seeing like this brief moment. Who was it, Daniel Lagos or something who identified the transgender tipping point as twenty fifteen? And I was doing my own research on trans kids at the time and things did seem to be getting better. So much so that there were times where in my own head I was going, I can't believe they're letting us do this.
Travers:You know, like that we're allowed to support children having a range of gender identities. Like compared to when I was a kid where kids who were gender non conforming got the crap beat out of them and nobody did anything. In fact, I'm sure teachers and principals thought that bullies were performing public service and that we would come to the point where this was understood. But we're seeing just such a fierce backlash, aren't we? And it's a backlash to feminism.
Travers:It's a backlash to LGBT social movements. It's a backlash to racial justice movements. Sport is such a sight where this is so acutely seen. I'm sure that both of you, as well as many others, are watching to see what happens with FIFA in The United States and the Olympics in The United States as a place for the retrenchment of gender norms and sex testing. It's quite alarming.
Mary Louise Adams:And just to show what an alternative trans policy could sound like. So we mentioned that Skate Canada changed the rules about who can skate with whom, but this is what the trans policy sounds like. And this is the actual policy. There is kind of educational materials that go with it that tell people how to do it. Skaters in our jurisdiction who identify as trans are able to participate in the gender category in which Individuals who identify as a girl or women are eligible to compete with girls or women to mixed teams, individuals who identify as a boy, blah, blah.
Mary Louise Adams:All identifications of gender identity by our athletes are believed to be made in good faith and do not require further disclosure or documentation. And when you read the kind of educational stuff about this, it's like, we respect people's privacy, and we believe people. And it comes They discuss this policy and educational materials related to what people call safe sport. And so the kind of issues that come up in safe sport would you know, I think if you mentioned that to people right off the bat, they'd be thinking about sexual abuse in sport and sexual misconduct in sport and so on. But there is this long continuum or long string of behaviors that has been made possible by kind of the structures of sport and what people are willing to overlook in sport that hopefully as attitudes and knowledge have changed over time, people have not been willing to overlook in other realms of our society.
Mary Louise Adams:When you talk about the vast and speedy changes that we have been seeing since this tipping point was 2015, or like this kind of pinnacle of openness or however we want to put that, This is about the safety of people and this is about accessibility and it is about larger, both material and symbolic issues in the society. And so, when the people who are like, oh, well, figure skating, it's like, this is kind of trivial thing in the society as a whole. Like, this is our sport. It's like, this is not the most important thing in the world, but like, we really, really learn a lot when we see the kinds of discussions that happen in sport. That's one of the things that, Erika, I think you're doing a really good job of showing, you know, you're really able to read a lot of the structural systems that shape everything.
Mary Louise Adams:I think one of the things you do really well is show that you enjoy this thing and you have really strong critiques of it. Like our undergraduate students, they see that as very contradictory, right? Why are you criticizing so strictly this thing that they love? I wonder how you negotiate that at your rink or with the people who you participate with.
Erica Rand:Yeah. So one of the things about the contradictions, there are a lot of ways that the saying that's become more and more popular about loving something that doesn't love you back is something I think that happens for a lot of people in sport for lots of different reasons and thinking about what you can do to make it different and better. I work as a coach for some of the more beginning skaters. I skate myself during the pandemic. I worked as a skate guard, those people who go around and like say, stop fucking up or, you know, help you when you're injured.
Erica Rand:It's been really interesting in all those capacities to think about things. So two examples. One is most rinks have an annual ice show, like a recital put on where people do individual numbers or duo numbers or also these group numbers. So things would happen where some kids will be put in this like cowboys and Indians number or, you know, something like that or the person choreographing the number for all the adults would say, this is a romance about blah blah blah. Or my very first show was called artists and models and all the men were artists, all the women were models.
Erica Rand:So as you know, trained as a feminist art historian, it was clear like either where the cutes were like, if I didn't wanna follow that, didn't have to but I really wanted to be honest to wear the very cute dress. So figuring out how to navigate that and talk to other people or talk to people about their music, People are skating too. Like a lot of times, people skate to orientalist music and thinking about how can you talk to people about that. So that's one thing. But another thing I really wanna mention that I use as an example fairly often is when I teach, like sometimes I've discovered that ways I've just been taught to teach things really mess with people's gender identities.
Erica Rand:And one of those things is teaching crossovers, which are sometimes called crosscuts in Canada. When you teach beginning people to do it and you have them hold their hands out and their arms out, I realized that when I was teaching transmasculine people, sometimes that suddenly they would wanna stop skating. I finally had a friend I was coaching who I could say, hey. Do you feel like I'm trying to ask you to, like, do something that looks like you're showing us your elegant nails or something. It's like, yes.
Erica Rand:Well, at that moment, I could say, here's the functional thing going on trying to help you get upper body balance. Here are some different kinds of things you can do. So I think we could all learn as skaters, as coaches, as coaches of like any sport or people facilitating any people doing a sport. Like what are things that have gender coding or racial coding? For instance, this whole tuck your tailbone thing that I learned in yoga, skating, dance.
Erica Rand:That seems to me like really racialized, you know, idea of trying to flatten out your butt. There are different ways to say all of those things.
Travers:I want to talk about a contribution your book makes that is, I think, really subversive in a really neat way, that you write as somebody who was 60 years old and decided to try pair skating. I mean, like, I'm 64 now. You're a bit older, I presume. And we're not supposed to be doing stuff. Like an old woman, which, you know, when I used to think about old women, I don't see any of us in that category for a variety of reasons, gender not being the, you know, the one across the board.
Travers:But, you know, the idea that you would start doing something like this at the age of 60, that is really subversive because so much of the misogyny that is directed at women is directed at older women. You've talked a lot about the way in which you're working to unsettle the binary, But how do you feel like you're carving out space for older women to be more actualized, to have more agency in sport?
Erica Rand:Wow. What a question. And thank you for putting it that way. First of all, like in addition to this idea that older women and older people should just go off in a corner and not do anything, an interesting thing about skating is it's also performance. And I think one thing about like the auto ethnography of just being alive is learning by the time I got into my fifties, that stuff I had heard about, which is like you become invisible at a certain point turned out to be true.
Erica Rand:Like seriously, people just walk right by you like you actually don't exist. So it's interesting to be in a performative sport and also in a sport where my skating partner is a lot younger than I am. So thinking about age in a lot of different kinds of ways. And I will say it's been personally like exciting and also challenging to try to think, what can I do? What actually maybe shouldn't I do?
Erica Rand:Because, you know, really, like, that's also a question. And one person I think a lot about is Dara Torres, the swimmer who won an Olympic medal at age 20 and then at 40. And when she was asked at age 40, like, what's the difference? And she basically said, I wake up every morning feeling like I've been hit by a truck. So I like to just think about like how to both represent yourself as someone who's out there doing something and to really sounds corny to just say, like, risk taking is kind of a great idea.
Erica Rand:And for me, this has involved a lot of things including, like, I have this fear of being upside down and having my head upside down. So I'm trying to learn how to crawl up a wall backwards with my feet so I can like hang out with my head upside down. So there are a bunch of different things I'm trying to learn.
Mary Louise Adams:I also had some questions here about age and I'm like, I've made little notes. We're supposed to be here talking about gender binaries, but like the age thing is so important. It's, a colleague and I did a paper a couple of years ago trying to talk to hockey coaches and figure skating coaches, how they actually interact with adults. And, you know, we learned some things that wouldn't surprise you at all. So A, it's spending time doing something that you're a little bit uncomfortable, that feels risky, that maybe you're not good at.
Mary Louise Adams:I started ballet when I was 50. I was really not good at it for a very long time. But it's also our field is not very good about recreational physical activity or recreational sport in general, but recreational adult physical activity and sport, it's a huge hole in sports studies research. But it's also the place where people are most thinking about how to do sport differently. Like, there are a lot of things to be really angry about in sport.
Mary Louise Adams:There are a lot of kind of conventions in sport that lead to horrible outcomes, injuries, psychological harms. We don't need to go into all that here, but then you see in historically and now you see adults really, some adults really trying to do things differently. So like you guys in your Paris team or, you know, groovy softball leagues that are trying to think about different ways of being more accessible. I have my last grad students trying to think about how to make sport and recreation activities more welcoming and inclusive to fat people. And how do you get people to have access to the pleasure of learning to move in different ways?
Mary Louise Adams:And for me, that's the skating. I'm sure other people enjoy their sports as much as we enjoy ours, but the feeling of gliding across the ice is very, very, very special. And so that needs to be available to more people. And some of those people are not going to be children. I know it's organized differently in The States, but that then speaks to the way the kind of structures that organize, for instance, in the cities that we live in, in Canada, how people get access to ice time, who gets access to ice, what sports get access to ice.
Mary Louise Adams:Could talk about this for hours and hours and hours, or the soccer fields. I live in Kingston, Ontario, it's a small city, about 200,000 people. Most of the athletic facilities are organized around youth sport, and there's a lot that makes a lot of sense. But like the figure skating clubs, they get discounted ice when young people are on the ice. And if you put adults on the ice, you have to pay more for that ice.
Mary Louise Adams:So then you prohibit adults from skating with the young people and so on. Like, it just like, it goes so far. It it's so deeply built into the structures that makes work possible or not possible. You've talked about a lot of really huge issues in this book, and then there's like a million others that are still underneath the kind of things you talk about.
Travers:Yeah. And one of the things you do so well in this book, Erica, is explain how the gender binary is racialized. It's heteronormative, but it's also aged. Because when people are really old in our culture, they become irrelevant and also ungendered. The definition of aging and disability in a lot of ways is consistent with losing one's masculinity for men.
Travers:You know, like old men cease to be able to dominate or whatever. So there's a way in which aging is really coded into this binary too. And I think that's important. I just think you're such a badass for getting into pair skating at the age of 60. I mean, I remember skateboarding with my kids when I was 50 and hitting the ground and oh my God, it was so the cement was so hard.
Travers:You know, I wasn't seriously injured. I definitely had a bruise, but it made me go, Oh, this is too painful. Mind you, I'm screaming along on my electric unicycle at high speed, but I do have gear. But, you know, there is that awareness that when you're 12, you might hit the ice and ouch. But when you're 60 or older, there is that potential dynamic.
Travers:But it certainly speaks to the amount of trust you would have to build with a pairs partner, doesn't it, to feel safe to do that? And I wonder, because of your discussion of the power imbalances in traditional pair skating, partly because it's heteronormative, but also because male partners are in such short supply, they have a lot of power, does it make you think about the way in which consent is negotiated in pair skating as it's currently constructed? Mary Louise mentioned that in dance, there's been a lot more consent based discussion around who lifts who, how, who touches who, where. Although I do have a graduate student who's arguing that dance needs to learn from BDSM and mixed martial arts in terms of consent based practices, which is, you know, fascinating. But I know you must have thought about this a lot.
Travers:What have you been coming up with?
Erica Rand:Well, first of all, one of the joys of skating, or I'm sure doing other recreational things as an adult, is getting to hook up with a skating partner where you both have really good politics about consent. In my own world of skating, that's been amazing. But in pair skating and dance, there's so much of a history of power imbalance and abuse because of the way that boys and men are in such short supply. And various skaters sometimes after they're finished have spoken about the way that getting a male partner is like going to a cattle call and then they have a chance to basically tell you what to do. And we learned about that in our own skating because there's, not about we have didn't have that experience at all, but it's just in a granular way that these power things are embedded.
Erica Rand:Like the language of pair skating is lift the girl, throw the girl, put the girl where you want her to be. Well, all of that language is really conducive to this idea that the person competing as male in that partnership is in charge, right? The whole language is like that. And it also like one thing that really pisses me off is that it's very much undercuts the physical strength and participation you have to have to be stating in the girl or woman category. Like you need a lot of core strengths to be lifted.
Erica Rand:You need help out for it to happen. You need to collaborate effectively. You need to do all these different kinds of things that gets totally undercut. And then on top of that, the representation of so much skating in pairs and dance is this sort of heterosexual romance rescue, blah blah blah, like that kind of thing. So it's then it's built into the narrative other people see.
Mary Louise Adams:The heterosexual storyline that is applied to skating, as to other things too, but as applied to skating, is one of the things I think that has really held the sport back in terms of finding an audience for the year 2025. Like, I think there are all sorts of people in skating organizations all over the world, like, really wondering about why the audience is diminishing. And the athletic capabilities of skaters continues in some ways to follow this progress narrative. People will have just recently seen the American skater, Ilya Malinens, landing seven quadruple jumps in one program, which is outrageous, really. And somebody else will do it at some point after him.
Mary Louise Adams:Apparently, another big story from a recent weekend was that all of the junior level women in the ISU Grand Prix Final were doing triple axles. That absolutely wouldn't have happened a number of years ago. So the technical stuff, it changes over time. And is there a limit to what that change can be? Unclear, the equipment changes too.
Mary Louise Adams:But what does not seem to be changing is the things that are represented on the ice, the kinds of music people use, the costumes they wear. Costume rules changed a number of years ago and hardly anybody takes advantage of the changed costume rule where people competing in the women's category are not required to wear dresses. I get it, dresses are nice, some people love the dresses, but you think like, why does almost nobody take the opportunity not to wear a dress? When they all practiced without dresses, almost everybody would practice in just plain tights, but the limitations of the storylines, the traditions people draw on when they make up their choreography, the kind of stereotypes that Erica was pointing to earlier. Many programs have you seen where people put on some kind of Spanish inspired music and wear a black dress with a red rose on it or some red trim on it?
Mary Louise Adams:It's just like it is so basic in some ways in terms of the vision that people have for how you can move a body on the ice. And some of that is the requirements of the scoring system. Some of it is wanting to please judges who are not inviting a lot of imagination. Some of it is racism and colonial histories and all sorts of other really weighty discourses that suggest what we should value. But yeah, that to me is like one of the things to lament about figure skating right now.
Mary Louise Adams:And if you could open up what the storylines were, or even if you could open up more possibility for abstraction on the ice, then you would be able to skate in ways that felt meaningful for artistic reasons or for aesthetic reasons and not to match gender norms or other norms or the aristocratic white people norms that have really established the sport historically. I want to see skating, like take more risks. There are a few people doing that in different contexts, outside of competition. And I think that is one of the really interesting pieces that Erica opens the book with, like how much of the limitations in this sport are related to the fact that we're doing these things because we want to compete with them? And that's a contradiction that I think lots of skaters feel.
Erica Rand:Yeah, there are increasing ways to do something that's not competing. There are big ice theater programs, people around the world trying to promote different kinds of skating, more artistic skating, more creative skating, things that you're talking about. And at the same time, we have a competition system that is really rooted in a traditional set of things. And that traditional set of things supports certain kind of people even to the point where you're talking about those jumps for instance. I mean, I think the thing is that sports develop in relation to a bunch of different ideals about who should succeed in the sport and what that should be about.
Erica Rand:So just for instance, skating would be totally different if jumping up and rotating around four times were not considered the highest point getting anything.
Travers:I wanted to ask a different question, Erica. I was really happy to see you talk about the Paralympics. I do work related to transgender participation in sport. Without having gone into the Paralympics in any great detail, like my knowledge is very superficial, I had echoed other people in saying that, you know, the Paralympics goes beyond gender in certain ways in identifying particular capacities. And that might be something that we could use in organizing sport alternatively.
Travers:But in your book, you at least partially blew that out of the water for me with your note that gender in itself is handicapped in the Paralympics. Can you explain more to people? And obviously not everyone will have read the book, but explain, you know, what the Paralympic system is and how it is handicapping gender.
Erica Rand:Sure. So para sport is the category for sports for people with disabilities that are sports that can make it into the International Olympic para sport system. So that's important in itself because that's based on initially wanting injured military to be able to do sports. So the sports that Paralympics support and a lot of such sports program support, for instance, don't count disabilities that affect especially poor people or people of color or women. So the whole system itself in that is questionable.
Erica Rand:But the thing I was talking about in the book is in different, it's different for different sports, but sports identify disabilities using a different kind of system. So wheelchair basketball, for instance, has a system where people are rated on a scale of one to 4.5 depending on what their disabilities are. And there's a certain number of people you can have, a certain number you can add up to on the court at any time. Some sports are just about don't do that numbering system. Wheelchair rugby, which is one of the few sports that's mixed gender, which is basically M or F but nothing else, categorizes people on a number system, but then gives an extra 0.5 to how many people can be in play at the same time for every person competing as female.
Erica Rand:In other words, being categorized as female is a point five handicap. And that struck me so much because, Trevor, I think the thing you mentioned that seems to show so much potential is that people come with different capacities and you can work around people's different capacities that aren't just like a gender label. But then you also get a situation that many of them, the sports are either gender divided or gender marked in a certain way because it categorizes women or girls as being point five less athletic. It, to me, undoes a lot of the potential in saying people with different capacities can compete together. That's one thing.
Erica Rand:But also one of the things I've learned especially from reading the work of Danielle Pears is that para sport systems where you have to be judged to see what exactly your disabilities are very much open people up to a huge amount of surveillance and make a lot of people think, oh, I can look at that person and think, wait, they're walking, but they don't have a category that would make them able to walk. So I'm suspicious of them. And I think that gets us back to what you mentioned before that these anti trans policies are doing, which is they are encouraging people to say, hey. That person over there does not seem female enough to me.
Travers:And we know that racialized girls and women are disproportionately targeted for that kind of scrutiny. Absolutely. Or anyone who has the nerve to have short hair. The sport that I'm interested in right now is the WNBA, and there are no white women playing who have short hair right now. There are two black women who have short hair.
Travers:And they identify as masculine, the stud buds, which, you know, if you have not picked up on the stud buds, you should Google it. They are fantastic. And they've just switched the whole media landscape for the WNBA on its head by, you know, showing that there is an audience for their content. It's fabulous. But I look back to post 1997 when the league was established and the early aughts.
Travers:It was not unusual to see white women with short hair. Now we don't. None of them. They're all having ponytails. And we're seeing this, I mean, guess along with you, the seventies were a pretty good time for a teenager because it was unisex, right?
Travers:You went to the store and you bought jeans. You went to the store and you bought a t shirt. You went to the store and you bought shoes. It was one store. Everybody wore the same jeans, t shirt, shoes.
Travers:But since that time, we've seen like a, you know, cultural efforts to repolarize gender. And you see it in women's sports across the board, the ponytail. Like, it's just ubiquitous. And, you know, I would kill for someone to have a dyke haircut, whether they're queer or not. But the stud buds have provided, but the white women have not.
Travers:Like they're really performing orthodox femininity across the board, which is really sad and disturbing to me.
Erica Rand:I will just say that in the seventies, as sort of an emerging dyke in the seventies, I was pretty happy in the eighties when I figured out that I could wear more feminine stuff than you go to the store and you buy all the stuff you were suggesting. But I absolutely know what you're talking about. And one just little thing I wanna flag that you said that's so important is that we so often think there's this narrative of progress. I mean, maybe not right now with things going down so badly, but it's important that in sports like skating and other sports like that, really what you see in this heteronormative thing is actually also a step downward from growth and other things, especially in the 70s and other times.
Mary Louise Adams:The ponytail thing, it's such a perfect teaching moment. Of course, all our classes are so huge now. You can stand in a lecture hall and look around the classroom in a school of kinesiology and health studies where many of the women now in a way that they wouldn't like twenty years ago are quite happy identifying themselves as feminist, and that's not as scary as it used to be in Canada at any rate. But the ponytail thing is amazing, But you can look historically and you can just look at photographs of teams and you can see how different that is. You can look into, you know, you can watch the opening minutes of an international soccer game and see how culturally specific it is.
Mary Louise Adams:And it always reminds me of Dana Daniels' books that has Ponytail in the title.
Travers:Polygendered and Ponytailed indeed. Yeah.
Mary Louise Adams:Yeah, I'm sure people listening have their own practices related to assessing the ponytails on the sports shows that they're watching.
Travers:It feels like wearing the ponytail is sort of like a necessary thing to do to escape serious scrutiny. Like, let's just take a moment and think about if Caitlin Clark had upon arriving at or Paige Becker's having arrived at the WNBA had gotten a nice fresh cut. Like, my god, the moral panic. I mean, Caitlyn Clarke's definitely not gonna do it. Paige Becker's would be more likely to do it.
Travers:But there's also so much, not necessarily feminist, but there's a, like, long hair. It's like gender nonconformity is more threatening than feminism. You know, girls have entry to arenas that they didn't have before and women, but they have to present at least as heterosexually legible.
Erica Rand:I feel like I'm remembering a TODA commercial from a few decades ago and remarking it was like a girl's basketball team and remarking at all the ponytails that the idea that it's not spread, but even more entrenched. And I noticed with my students sometimes more of them are telling me things about, for instance, how much they love to do makeup before their game, which I just don't feel like I heard as often before that I'm hearing more of now or a lot of, you know, because there's been stuff written for example, the whole softball thing where girls are all wearing matching ribbons or something. And I feel like more people are defending that as if it were personal expression rather than forced conformity.
Travers:No, and I think that you're right, but I think that there's a dynamic that has emerged. I mean, there have always been opportunities for heterosexy female athletes, particularly white ones to cash in. You know, like the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. But name, image and likeness and the rise of social media, I mean, have like I'm more familiar with the WNBA. But like women like Angel Reese who has millions and millions of followers and makes so much more money from her non WNBA activities than she ever could in the WNBA.
Travers:So there's a sense in which sexiness is paying off. And you see a lot of athletes who you know are wearing quite elaborate makeup. Like I watch them, you know, hair and makeup. And you know, one of the number one rules for white people is we do not comment about black women's hair. So I'm going to take that off the table.
Travers:But I do see a lot of makeup and there's a lot of, like you can imagine, like I'm thinking, that would take a lot of time and energy to pull off, to come out and play in a game like looking that great. So there's a sense in which in order to succeed in women's sports, have to market themselves. But they're not marketing themselves to a network. They're marketing themselves individually to consumers, you know, on social media. And you know, perhaps they're also trying to mitigate some of the hate they experience.
Travers:Because I know that, you know, for example in the NCAA, basketball players get the most hate of everyone, but women's basketball players get four more times hate than men do. So, you know, they're navigating an environment that is absolutely toxic and hateful and dangerous. So some of that is survival, some of it is economic, and then, you know, some of it reflects just a larger trend of, okay, you know, we have gay marriage now, etcetera. But gender nonconformity is still and we're seeing an immense organized pushback against it. But even prior to that, gender nonconformity among most female athletes recently has been they've done the ponytail to sort of mitigate it to an extent.
Travers:I'm sure not all, but a lot.
Erica Rand:Yeah. That's super important. And I think in so many cases, in thinking about sport, like the whole context in which sport happens is so important to talk about. And those specific examples are really central, I think.
Mary Louise Adams:And it's a contradiction that people can see in sport in a way. It's pedagogically useful for people to be able to reflect on that in a way that it's maybe harder to reflect on women in other realms of the society, particularly in the classroom with young people, that's really pedagogically useful. But it is the narrowing down of the possibility of what femininity means. Forget trans on some level, but like opening up gender in all the various ways that you could open it up. Like we have classes where students are open to their trans classmates, but their own sense of their, like the students who feel themselves to be cisgender, like their own sense of their own gender feels unbelievably narrow to me, and that's the women and the men.
Mary Louise Adams:And how do you actually use the discourses around things that are familiar to people in everyday life to help them see the limitations that they're putting on themselves. I think skating is a great thing to do that. Sport is a great thing to do that in general. And it's certainly not the only one, but it is in some ways so glaring that it's really, really valuable to have those conversations.
Erica Rand:I have to say that one of the things that I found really humbling and scary and disturbing for me writing this book was having to think about how my own gender assumptions about myself were so fixed. Like I had just presumption like, who am I? And I felt like I am this queer femme dyke. And I give this example of saying like over and over, I like to be the one in the skirt, which I must have said like a million times and had to as a pair skater one way I really grew as a pair skater was having Anna say, oh, look at that interesting costume. Like, having to job myself to learn.
Erica Rand:First of all, maybe that's not me all the time, which I already knew because I'm not always the one in skirt. That's one thing. But in addition, one thing I think about a lot and I had been talking and writing about for a really long time, I think is really well expressed by Eric Stanley who makes this great point about gender self determination, where they basically say instead of thinking of gender self determination as a personal thing, we could think of it as a political project to enable everybody to express whatever genders they want at any time, whether they stay the same or change. And that question of how can we think of gender self determination and other kinds as a collective project that's not only about us. That's something I learned a lot about from pair skating in a different way because I'm in a unit that makes gender in a unit of two.
Travers:Well, that's always been what it is, isn't it? It's like trans inclusion. Genuine trans inclusion is good for everybody. I mean, we know from studies that in schools that have SOGI curriculum and gay straight alliances that the violence against girls and women is reduced. You you have a less polarized gender order.
Travers:It becomes a safer place for girls and women. But, you know, there's I know we're getting close to the end. Erica, what basis is there for hope? Tell me something that inspires you.
Erica Rand:Well, one thing that inspires me is how many people are working for a change. A small example that I will give is that when this new ruling came down in US figure skating, I went to an emergency meeting, all these things happen. There are all kinds of people trying to figure out how to make things better in so many different contexts. And I think a reason for hope is always that people are pushing back. So to me, that's huge.
Erica Rand:And there's so much stuff we can do. And I think part of that is in, as we've been talking about, doing things like trying different things, taking risks, physical experimentation, that's part of the opening up individual sports like skating or other kinds of things and the political work we all need to do together. So even though that's kind of edging back into the hard stuff, beautiful new stuff is happening when people use their imaginations to do something else. And I will go back to that Skate Canada ruling from December 2022 when suddenly you started to see people doing experimentation, including some of like the biggest skaters around and the excitement generated by that and also the excitement generated by doing other kinds of work and pleasure is really important. And I'm very moved.
Erica Rand:Like there have been times in the past year where I just thought like, you know, or when I was doing the final revision on the book, I'm like, everything's so bad. I have to stop talking about the joy part and I have to put more into what's happening right now. And I think to me, part of the point is that pleasure is part of social justice. Everybody should get to have it. We need to spread it around.
Erica Rand:And I think we can figure out ways to do that in smaller and bigger picture fashions.
Travers:I love that. That's a great response.
Erica Rand:Yeah. So would this be a good time for me to say thank you so much for being on this podcast with me and for all I've learned from you over a ton of years. And I still look forward to more things we'll do together.
Travers:Back at you.
Mary Louise Adams:Thanks for inviting us, and thanks for writing a great book.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book is Skating Away from the Binary by Erica Rand, which is part of our Forerunners series, available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.