The Breakside - 1/18
Happy New Year! And now a break from the heavy topic of a known antisemite in the Ultimate community to the light and breezy topic of...oh...never mind.
Hi y’all and welcome back to another edition of The Breakside. The uploading schedule will be “whenever I can” moving forward but hopefully that means more consistent than I have been the last month or so. I am looking forward to more exciting things to cover as College Ultimate gets into full swing, and of course have a couple of stories I’ve been sitting on for a while trying to figure out how to write as well. If you do have anything you think deserves some coverage though feel free to let me know! I’ll do my best to make it happen.
What Does Fairness Really Mean to You? To Us? And What is it Worth?
Content Warning: This piece will contain references to Transphobia and links to posts/forums with Transphobic comments
Yes, I may have finished three interviews and not their two accompanying stories for The Breakside, but I am powerless to resist when the writing inspiration strikes.
Today, that inspiration has me thinking about several posts and conversations I’ve seen within the Ultimate community in the last month or so. About a month ago, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) released new guidelines around gender-based competitive divisions, making it more difficult and time-consuming for transgender athletes to compete in the Gender-Based Divisions. Key parts of that decision were an anonymous survey to all members and a review by a medical subcommittee.
As a fellow disc sport and community with a lot of crossover into Disc Golf, the Ultimate Community took notice. A handful of Twitter conversations and threads were shared about the rolling back of trans rights across the board in the United States, in athletics, and an article published on Ultiworld featuring the reaction from Alex Rubin (a nonbinary Ultimate player) regarding the rule change. However, what caught my attention most was the negative pushback to this showing of support. Perhaps it’s naïve of me, but I still feel a sudden pit in my stomach when I see things like this Reddit post on r/Ultimate, featuring a “WOMAN in Ultimate” showing three (now deleted) comments on the original Ultiworld article all showing support for the recent change made by the PDGA.
Those comments expressed sentiments like “once a man, always a man” regarding sports and physical activity. Another claimed that cis women were victims of “sinister,” “covert oppression,” where “reasonable people” had somehow been convinced of “obvious delusions.” I hate seeing that kind of sentiment in a community I believe has the capacity for so much good.
However, I don’t often do anything about that feeling. Often I’ve felt overwhelmed by the prospect of direct confrontation in these situations, and like I don’t know enough about the trans experience or how to counter information I believe to be false. But, I did promise myself that this would be a platform that advocates for positive change. In that spirit, I want to dedicate this issue to pushing back against narratives that aim to make Ultimate more exclusive rather than inclusive and to consider once again where we want the community to go in the future.
I hope that if you are reading this in January 2023, you don’t need me to remind you of how trans Americans’ rights are being stripped away by the government across the country. They are tired. It is time for cisgender members of the Ultimate community to step up.
Ultimate should be fundamentally inclusive. It’s written into the mission and goals of USA Ultimate and often serves as a haven for people cast out of different communities. How did you get involved in Ultimate? How different would your life be without the people and experiences you’ve crossed paths with through Ultimate? Why would we want to push people away from that space? To me, one of the fundamental goals of the Ultimate community should be to make it as accessible and welcoming to as many people as possible. That goal should be the foundation of Ultimate’s growth moving forward.
In pushing back against exclusionary narratives and my initial instincts, I want to consider why people are against trans athletes competing in their rightful divisions. I would argue that the heart of the issue is a phrase I haven’t heard since I was about 12. “It’s not fair.” At face value, it’s easy to argue that we like our sports to be fair. There are banned performance-enhancing drugs, salary caps, and collective bargaining agreements between groups of team owners and players’ unions. Even the very rules of the games we play we enforce with the idea of fairness for those competing. Fundamentally though, that is the most shallow and least empathetic interpretation of what fairness means. And applying that vision of fairness exclusively to trans athletes while ignoring all other fairness applications becomes anti-trans, even if people try to have good intentions.
In previous versions of this piece, I struggled to distill exactly what I was saying in a way that made sense to you all, people who don’t have the luxury of reading my thoughts. (Thank you mom and dad for being my editors). However, I believe that the idea of maximum inclusion in our sport and community and an understanding of the fundamental unfairness of sports are all that is needed to dismantle most anti-trans arguments.
One thing I will not do is dispute that there are physiological differences between male, female, and intersex people. Sometimes those differences linger in certain ways after someone transitions, which seems to be what people advocating for trans exclusion are very hung up on. Regardless, pretending like those are the only physiological differences between competitors, and that regulating those as harshly as possible somehow creates a magic utopia of fair competition is ridiculous. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that are entirely outside of someone’s control that can change the “fairness” of competition between individuals and teams: height, healthy weight, socioeconomic background, nation of origin, genetic mutation of your muscle composition, and time of the year you were born. That’s not to mention there is no testing for Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in either disc sport.
Let’s play these hypotheticals out to their logical conclusions. First, regulate every possible variable that might change someone’s athletic abilities. Let’s only have people that are the exact same age and size, as well as having grown up with the same resources to pursue athletics, and genetically testing them to make sure they aren’t predisposed to a better slow vs. fast twitch muscle ratio. Then, once we can field teams in divisions of essentially the same people, they all play games and compete for outcomes that boil down to luck. The results become no different than flipping a coin. Does any of that sound fun? Spectating or competing? People don’t play sports because every matchup is perfectly equal.
Now let’s consider a world that is much closer to reality. One governed by strict hormonal testing for trans athletes to compete in gendered divisions that suit their actual gender. Let’s say it’s somehow done in the quickest, most efficient, and least invasive way possible. But then I go and pump myself full of the best PEDs money can buy, and I become the fastest and strongest player alive. Is that fair? Have we leveled the playing field for everyone? No, we haven’t. At all.
If the logic for changing these rules and regulations in Disc Golf is that people are playing for money and are, therefore, more incentivized to cheat, it still makes no sense for me to draw the line on where you try to regulate people based on whether or not they are trans. About 5% of U.S. adults are trans. If they wanted to, any person could get hopped up on PEDs for an advantage. It makes no sense to draw a hard line of inclusion based solely on whether or not someone is trans. I won’t pretend to have read enough of the science on whether there is that much of a measurable advantage for specific sports that measuring someone’s testosterone levels is that important for making sure everything is “fair.” But, I will say that pretending like that is the only possible way someone could gain some advantage and choosing only to govern people’s trans-ness is hypocritical and transphobic. That’s because regardless of the intent of the regulations people put in place, the impact of those regulations is exclusively on trans athletes.
One last point I want to make is that it’s incredibly self-centered to claim that someone has an inherent advantage over you by virtue of them being trans while ignoring any privilege or advantages you may have over them by being cis. I may not be familiar with all data regarding trans athletes, but some data I am familiar with are studies like this. These studies consistently demonstrate that trans people who do not receive gender-affirming care have worse mental health outcomes than their cisgender counterparts. I might add that someone’s mental health and capabilities are also essential to their athletic abilities and quality of life.
The Ultimate community and USA Ultimate like to paint the sport as this beautiful utopia where everything is different from other sports because of the people and Spirit of the Game. However, following Disc Golf’s direction would be directly opposing the game’s long-term health and growth, as well as the health and happiness of members of our community.
About The Breakside
The goal of this newsletter is to tackle what I see as a gap in the present coverage of Ultimate as a sport. I hope that this newsletter will provide an outlet for important, yet overlooked people and stories to receive the coverage and perspectives they deserve.
About the Author
My name is Noam Gumerman (he/him), and I am a senior at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. I am from Chapel Hill, NC, and am currently studying Journalism and American Studies at Brandeis University. I am one of the current captains of Brandeis TRON, our open division team. My claim to fame within the Ultimate community is running the @being_ulti account during the week of the 2022 WUCC tournament. Contact me for discussions, feedback, story suggestions and more on Twitter at @noamgum, or via email at ngumerman@brandeis.edu.