Gender lines challenge our changing world

My daughter joined an adult coed kickball league this year in Utah.

She and three friends, all women, signed up and waited to be placed on a team. When the roster arrived, it included nine women and one man on a team the league dubbed Dynamos.

Play ball.

Then an official from the league, a man, emailed them to say: “We have an odd situation.”

Referring to their gender imbalance, he advised adding more men and said he would keep registration open and waive the $75 fee for men who joined the team. Some of the women, but not all, were incensed.

The roster now has nine women and four men. One of the men has not shown up for a game yet. Another man incorrectly told my daughter, a second baseman on her high school softball team, that she should stand at second base when playing the position. Her competitive instinct was further fired by rules that say men can’t pitch to women, but women can pitch to either gender.

In the first game, each player on the team took a turn kicking in random order. But in the next game, the referee said men and women had to alternate on each kick. That meant the few men would get way more turns kicking than the women. The women protested several times and the referee, also a woman, relented, saying a man had to take every third kick.

The women made a change, too. Their team is now called Odd Situation.

Humans have been litigating competition between genders for eons — on and off the playing fields. My daughter got me thinking about well-documented pay gaps between men and women. And promotions doled out unevenly by gender. And the many women I’ve known who don’t want an advantage, just a fair chance. And, further afield, the ongoing Democratic debate over whether a woman should be nominated this time around for president.

I also thought about women who tested fairness in gendered competition in different ways.

Like Renee Richards, the tennis player who underwent male-to-female sex reassignment surgery in 1975 and was not allowed to compete as a woman when genetic screening for female players was instituted by the national tennis association. Richards won a New York Supreme Court case in 1977, a landmark decision for transgender rights, and at 43 years old, entered the U.S. Open that year, losing in the first round but reaching the finals in doubles. In five years as a pro, she ranked as high as 20th.

And like Caster Semenya, the South African runner who twice won the Olympic women’s 800-meter run. Semenya, 28, who is thought to be intersex — a person whose anatomy does not conform to typical definitions of male or female — and whose body naturally produces high levels of muscle-building testosterone, lost a case last week when the highest court in international sports ruled that female athletes like her in events from 400 meters to a mile must reduce their testosterone, typically by taking hormone-reducing drugs.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport acknowledged its ruling was discriminatory but necessary to ensure fair competition.

Of course, the level of allowable testosterone is arbitrary. How that defines a woman is a mystery. How that biological advantage is unfair, and a swimmer’s naturally very long trunk or a sprinter’s naturally very long legs or a cyclist’s naturally very low resting heart rate is fair, is murky.

Semenya, who could appeal or switch events or retire, tweeted, “Knowing when to walk away is wisdom.”

But the litigation will continue.

From the fields of Utah to the tracks of Olympians, we still haven’t figured it out.

Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday’s editorial board.