Comparing Intersex And Transgender Females Deserve A Place...

Intersex and transgender females deserve a place of belonging in the world of sport. Society’s need to categorize humans makes it difficult for minorities to find a sense of belonging. Humans are easily given labels by society - as gay, straight, black, asian, female, male etc. This system works for the majority of people, and those who fit in do not see a necessity to change these constructs. As Judith Butler argues in her essay Undoing Gender we must remake the definition of human by deconstructing our preconceived notion of humanity and continuously reassembling it. Butler eloquently states â€Å"This means we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and re-articulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less†¦show more content†¦Physicist Ira Hammerman discovered that in a set of swimming and running races woman s world records were consistently about 90 percent of the men’s world record. Further research proved this ratio true across diverse sports (Meyer). Many believe that a male-to-female transgender holds an unfair competitive advantage against a cisgender female because they were born as males and therefore retain some of the advantages that come with masculinity. These advantages go beyond the biological differences in gender - which can be equated with hormonal treatment. In her essay Essentialism and Experience Bell Hooks discusses the effect of male privilege. She argues that male students, who have spent most of their lives benefitting from male privilege, do not fully understand the passion of experience in a classroom. Similarly we can explore the benefits of male privilege in sport which is a drastically male dominant aspect of society. A study at the University of Southern California uncovered that L.A. based broadcast affiliates devote only 3.2 percent of airtime to women’s sport (Good). Iris Young builds on this societal imbalance in her essay Throwing Like a Girl. Young expl ains how societal structures have a psychological effect on female performance. She argues that the fact that women cannot throw as far as men is not simply due to the biomechanical differences between genders but rather