Why Gender Matters for Safeguarding in Sport

[Music] Welcome to ScorePotPast and the very first episode of our journey to the Construct Safe Gardening in the world of sports. We will break down concepts, question assumptions, and unpack the biases and beliefs that shape the conversation around safe gardening. We will dig deep, right to the core of meaning and understanding. And we are your host, Alexandra Volkov and Anata Tadia. And behind the scenes looking after the audio is Ryan Lobbix. Let's be Construct Safe Gardening together. [Music] Today we are here to discuss the minion of gender, the relationship between gender and violence in sports, and how a deep understanding of gender should influence safe gardening policies. For this episode, we invited the best expert in the field and also a decorated track and field outlet, World Championship and Olympic Games participant, Madeline Pape. Hi Madeline, welcome to ScorePotCast. Hello, so happy to be here. Madeline is a sociologist, Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne Center for Gender Studies and Institute of Social Sciences. She specializes in regulation and gender in sport, the politics of inclusion, and the study of sex and gender in biomedical and sports sciences. Madeline works with sports practitioners, experts and advocates to advance integrity in how sports organization govern inclusion in women's sports. Madeline, can you tell us a little bit more about your journey and how you came to work with safe gardening in sports? Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question, Alexandra. So we're a bit way to begin. I guess I would, I think I would take this back to my own experience as an athlete. I was one of those athletes who unfortunately had their athletic career cut short quite suddenly by an injury. And that injury came out of a long journey and it was a long period of overtraining, of training while injured, of also my coach and my doctor withholding information from me about the severity of my injury and pushing instead for me to qualify for the next international championships instead of putting my health back to my well-being first. That was basically my experience over the last sort of seven months of my career before I then chose myself to stop running, find out what I needed to do to address my injury, which was in the Achilles injury, have surgery again, and ultimately never returned to running. And it was, I think it really, well, it was a life changing moment in a sense that, well, it turned my life completely upside down when my career ended in that way. And I ended up moving to the United States and undertaking a PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I found a new pathway, but there was just something that felt really, something felt really wrong about how that injury happened and about how I felt actually gaslit or, you know, that's a term I guess that gets used a lot in the context of discussions about violence, but where I could feel that something was wrong in how I was being trained, in how my coach was not listening to what I was saying about the intensity of our trainings, the fact that there wasn't enough time being spent on softer surfaces, for example, in the forest, on grass, getting off the track, getting off the hard surfaces, how it was showing through in my mental health, it was showing through in things like acne breakouts, all over my back, all over my face, significant amounts of stress, and also poor performances during that seven month period. And yet my coach wasn't willing to change the training and I felt very trapped in that situation, and like I didn't have a choice, but to submit to what he was telling me I had to do. And I think athletes, especially in individual sports, or at least, you know, that's the experience I know best, I come from an individual sport, and you are very dependent on your coach, and you really need to trust that your coach is putting you and your interests first. If you start to doubt that, the whole thing kind of starts to fall apart, it starts to unravel. So it's very hard to take distance, some distance, and reflect in a sort of removed way about what might be wrong with that situation, and actually, you know, take steps to walk away from it, especially when you've got major championships coming up. You're already in the swing of it. Yeah, you can, well, in my experience, I got quite trapped in, and I paid, you know, the ultimate price for that, because in the end, my body had been so badly injured by that period of overtraining and ignoring what my body was telling me, that it ended my career, and actually, I didn't even, I wasn't even able to jog for five years, after the second surgery. So, you know, not only could I not run as an elite athlete, I actually couldn't run at all. And so, this is super tough to hear, but what happened? Like, what did you do next? Because you mentioned you moved to complete career change, and the University of Wisconsin. How did that happen? How was that process for you? Yeah, so, in a way, I mean, I really hit rock bottom after this period. I mean, it wasn't only that the injury happened the way it did, but also that my coach, who was a national coach at the time, also pulled all of my funding, because I refused to keep training on my injured Achilles. So, I found myself back living with my parents at age, I don't know, I think I might have been 27 at that point, living back with my parents in a wheelchair after having surgery on my Achilles Plus. My Achilles Plus on my other foot to try to fix another problem with that foot. My dessert interrupt. Did you have someone to rely on, like, a network, like, was the Sir Family at that time? I mean, I definitely had at least one close friend, who I really leaned on during that time, but for sure it was my family that I had to really rely on. And I mean, I mean, rely on in a very material way, like to put a roof over my head kind of thing. Yeah, I guess it's really traumatic experience to lose your, it's not only a livelihood, I mean, though I also think livelihood is very important, like, your what you're doing to end a living is not a small thing. I think that's very important, but it's more than that. I mean, this is really about your identity as an athlete, or as a person, sorry, your identity as a person, and yeah, how you're seen and known by the people around you. So to lose that was to have to start all over again in terms of who I was as a person, what I wanted to do with my life. How I wanted to be known by the people around me, and it was very painful to, I just, I mean, I just knew I couldn't stay in Australia, like, I had to leave. I needed to be get away from that environment, get away from that person that I was that I had lost, and also on a more positive note, like, actually, now, have the opportunity to go and live somewhere else on the other side of the world and have that adventure, which, you know, when your an athlete isn't, isn't really, I mean, you do travel a lot for competition, but yeah, this was a chance to live the, the alternative life that wasn't available to me as an athlete. So I decided I would look at doing a PhD overseas. My university studies were definitely something that helped to call me out of that hole and give me, you know, something to be passionate about and, and work towards again. So finally, I finished my undergraduate studies and applied to do a PhD overseas, got admitted to Wisconsin and, and had no idea where Wisconsin was on a map, or where the city of Madison was, but decided to roll the dice and, and move over there. So from on the field to off the field, that was your career evolution, and I would like to know more about your, your area of expertise in this moment, because you're a gender expert. Is that correct? Yeah, I would say a gender expert. Can you tell us how did you get involved in exploring what gender means? It wasn't my plan, actually. So when I moved to Wisconsin, I had thought I was going to be doing research on sustainability-related questions. But I was also really curious about the gender-related courses and groups that existed on the campus. And so I took a course that was about, it was about feminist theory, was the name of the course, and the first book, the very, very first book that we had. read was a book by Anfoso Sterling who is a biologist who has really transformed the ways that gender scholars, but I would say also biologists think about biological sex. In this book, opened with the story of Maria Jose Patinio who is a Spanish herdler and who was banned from competing in the 1980s, like 1980s, because she was found to have a Y chromosome. And the story, as Anfoso Sterling tells it, is about how Maria Patinio managed to challenge those eligibility rules by showing that, in fact, presence of a Y chromosome was not telling us the whole story. And that in her case, actually, she in every way looks like a woman, ran like a woman, lived like a woman, and the Y chromosome test was the wrong test. And I read this chapter that chapter that I was can just not at all expecting to read in opening this book and had the opportunity to reflect on my own experiences as an elite athlete, and specifically a moment in 2009 that has actually become, I would say, my primary reference point for my entire career, which I didn't know at the time in 2009 would be the case. I was at the World Championships in Berlin and I competed in the same heat as South African champion, Castus Emanuel. And Castus Emanuel at the time was a young, up-and-coming athlete. I think she was 18 years old. This was her first international championships. And it was the championships where the controversy erupted around her right to compete. And this controversy erupted over the course of the championship. So there were the heats, two days later, with the semi, or day later with the semis, a couple of days later, it was the final and just escalated over those few days. Now I was there on the ground to see that happen. And so I opened this book, I read this chapter about Maria Jose Patino and I realized that there is an entire universe of discussion and debate about how to regulate eligibility in the women's category, but also how to critically unpack this notion of biological sex. And I can't say that I had an overnight transformation. I was very much a skeptic in reading this. But nevertheless, it gave me the opportunity to revisit this past experience and to start to think differently about what assumptions I held at that time. But also I think to see Semania differently. And I really hadn't taken the time to think about Semania in the years after that event. I mean, of course, she was still racing and it was from time to time in the news, but I hadn't reflected on my own behavior towards her until this moment. And I just really started to think about how the ways that we define eligibility in the women's category impact those athletes that we decide shouldn't be competing alongside other women. You mentioned the need to critically unpack biological sex. Can you help us understand what sex is and how that differs from gender? I guess this is how I think about it. We like to make an analytical distinction between these two concepts. So when we talk about sex, we're talking about a set of assigned categories, typically female and male. And we assign these categories often on the basis of a very cursory examination of an infant's genitalia. It gets entered onto a birth certificate later onto a passport, etc. And we do that with the understanding that that category that assigned category is a proxy for a number of other characteristics. That female will correspond with certain chromosomes. It will correspond with a certain testosterone range. It will correspond with certain genitalia, secondary sex characteristics like breast development, etc. And the converse for when we assign this category male. So sex is a set of assigned categories. And it is a proxy for certain what we assume to be certain underlying biological characteristics. On the other hand, then we have gender. And there are different ways to define gender, depending on what discipline you've been trained in. I've been trained in sociology. So I'll give you the sociology approach. Very often we start not in sociology, but outside of sociology, we will assume that gender is about identity. That's about identity. Categories, expression of ones, sense, internal sense of gender. And that is a part of gender. But sociologists understand it as something much more comprehensive and encompassing. We understand gender as a system of power and of relationships that is reproduced at multiple levels of society that structures how we, for example, organize politics, how we organize our educational system, how we organize sport. This is at the very macro level. It organizes and structures our relationships at what we call the meso level, by which I mean within our workplaces, within our families, perhaps within our individual school, within our individual sports club. And then also structures and shapes our relationships at the individual level. So how we interact with the people around us and how they perceive us. So for sociologists, the important pieces, I think, are to understand that it's not a characteristic of individuals, but it's a characteristic of institutions. It is a system of power that is about reproducing a certain vision of femininity and masculinity, of the place of women in society, of the place of men in society, that this is a very, that it's a binary ideology. And that it's also dynamic, which means that it can be changed, it can be, it does it all over time, it's not a static system. That's the distinction that I would make between sex and gender. I would like to pause on the definitions that you give about sex for a moment because what you're mentioning about gender is basing in my mind. So sports is an institution, right? So sport is not immune to this gender conversation that you're mentioning and also the system of powers. So the first thing that I'm thinking about is when you say binary view of things, I'm thinking, well, there is a male category in sports, there is a female category and this is, I believe, the most evident way where gender relates to sport. But what are the other areas where gender has an influence over sports in this system of powers that you mentioned before? So first of all, you said that we have a female and a male category in sport. We've often talked about it as a women's and a men's category, actually. It's at once understood as a biological category, but always also as social categories, that the rationale behind having separate women's and men's categories was never purely a biological rationale. If we look back at the origins of, well, modern sport and we can take the Olympic movement as a sort of classic example and our friend Pierre de Kubartan and his vision for the modern Olympic movement was very much about creating an international brotherhood from which many men were actually excluded. This was men from certain countries who were prioritised in this brotherhood or who had access to this brotherhood and it was in Pierre de Kubartan's words and he owned paraphrase in a bit about celebrating the best of human capabilities, but that was understood to be men's capabilities and men as representing human capacity. And women were to be relegated to the stands and Pierre de Kubartan is famous for having been quite resistant to the very, very gradual incorporation of women into a Olympic sport and that wasn't for biological reasons. He was opposed to that because of wanting to preserve the Olympic movement and the Olympic stage as a stage for celebrating masculinity and this brotherhood of men from across the world. So women were a threat to this vision. They undermined how he saw the purpose of the Olympic movement and who he thought should be treated as or have the opportunity to be to be an Olympian. So I refer to that historical example because I think we really need to remember that when we're talking about why there is a separation of women and men in many sports and especially at the elite level. In some ways this sort of insistence on sex segregation is sort of taken on a life of its of its own. We go very, very far with our insistence on separating women from men and also girls from boys across many different levels of sport, often where there is really no biological justification for doing so when we're talking about young kids in particular, but also you know in at the grassroots level of various sports. I think you know there are there are many examples we can think of where there isn't actually a performance or biological justification to separate women and men, but it nevertheless is part of has become part of how we organize sport and also I think how we value different bodies within sport and how sport works ultimately to reaffirm and reproduce ideas about sex and gender difference more broadly in society. Talking about the gender difference, can you also explain to to us in a 12-listeness the difference between DSD differences in sex development, intersex and transgender for us to understand it better? Yeah sure so maybe I'll start with an easy one which is transgender. When we refer to somebody as being transgender or if someone identifies as transgender they are someone whose identity whose lived experience of gender doesn't align in the expected way with the sex category that they were assigned at birth. So a trans man, transgender man is a man who had been assigned female at birth but does not identify it all as a woman. The reverse of that and I think it's a I quite like using this this word like I would describe myself as cisgender which means that in my case I was assigned female at birth I happened to identify as a woman so I don't have this misalignment between the category that was assigned to me at birth and my identity so I have so those two things are aligned and in the way that is sort of socially expected of me and therefore I am considered cisgender. When it comes to intersex variations this is actually a really interesting landscape from a terminology point of view because the terms are really evolved and they continue to to evolve. The term DSD differences of sex development was originally actually disorders of sex development and for that reason it's experienced by people who've been given that label as quite pathologizing like as in saying there's something wrong with them from a health or medical point of view and therefore it can be stigmatizing. I prefer intersex variations a person with intersex variations for example. Here we're talking about people with the sexualated characteristics that don't align neatly with what we've assumed to be the characteristics of a person with classifiers female and a person with classifiers as male. That might be variation at the level of chromosomes it could be variation at the level of their hormonal ranges how much testosterone their body is producing for example. They might nevertheless be classifiers as female or male very often they will identify as women or as men consistent with the category that were assigned to birth but it's just that some part of their biological characteristics don't actually map onto what we've assumed to be the characteristics of these two binary female male categories. So yeah I use intersex a person with intersex variations there are certain people who identify as intersex as an intersex person for example. I don't use that just when I'm talking in a general way because some people who have intersex variations don't necessarily identify as intersex so this isn't evolving terminology landscape the IOC the International Olympic Committee for example uses sex variations so they don't refer to intersex they just refer to people with sex variations I guess I'm somewhere in the middle I just say people with intersex variations. From what you're saying it seems the ecosystem is much more complex than the simple categories of men and women we are taught to accept in sports. So I'm wondering does gender shape what we see in sports particularly the violence and abuse that correct me if I'm wrong often targets people who don't conform to these traditional ideas of men and women. Yeah so I mean I think just take a step back an important insight for me and actually it really helped me understand my own experiences as an athlete that's why I think it was so powerful for me to learn this but sociologists who study sport understand sport to be in effect a form of organized violence. Some sociologists have talked about sports sort of taking the place of actual war and conflict and sort of providing a sort of outlet that was less harmful than actual war. Some sociologists have focused on the relationship between this sport as a form of organized violence and masculinity and I'll say more about that but I think that the key thing for me was to read how these different forms of violence are kind of baked in all the way through sport that as much as we tell ourselves that sport is inherently good and is a vehicle of health and well-being and social cohesion and personal development and so on and so forth. It is also at the same time a place where individual participants like myself when I was an athlete learn to accept and normalise a great many forms of violence. For example violence against yourself in the form of overtreating or enduring pain continuing to train or compete during pain and just normalising that it's just a natural and inevitable part of sport. Violence and normalising violence such as psychological violence where you know coaches can be very psychologically manipulative and convince athletes that they inadequate that they were never that good anyway, that they're weak because they don't submit to the training that was asked of them, that the problem is them. Physical violence, sexual violence, we talk about financial violence as well and we're holding of earnings sometimes from athletes as a form of control and coercive control. Many of these practices we can see as sort of falling on a spectrum, some are more harmful than others. What's important though is that many of these forms of violence are I would say even all of them somehow become normalised in the context of sport and we just accept them as though it's just how it is and this is just a natural part of sport. Is there a relationship between violence and in sports and gender and if there is, what's the relationship between violence in sport and women and in the sex for example? Yeah so there is a theory of the relationship between these forms of violence in sport and gender and I find it very compelling. I'm going to use the theory or conceptual framework that a sociologist by the name of Mike Messner developed back in the early 2000s and he talks about a triad of male violence in sport and there's three parts of the triangle violence against oneself, violence against other men and violence against women and these three forms of violence according to Messner operate in order to reestablish or reproduce the link between practices of sport and hegemonic masculinity. That's a sociological concept hegemonic masculinity. It is the ideas that we hold about men and masculinity which then justify the superior place of men in society and the domination of women. So sport according to Messner is critically important to affirming this ideology of masculinity and these three forms of violence are one of some of the key mechanisms via which sport managers to reproduce this link with hegemonic masculinity. I just want to pose on what you said about the point on violence against men because often what we are exposed through media, what we hear about or this horrible abuse is in sport. We tend to think that it's mainly towards women but it seems that this is not the case, right? This is definitely not the case. Yeah, there are many studies that have documented men's experiences of all kinds of violence in sport including sexual violence, physical violence, psychological violence and hegemonic masculinity as a concept helps us to understand this because what hegemonic masculinity does as an idea, so it's an idea. It's not necessarily something that one individual man embodies. It's an idea about masculinity. and it enforces a hierarchy amongst men. And so men whose behavior doesn't confirm the ideology of hegemonic masculinity can be punished. There is a need for the behavior and the position of men to be controlled in order to maintain this ideology of hegemonic masculinity. The second part, I think that's really important to this is sexuality. Sexuality is vitally important to how hegemonic masculinity operates. And it's as we often see, while we see sport associated with high levels of homophobia, which have evolved over time and some scholars argue have improved that we have lower degrees of homophobia now in sport. But nevertheless, there's also research showing that it continues. And just I think if we look at the number of male athletes who have come out and said that they are, they are gay, for example, it's an exceedingly small number of athletes, especially within male team sports. So that also tells us something about the ways that violence is used, including homophobic violence, including homophobic slurs towards men who might not even be gay, actually. But as a way of controlling their position within this hierarchy and reproducing a particular notion of masculinity in and through sport. So what we're seeing in sport governing bodies and sports institutions nowadays is that there is a predominance of men governing the sports. So it doesn't seem that it's a good starting point to address violence in sport from what you're saying. I'm wondering also are perpetrators of abuse predominantly men? You're right, Denata, that the majority of leaders in most sports and in most countries and at the international level, I'm in, even though that is a number that is, it's definitely shifting. And there's been some important improvements in the representation of women not only in leadership roles, but in important leadership roles. So there's, you know, there is a difference between being on an executive board and being the president of the International Federation. That is a very important power and symbolic difference. So, you know, we might see improvements on the number of women, for example, who are IOC members or who are represented on the IOC executive board. But another question is, can a woman be elected as IOC president? We know the answer to that question now. But we've taken a long time to get there. And certainly when we look at the president roles in international federations, we can see that there is an exceedingly small number of women who've made it to that level. Coaching is in fact worse than elected leadership roles. We sort of have stagnated at about 11 percent, between 10 and 12 percent of coaches at the Olympic Games being women. And that number has been really slow to improve. It seems, and I think it's really interesting to sort of ask why this is the case. But coaching is sort of this, it's a less, in some ways, a less visible part of the sporty ecosystem compared to the elected leaders. But it's also, I think, a very influential and, and I would say even more impactful position than like being president in some ways, because of how you interact with athletes and you socialize the athletes that you're training and so on. So, coaching is really important in this normalization of violence discussion. And yes, coaching is very much male dominated, far more so than leadership. Now the question is, is this where the perpetrators are coming from? Are perpetrators men, and if they're men are they coaches or what are they? And of course there's a diverse range of perpetrators. And athletes can also very much and very often be the perpetrators of violence, including sexual violence in sport. But, you know, where I think the coaching role is important is in the normalization of these different forms of violence that athletes sort of come to accept as just part of how we do sport. Mendeline, we also have one question trying to put these two themes together. In your opinion, what is the connection between hegemonic masculinity and insistence on including trans and intersex athletes? And I must say, consider in this context of narrative of protecting female category in sports. Yeah, that's a really good question. So, here's how I see it. Hegemonic masculinity, as an ideology, relies very heavily on the idea that sex is binary, that there are clear distinctions between women on the one side and men on the other. The moment we start to blur that line, we start to unsettle and destabilize this. The ideology that has granted men this privileged place in sport, whether that is on the playing field or in leadership, but especially on the playing field. Men are a category apart when it comes to their sports performance. And women's performances do not touch what men are capable of doing on the sporting field. So, it relies on this bright line between women on one side and men on the other. So, once we understand that, we can see very easily why the presence of transgender women and women within to sex variations is so destabilizing. On the one hand, it has unsettled the idea that biology is binary, but also that biology is destiny. And that once one is categorized, male at birth, one is forever trapped in that category. This is the threat. This is the threat posed by women with intersex variations and trans women. And I think your point about the protection discourse is also really important here. And I'd like to refer to, well, it's an article I always ask my students to read. I really love this article. It was really sort of one of those mind bending articles. And it's by Mary Jo Cain, who is an American sociologist, and she wrote this article about sport as a continuum. The starting point for her article was the Minneapolis marathon. So, she was in the streets of Leigh Fee, Minneapolis watching the competitors in the marathon, come past. And she noticed that, of course, the women and men competing in this marathon were mixed. They were all mixed up. It wasn't that the men all came through in one wave, and the women all came through in the second wave. And rather that there was a very high amount of overlap in the performances of men and women in this marathon. And so, her conceptual approach was to say that sporting ability is a continuum. Sporting ability is not binary. And yet, we often organize sport as though sporting ability was binary. And to come back to the protection idea, she argues that this binary separation that we have built into the practice of sport protects men. That it is men who are protected by this binary structure because it allows us to live in place the myth that all men are universally stronger, faster, better athletes than women. If we were to have more integration of women and men and girls and boys in sport, we wouldn't be able to hold onto that myth anymore because we would see that it was more complex than that. So protection, the marriage, okay, works in the opposite direction. And I always come back to that with my students because, you know, it's not only that protection has been used as a reason to exclude women from sport. But historically, this was the logic that we were told that sport was harmful to women's bodies, women were a need of protection from the rigors of sport that women were being served by their underrepresentation and lesser involvement in sport. It's not only this paternalistic version of protection that I think we need to be aware of, but also this other sort of flipping of the script that says that what we are also protecting is this idea of universal male superiority in the context of sport. So now I want to go back to the theme of our series to safeguarding should there be a connection between gender and safeguarding policies and sports. that discrimination of gender minorities groups, for example, and discrimination into their access to sport. Is it a safeguarding matter? Or how safeguarding policies should be structured considering different genders and considering this ideology of hegemonic masculinity? So it's a complex question and I want to open for you the room to also whatever part of this question you prefer. So this is I think the main area of how I connect to the topic of safeguarding today in my work. And the understanding I bring to practices of regulating inclusion in the women's category is that those practices introduce a range of harms in sporting environments that affect all women and that have particular consequences for women within to sex variations and also consequences for trans women and trans athletes more generally. Let's take the example of mandatory sex testing, for example. So this practice mandatory sex testing which, yeah, I would consider that to be the type of testing that has focused on chromosomes as the condition of entry to the women's category in the 1970s, 1980s, even into the late 1990s. There was mandatory chromosome testing for all competitors in the women's category competing at the Olympic level. That practice was abandoned in the 90s for two main reasons. One reason was that, you know, building on the story of Maria Jose Patino, there was a number of scientific experts managed to convince sports governing bodies, then in fact, there wasn't a scientific justification for excluding women on the basis of their chromosomes. The second reason that it was abandoned was that the same experts managed to convince sports governing bodies that also the harms that this introduces into the lives of the athletes who are excluded are really significant and they just can't be justified when we look at the evidence base. So that was the 1990s and I think at the time, gender scholars really thought that that was the end. We were not going to see this practice. This was a sort of a cake, old-fashioned practice that was now relegated to the dustbin of history. Well, it's back. It's now back. It was mandatory testing was announced by World Aquatics, the International Alliance Swimming Federation in 2023. It really very little information about how that has been rolled out, but we know that World Athletics has given a bit more information and we have quite a bit of visibility now on what they say they're going to be doing, but they've announced this year a return to mandatory chromosome testing for all competitors in the women's category. So if we take this practice and we ask, how is it harmful? Why is this a safe guarding issue? First of all, it's violating the rights of all women in the women's category. The right to, for example, not be coerced into undertaking medical steps and tests. And that's why we've seen, for example, in the case of the French Athletics Federation that their athletes can't even do this test, it's the tester identifying SRY genes, the genetic test, they legally cannot do this test in France. Why? Because there are legal protections in place to ensure that athletes are not required to submit to such testing for sporting purposes. Like there is an ethical framework that usually guides the use of genetic testing kind of everywhere except for in sport, right? Like sport emerges as the sort of exception here is the area to which such standards do not apply apparently. So all women are being asked to undergo a practice that has no medical justification, which violates their right to choose to participate in a medical test, to have free, the right to free and informed consent, the right to have their data protected, their privacy protected. And also I would say the right to participate in sport without their gender being called into question. It's not a condition, it's not a condition of their entry that we're going to subject them to this kind of test for them to participate. Then we have for the specific group of athletes who might return, you know, a quote unquote negative test result. So, and the SRY gene is detected as might be the case for women with certain intersex variations. Here we have a very, very complicated and serious range of harms that start to emerge. Not only have these women being required to undergo this test without the right to free and informed consent, they also then could find themselves in a situation where they are required to undergo further testing and invasive testing to establish whether or not they are actually presenting with masculine characteristics that their bodies are developing in a masculine way. This involves things like measuring breast development, palpating the labia, measuring the development of the clitoris, invasive gynecological exams that don't have a medical justification. They are purely being required of these athletes for what will athletics claims to be a sporting justification. We know that if they're pulled from a team that sports organisations cannot protect their identity and we saw this even in Paris, there was an Indian athlete that was pulled from her team and suddenly media in India was starting to ask questions about whether she had been, was it Dopey or had she failed, quite a quote, failed a sex test. There are so many cases where we've seen the names of these athletes leaked to the media or just the media realises what's going on here and that not only violates the privacy of these individuals but can expose them to considerable amounts of harassment, potentially even physical violence, certainly ostracization in some cases from their communities, from their families even and a very, very important point that I just cannot emphasise enough is that we are talking here about implementing a test at a global scale across in the case of athletics more than 200 countries. There is a wide range of standards, expertise, resources in these 200 different countries and very often the athletes who are most harmed by these eligibility rules are women of colour from global south countries and I just think we cannot normalise a practice in women's sport that is exposing the women who are probably the least advantage amongst us to these kinds of harms with so little choice and so little support to actually contest or just navigate that situation. Yeah, the sad story that they're giving a choice out of to suppress the hormones so taking a hormone therapy that is very badly studied or to pull out of sports and basically they introduce no choice to the women you mentioned to participate in sport. Yeah, it's not a choice. Considering all that we've been discussing so far, we wanted to get your opinion on how safe guarding policies should be structured to address gendered harms. Yeah, look, that's a really it's a really important question and I think probably even the first step is to actually be able to talk about gendered harms and what they are and why they arise in the context of sport. You know, I've had numerous conversations with practitioners of safeguarding in sport who are quite resistant to the idea of bringing a gender analysis to this topic. Why? Can we ask why? I think there are a couple of reasons. There are people who are skeptical that gender plays a role. Like they would say for example, well, male athletes experience abuse as well as women athletes. So it can't be gender. Now, if you take my understanding of gender, I will say of course male athletes experience abuse as well as women athletes and that is precisely why we need to bring a gender analysis. That a gender analysis is not reducible to women the victims' violence. The role of gender in sport means that all athletes are exposed to different forms of violence. That's not to say that the experience of a male athlete who experiences hazing or physical abuse by his coach is going to be the same as a woman who is sexually molested by a heritrainer. It's not to say that the precise mechanism behind that violence is the same, but then in both cases we have a gendered dynamic that takes us back to the root origins of these forms of violence in sport. In the fact that we have an over-representation of man amongst perpetrators, I think also, and whether the victims or the survivors, whether the survivors are women or men doesn't matter. We have a gender dynamic here and we need to understand it. So I think there's some people that, or some practitioners that just kind of can't see how to make the leap from the data that they're seeing to a broader understanding of what gender means in the context of sport. That's one piece. The second piece is a political question. The fact that we call it safeguarding, I think already tells us something about how this agenda is unfolding and what sort of, I'm not saying necessarily conscious decisions, but strategically what kind of framing might work or not work in this context. I mean, I think it would be very different if instead of calling these safeguarding policies, we were calling them violence and sport policies. We were naming the problem, instead of naming, you know, the sort of, in some ways, more palatable, nice to have concept of safeguarding. I think if we were talking about violence in sport, it would be much harder to get the buy-in of sports leaders. Especially, those sports leaders and men, and especially if we're adding a gender analysis that is talking about power imbalances in sport. Now, that strategic decision, of course, is reasonable. I understand why that might be strategically for some people a more appealing choice. However, it does come with a number of very important costs. There seems to be some resistance to even naming or including gender dynamics in the analysis of safeguarding policies. Wouldn't bringing gender into that analysis help us design better prevention and stronger remedies, especially when gender, as we understood, intersects with social and cultural differences, which often shape the kinds of harm we tend to ignore or suppress. I'd love to hear final thoughts on that. As a sociologist, I kind of want to get to the root of the problem. That's what interests me here. The root of the problem for me is about the fact that sport continues to be in the service of men and masculine, and at particular social place for men and masculinity, and that this is then reflected in the statistics we see for the number of women in leadership roles. This is reflected in the fact that men are still preferred as coaches, and we can do a very interesting gender analysis of why that's the case. We do have to link it out to wider gender dynamics as well. We do still see women taking on the greater burden of caregiving responsibilities, for example, this, of course, is potentially a barrier when it comes to being able to commit to an elite coaching role. It's not that sport is the only problem here. I guess a framing that I really find important is that. I have heard people talk about violence in sport and safeguarding issues in sport and not justify it in a way, but explain it by saying that, "Look, sport is just like any other area of society. Once we have violence in other areas of society, we should expect to see it in sport." In some ways, it's not okay, but it's also don't panic. Sport is not in some ways responsible for this violence. It's just a fact of social life that violence exists, and therefore it's reflected in sport. I very much push back against that diagnosis. I would say sport has enabled certain forms of violence. Sport is conducive. Sport provides an ideal setting in a way for forms of violence like sexual abuse, molesting and so on. We need to understand that. We need to understand what it is about the power structures in sport, about the logic that drives these forms of violence in sport, if we're then going to come up with solutions. So do I understand correctly that your call for action is to do more studies and to open up to the new knowledge and to confess and accept that we are working in the industry that this problem is predominant? I think it's great that there's more and more research in this area. A lot of the research that exists is what I would call epidemiological research. So looking at statistics, looking at rates of violence taking this data from surveys of athletes and so on, to really try to just document what is happening, what forms of violence are happening, two-witch athletes in which sports, in which countries. What is the rate of violence and the different forms of violence in sporting environments? That is vitally important work in part because there are still people, plenty of people and plenty of leaders that need convincing that this is even a problem. So what I think can be added to that work is perhaps more interdisciplinary work that is also, that, you know, if we take, I think a good example is the case of women within to sex variations and how they've been harmed by sex testing practices. If we do a population epidemiological study of a country like Australia where I'm from, for example, this is probably not going to come up in the data. It might to a very tiny extent, but it's not going to be, we're not really going to capture the nature of this form of violence and its effects on athletes if we rely on a survey. Unless we have a wider understanding of how gender operates in sport, we're not going to think to actually question the absence of those experiences in our data and design a study that will enable us to understand and capture what's happening in the case of those athletes who are a small, stigmatized minority who are often located in countries that are not being studied, countries with less resources, countries that are outside of Europe. So we need to have the, I would say, critical understanding of gender and how this has been developed by sociologists in the context of sport, to then sort of know what might be missing from our data and from our analysis of the situation. The critical understanding, I want to quote you, critical understanding is exactly what we need and this is why we are doing this series to try to deconstruct what safeguarding means and I think this conversation was extremely important to understand what is gender, who is woman, who is man and its relationship to safeguarding or to violence and sport as you mentioned before. Thank you very much, Madeline, for being here with us today. Before we let you go, is there anything else you would like to tell our listeners? If I may, I'll take you up on that offer to Nata. I go ahead, go ahead. I'm pretty concerned, I think I can say, about the direction of the discussion around both transgender athletes and athletes with intersex variations in international sport at this time and also definitely concerned about how this return of mandatory sex testing is already in a way being normalized as though this is just a part of participating as elite sport and athletes have to suck it up and there's nothing more to say about it. I just think it's really important at this moment in history really that we all make a method not to necessarily change our opinions or change our minds about how we feel about biological sex and the division of sport into women's and men's and who needs protection and from what. I'd like to kind of just park that debate for a moment and actually seek out the people that we're talking about here, seek out women, trans athletes, seek out the stories of athletes within sex variations and just actually take the time to understand what their lived experiences are in the context of sport. And I'm not saying that people at all need to agree with my particular stance on eligibility regulation but I'm really concerned about the, and disappointed I guess, I'm disappointed about the lack of willingness to seek out the actual people that we're talking about and to consider whole opinions about them without understanding who these people are and also what the consequences of our opinions might be for their lives. I would like to reinforce this because it's been a key component in our conversation, give voice to the affected people to let them speak and say what they're saying and feel and give them space to do that. Madeline Yosem mentioned Michael Messna as a sociologist and his book, we've read his book, it's an amazing, very good read and we recommend it to everyone taking the field. cold and is there anything else book or article that you would recommend our listeners to read. Yeah, that means there's a lot of great books on on sex testing in sport, the history of it and the sort of more contemporary history of it as well. So I would definitely recommend a book by Lindsay Piper, who is a historian, who book is called Sex Testing Gender Policing in Women's Sport. And then I would also recommend a, it's just a very short article that is even I think it's only like a thousand words long actually. That is, but was authored by a big group of authors, I'm one of the, one of the authors, the lead author is a man named Ellen Williams. The title of the article is Fair and Safe, Eligibility Criteria for Women's Sport. The proposed testing regime is not justified, ethical or viable. I think it's just a really short to the point article that actually lays out why this is a really important safeguarding issue for international sport. Thank you very much, Melinda. It was great to have you with us today and I think it's time to say our goodbyes. Thank you very much. Thank you Alexandra. Thank you, Dana. It was a really great time talking with you. Thank you for listening. This show is produced by Score, Sport Think Tank. With a Switzerland based association, we are dedicated to creating safe spaces for honest and meaningful conversations that positively impact the world of sport. Special thanks to the entire score team working behind the scenes, to our brilliant sound wizard Ryan Lobbix and to our wonderful graphic designer, Natalia Plaza Sanchez. Be sure to check out our LinkedIn page for more information about this episode and also the work that we do and we invite you to explore the other episodes as we continue this journey of deconstructing safe guarding in sport. [BLANK_AUDIO]