After Atalanta

 I posted on the Title IX Blog my 2025 intention to blog more; a goal that will be facilitated by shorter (pithier?) posts. I have let go of trying to make deeply profound and impactful posts all the time--since that actually prevented me from posting most of the time--and will shift to more frequent posts that are comments and observations.  That intention applies to After Atalanta as well, so here goes. In this moment of downtime I have been trying to get through all the tabs of things I absolutely must read before my computer decides to automatically restart itself.  I did not absolutely need to read about the Stop Campus Hazing Act which requires changes that incidents of hazing be included Clery Act-mandated reporting. (It's possible I already thought this was happening in fact.) But when reading about it, I did get to thinking about standards of risk and reasonableness.  A thorough definition of hazing was provided, including this second part that the offend...

All the rhetoric about trans and intersex athletes affects the way ciswomen in general but, in this situation, cis women athletes, are being discussed--and criticized. This is not new nor is it a revelation. Activists and scholars have been trying to make people aware of this for years. But it was on display at this year's US Open, when one of the vocal proponents of banning trans women in sports, made comments about a cis woman playing like a man.  I missed Chris Evert's on-air comments about Karolina Muchova because I have made a concerted effort to watch the women's matches on ESPN3 where Mary Carillo has been doing actual good commentary. When I have had to listen to Evert (yes, I know mute is an option), it is just painful. In general, I don't see what her appeal is. The majority of her comments are guesses at what the players are thinking. But her comments this year (and likely in the past--there is some rich discourse analysis to be done I suspect) have been espe...

 cross-posted at the Title IX Blog -------------------------------------------------- Well The Boston Globe published the news  (paywalled*) behind former women's ice hockey coach Katey Stone's press conference two hours before the conference The surprise factor was gone by the time I tracked down the clips. The two pieces of the press conference (Stone's lawyer's remarks and Stone's remarks) can be found at Hockey New s. Some former players spoke as well but I have not seen those clips yet.  There is plenty to say about this lawsuit and press conference.  First, looking back at my predictions, I should have placed more emphasis on retribution than on moving forward with "apologies." Most of today was digging in to "truths." There were no apologies. There was some very interesting running around the allegations though. More on that below.  It was very clear that Stone is irate that she was not allowed to speak back in 2023 when everything went do...

Oh hey--here's the post I never finished about former Harvard women's ice hockey coach Katey Stone. I had basically abandoned it as irrelevant/old news.  But Stone has made it relevant! Thanks, Katey.  The former coach is set to make an announcement and tell her side of the story (it seems?) tomorrow! (So I better get this done today!) She will be accompanied by her lawyer and three former players from different eras of her tenure at Harvard.  I really have no idea what she will say so I am just going to throw out some predictions (I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about the Emmys so I am in that mode). she will largely deny the allegations against her (more on those below) and sue Harvard for wrongful termination (or something like that since she technically retired) she will use the presence of the three former players to bolster those claims she will "apologize" to those who misconstrued her behavior as racist or her coaching style as violent and abusiv...

In the lead up to Wimbledon, I read several pieces and saw even more headlines about the change in the all-white clothing rule to allow players in the women's draw to wear darker shorts/tennis underwear. (Does anyone wear those anymore? Wishing I had kept some of mine now.) There were no bones made about the fact that this change was to ease players' anxiety about playing while on their periods.  Point1: This change was subject to a vote because it is considered a rule change to the dress code. A vote. In 2023 that helps ease the anxiety of menstruating players.  Point 1a: This is not a new issue. Most of the stories mention that some soccer teams are eliminating white shorts from their kits as well this summer. This discussion has also emerged in regard to long-distance athletes (cyclists, runners, triathletes) who are not as bound by dress codes/team uniforms but affected by the nature of their sports which often do not allow for a bathroom break to change a tampon or pad or...

 I have many thoughts on the news that the Harvard women's ice hockey team was a space of abuse, intimidation, humiliation, bullying, and general badness. I am having trouble organizing them and figuring out where to begin. There is so very much to say. My organizational strategy is to create multiple posts. This first one is about my interest in this particular case and a little bit on Katey Stone, the Harvard head coach who unapologetically created this toxic culture and women as ice hockey coaches more generally.  There is a lot to say about every revelation of dysfunctional and destructive team cultures. They exist far more widely than most people likely believe--at all levels of sports, and they are all multi-faceted (i.e., emotional and physical abuse, racism, other forms of discrimination and violence). This one for me, though, was especially provoking because I did my master's thesis on coaches in DI women's ice hockey in the early 2000s. I interviewed players from...

 Most semesters I start off my ethics course with an article about the connection between sports and character building. It inspires debate, requires an assessment of data, and sets the tone for the course in which I am asking my students to check their preconceptions in order to effectively engage in a process of moral reasoning.  We discuss definitions of character and how those definitions are often shifted or ignored when considering actions and decisions that happen in the context of sports. While many students will start to see that sports are not automatic character builders, that mere participation does not make someone a better person, they will take exception to the idea that unethical things done "in the heat of battle" does not make one unethical or speak badly of sport itself. In other words, the drive to win sometimes makes people do unethical things, but that's kind of just the nature of sports.  But doesn't an ethical person, by virtue of being ethical...

 Last weekend, BYU fans directed racial slurs against several Black women on the Duke volleyball team. It seems that Rachel Richardson experienced the brunt of it including a threat from a white man in which she was told to "watch her back" on her way to the bus. She is the athlete who has spoken up about the violence.  BYU responded late and poorly, but this was an all-around failure by all coaches and officials.  It has been pointed out t hat BYU's response reflects their ignorance. Others have thrown up their hands in a "it's BYU--what do you expect?" kind of way.  ALL institutions should already be doing this work. That Heather Olmstead, BYU coach, said that after talking to Richardson (and others) that she now "understand(s) areas where we can do better" is offensive. Stop asking Black people to educate you about racism. AND ALSO how do you not understand that yelling racial slurs is a problem? This is not an area to be worked on--this is an ...

 Mariah Burton Nelson and Donna Lopiano, long-time women's sports advocates, have found "a fair and inclusive solution" to the "problem" of trans athletes--specifically trans women (because trans men are apparently inherently disadvantaged despite all that testosterone, the very substance that a mere blink of an eye ago everyone said meant everything in terms of advantage).  They (presumably with their more visible/vocal and polarizing colleagues Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Martina Navratilova) have created the Women's Sports Umbrella. The umbrella, they claim, allows for anyone identifying as female to have a "team" experience. But if an athlete was assigned male at birth and transitioned after the age of 12, that person cannot compete alongside women. Well unless it is an individual sport in which case fine but the scores/times do not get included with the "real women's" scores, they get put into the trans category. (But rugby and othe...

There are so many anti-trans bills passed by and pending in state legislatures here in the United States that I cannot even begin to address them all except to say this has been a concerted movement targeting trans youth for several years now and it is horrifying. The bill in Utah is my focus today. All the bills are horrible and saddening and enraging, but this one...is all that and more. This one demonstrates the consequences of the anti-trans "save women's sports" movement. The bill, which originated in 2021, bans children from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. It was passed in March 2022, the governor vetoed it, t he legislature overrode the governor's veto.   Governor Cox, a Republican, expressed some compassion when explaining his veto of the bill. He cited that fact that Utah had four transgender children playing school-sponsored sports at the time. (I would argue that the number does not matter, but will save that post for another ...

 [this is cross-posted. Original post is at Title IX Blog. ]  I virtually attended last week's  NCAA annual Inclusion Forum  which was celebrating Title IX but also included issues of BIPOC inclusion and athlete mental health (among others). There was a panel on Thursday afternoon headlined by former Harvard swimmer Schuyler Bailar about trans athletes.  When the conference was announced, I was curious about how the organization would approach--or even if they would--trans athletes given the recent seemingly abrupt change in their policy (January 2022-- curiously  amidst the growing visibility of Penn swimmer Lia Thomas). They moved from a not ideal but not totally horrible policy in which hormone levels (specifically testosterone) governed participation, to a  we-are-cowards-kowtowing-to-the-misnamed-fear-mongering-save-women's-sports folks policy  in which trans athletes are treated as cheaters constantly having to submit to surveillance. Additi...

  This perhaps make me an outsider in the LGBTQ+ community. Even before the concept of rainbow-washing was a thing, I was not especially drawn to companies/entities that displayed a rainbow flag. How did I know if it was genuine? What did the display of the flag even mean in terms of actions taken (or not); what did support/allyship look like?  And so, I am not particularly disturbed that some players for the Tampa Bay Rays chose not to wear rainbow patches and rainbow logo hats during their recent Pride Night. Five players said it conflicted with their religious beliefs . While, yes, their discourse of conflict with beliefs and not judging/being welcoming is contradictory, that is not new when it comes to this issue.  The patch/hat was an opt-in for players. Now we know more about the five players who chose not to participate. They don't support LGBT rights because they feel it conflicts with their religion. Ok.  I am more interested in what the players who chose to...

After a 6-year hiatus which I spent being on the academic job market, getting a TT job and getting tenure, I have returned to After Atalanta. I am excited about phase 2(?) of AA and getting back to more public scholarship. I have kept up a sporadic presence at the Title IX Blog , which I am solely in charge of now (yikes!), but am trying to be more consistent. Since so many of my current interests (trans policies, labor, ethics) fall outside Title IX or are only tangentially related, I wanted to come back here.  I am not sure what form posts will take. Likely, some of them will resemble what I had been doing. I am planning one on the new Ohio law t hat allows anyone to question the sex of any female child playing sports. "Verification" would be done via genital, penetrative exams.  But I imagine briefer "quick take" posts as well. Things too long for Twitter (I will be using @titleixblog for After Atalanta content as well) but definitely worth mentioning. (I have so...

If we thought the international sports community had learned something about gender and sex, biology, identity and athleticism after the debacle caused by the International Association of Athletics Federations in its process of “gender verification” in the case of South African runner Caster Semenya, an April New York Times op-ed about these issues has shocked the naiveté right out of us. I would have liked to believe that the humiliation Semenya underwent when members of the international track and field community questioned her sex thus triggering physical, medical, and psychological examinations would become an anomaly. Based on the information presented by co-authors Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, it was not. The difference: the process of accusing and testing Semenya was very public; the process of testing and “fixing” the bodies of athletes who do not conform to the IAAF’s new hormone level policies (also adopted by the IOC and FIFA) have been quite hidden. Whil...

Last weekish I wrote about my astonishment that there isn't a 4-women bobsled event and how this speaks to the inequality that still remains in the Olympics in spite of visible and highly touted progress (i.e., the much-belated inclusion of women's ski jumping) because of the lack of equality in the events themselves. Even women's ski jumping has only one event while the men have two (two different sized hills). Want to see the inequality? Not in a pie graph or nifty infographic (though those are fun); but here in the medal ceremony for the team luge eve nt. This was a new event this year (I think--I had never seen it before) in which a team comprised of a female sledder, a male sledder, and a doubles team relay down the course. When one entity crosses the line, he/she hits a paddle which releases the gate at the top for the next entity. Each team has 1 woman and three men. Why? Because female lugers only have one event--the singles. Just like the female bobsledders only...

I ended yesterday's post with a line about female Olympians, who are the minority gender at the Winter Olympics, receiving a greater piece of spotlight. The caveat (in addition to the fact that it actually might not be true if one does a thorough content analysis of media coverage) is that the spotlight they are under highlights their sexuality, or rather their performance of their (hetero)sexuality/femininity. Obviously in most other arenas (pun intended) the spotlight on female athletes and women's sports is pretty dim. So much so that the media sometimes forgets altogether that women's sports exist. Because when "women" gets placed in front of "sports" it has some kind of cloaking effect, rendering women's sports invisible to the world. This phenomenon was on display last year when Andy Murray won Wimbledon, the first Brit to do so since Fred Perry in the 1930s. Except for Dorothy Round Little, Angela Mortimer Barrett, Ann Haydon-Jones, and Virg...

Many women's sports advocates have cheered the greater gender parity that we will see in Sochi next week. Mostly this is over the long-fought and quite visible battle female ski jumpers around the world engaged in over their inclusion in the winter games. (There's even a movie about it--which I haven't seen but would like to get a hold of.) But of course all is not equal, it's not even equitable. I was pretty sure, and then this article confirmed, that there would be no Nordic combined (jumping and cross-country skiing) event for women. But, as with the summer games, it's more than just sports, it's events within sports that provide more opportunities for male Olympic athletes than female ones. The most surprising to me was bobsled. In college, I remember the announcement that women's bobsled would be included in the 2002 games. My three female housemates and I were quite excited that we theoretically (and in theory only) had the possibility of being the...

Yesterday's NYT had an article about whether gay people were planning on "boycotting" the Sochi Olympics by not watching the games when they begin next week. Some of those interviewed, who noted that they were indeed fans of the Olympics, said they didn't feel right watching feeling that doing so would be a sign of support for Russia's anti-gay policies and sentiments. But, as Hilary Rosen of CNN and others have noted, not watching the Olympics will not have a direct effect on Russia. Russia will feel the effects, however, if fewer people attend the events and spend money in the country, as has been predicted . Russia has the games. Despite calls from different sectors to take the games away from Russia (rather unrealistic but at least someone said it), they will occur in the country. The goal, going forward, should be to make sure that such a problematic choice does not happen again. How to go about this? Well if we boycott Olympic sponsors like McDonalds an...

I just thought I would put that out there. Many of the articles I have read and radio reports I have heard about this "protest delegation" state that President Obama is choosing to send openly out athletes including Billie Jean King and Brian Boitano. Cahow's name is frequently left off the list despite the fact that she has been an activist for gay rights and inclusionary practices and attitudes in sport. Boitano came out publicly a few weeks ago. Cahow, a hockey player, has been out and part of this conversation for years. I imagine the rationale some might offer to the erasure of Cahow in the media is because she is not nearly as well-known among the American public as King and Boitano. And this would be true. But this "truth" speaks to the ongoing issues with the visibility of women's sports, especially sports that are viewed as more masculine, like ice hockey. But Cahow's resume is impressive. When media reports of the delegation mention King and ...

'Tis the season for year in review lists. Outsports compiled its own "gay sports year in review."  Year-end reviews can sometimes be cursory. But I was initially impressed by the lesser known and/or remembered stories writer Jim Buzinski mentioned in the piece including a gay male high school basketball coach who came out to his team and received tremendous support. But when I reached the end I asked (out loud to the empty room), did they not include Brittney Griner? So I did a page search for "griner" to compensate for any poor reading skills on my part. Nothing. It was not just that Griner came out, or rather stated publicly that she was gay; one of the biggest parts of the story was the way in which she was, as a player at Baylor, compelled to not discuss her sexuality even after telling her recruiters that she was gay when she was just in high school. To leave this story off the list is unacceptable whether on purpose or oversight. ( Another list , also ...