What Female Athletes Wear...

It seems we can’t go very long as a culture without someone complaining about how someone else dresses, how long their hair is, or related foolishness.  Most of Curmie’s commentary (at least here) has related to the almost (but not quite) uniformly sexist school dress codes that have forbidden five-year-olds from wearing sun dresses with spaghetti straps, de facto declared clavicles and shoulders erogenous zones, and are so unevenly applied that allegations of selective enforcement border on the obvious.  (Curmie isn’t going to link to all those stories, Gentle Reader, but you’re free to look them up.)

In a variation on the theme, there’s been a fair amount of publicity in the last year or so surrounding what female athletes wear.  There’s Paralympian Olivia Breen, who was told by an official her shorts were too short (this does not seem to have affected her eligibility, however).  There was the brouhaha over the Norwegian beach handball team’s decision to (OMG!) wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms, in defiance of the profoundly sexist edict of the International Handball Federation.  There was the IOC’s inane decision to prevent black women swimmers from wearing “soul caps,” which, if anything, would have created more drag than traditional headgear.  (Curmie actually wrote about this one, here).  Indeed, the fact that the German women’s gymnastics team made headlines for wearing regulation-compliant unitards rather than “traditional” leotards at the Olympics tells us rather a lot.

So here are two more stories about how female athletes choose to dress and the silly responses of people in power.  Both stories involve change.org petitions, although Curmie learned of one of them through other means.

Team members posed in sports bras
for a photo to accompany the change.org petition

Let’s start with the girls track team at Albany (NY) high school.  This may come as a surprise to you, Gentle Reader, but sometimes it gets hot in May.  Not only that, but doing strenuous exercise in that heat makes you feel even hotter.  Thus, some of the girls on the team, noting that the boys team was allowed to practice shirtless, sought to practice in sports bras.  Seems reasonable, yes?  No, of course not, according to school officials.

According to the Albany Times-Union, on May 12, Athletic Director Ashley Chapple asked the girls thus attired to leave practice.  The girls complied, but Jordan Johnson, a sophomore sprinter on the team, posted a petition on change.org to rally support for their cause.  At the Times-Union’s press time on the 17^th, the petition had gathered over 2500 online signatures; as Curmie writes this on the 22^nd, the petition has over 10,000 signatories (including Curmie).  You should feel free to increase that number, of course.

The girls—13 members of a 15-member team, apparently—were subsequently banned from attending a lacrosse game later that day, and suspended the following day for “inappropriate and disrespectful behavior directed toward an administrator,” which, of course was “in no way related to wardrobe.”  Oh, no, of course not.  You may believe this if you choose, Gentle Reader, but Curmie will indeed lower his opinion of your sagacity. 

The Hegemonic Legion of Doom School officials held a meeting on Monday with the girls—parents were forbidden from attending, for reasons you’re no doubt sufficiently worldly to guess, Gentle Reader—and reiterated their position before re-instating 12 team members (what happened to the 13^th is unclear).  Of course, the pseudo-educators in charge can’t even keep their story straight.  According to the girls, they were told by Principal Jodi Commerford that they were suspended for not wearing something over their sports bras because there were male coaches present.  What an insult to those coaches that they are presumed not be able to concentrate on their duties because some high school girls were wearing only a little more above the waist than those gents would see at any beach or swimming pool!  (OMG!  Midriffs!)

But if Superintendent Kaweeda G. Adams is to be believed, that’s not true.  So the problem was attending the lacrosse game (why shouldn’t they?)… or maybe something they said at the game?  School authorities say the girls were swearing; they say they weren’t.  The girls wouldn’t be the first to deny doing something they actually did; school officials wouldn’t be the first to lie about students in an attempt to extricate themselves from an embarrassing situation of their own making.  But since the power structure at the school has produced no legitimate rationale for denying the girls access to the lacrosse game to begin with (they aren’t charged with insubordination at their practice, only at the lacrosse game), there are only two possibilities: school officials are lying about the swearing, or they richly deserved it (or both, of course).

The real reason for the suspensions, of course, was that the girls had the audacity to go public with a change.org petition, thereby revealing the school administrators as authoritarian buffoons.

The suspension notices, by the way, state that each girl “poses a continuing danger to persons or property or an ongoing threat of disruption to the academic and athletic process.”  No, Ms. Adams, you’re going to have to look in the mirror to see someone who does that.

Latifa McBryde in action.

The other story pertains to Latifah McBryde.  She’s a Muslim wrestler who, according to the change.org petition, earned a place on the US team to compete at the Pan-Am Games in Mexico in July.  The problem is that for religious reasons, she “dresses in modest clothes and a hijab.”  Ah, but the stupid rules require a singlet.

Here’s the description of “A Wrestling Fan,” who started the change.org petition:

What do people in the wrestling room wear most often to practice? It’s not a singlet. What are high school wrestlers now allowed to wear in competition? Hint - also not a singlet. What does the Iranian Muslim women’s wrestling team wear? … Not a singlet! Latifah wears the same thing that the Iranian women’s wrestling team wears - knee-length pants strongly secured to spandex leggings, a long sleeve shirt also strongly secured at the waist and wrists, and a tightly secured headscarf sewed directly onto a rashguard.

Once again, as in the case of the “soul cap,” wearing what McBryde wants to wear is, if anything, a competitive disadvantage, so there ought to be no problem.  This, however, would be based on the apparently hasty assumption that the hierarchy of United World Wrestling can out-think a dead flounder.  USA Wrestling doesn’t seem to be much help, either.

If the NCAA—not known for either imparting justice or exhibiting intelligence—can ensure that a basketball team from Brigham Young University doesn’t have to compete on a Sunday in the NCAA tournament, then UWW and USAW can remove their phalangeal digits from their rectal cavities and find a way to allow McBryde to compete without violating her religious standards. 

In these two incidents, we see all-too-familiar patterns: blaming girls for being distracting (and concomitantly blaming boys/men for being so easily distracted), school officials believing their actions to be above reproach and their fecal matter odor-free, intransigent requirements imposed by sports authorities based on “the way it’s always been” without recognizing even the possibility of legitimate exceptions to the rule.

Curmie’s natural impulse is to look for guidance from Confucius, who has been referenced with approbation numerous times in this blog.  Alas, this time, Curmie is drawn instead to the wise words of a beloved former student: “People are stupid, y’all.”