Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates: A Conversation with Katie Barnes
The Intersectionality Series is an engaging new series sponsored by Georgetown’s Athletic Department and Office of Student Equity and Inclusion, including Center for Multicultural Equity and Access, Disability Cultural Center, LGBTQ Resource Center, and Women’s Center. The series seeks to create an ongoing dialogue on campus about intersectionality as an embodied ethos and practice, by amplifying artists, scholars, practitioners, and activists with relevant lived experience and expertise. Throughout the series, we hope to cultivate an inclusive, accessible community invested in collective care and flourishing.
About the event:
For decades women have been playing competitive sports thanks in large part to the protective cover of Title IX. Since passage of that law, the number of women participating in sports and the level of competition in high school, college, and professionally, has risen dramatically. In Fair Play, award-winning journalist Katie Barnes traces the evolution of women’s sports as a pastime and a political arena, where equality and fairness have been fought over for generations.
As attitudes toward gender have shifted to embrace more fluidity in recent decades, sex continues to be viewed as a static binary that is easily determined: male or female. It is on that very idea of static sex that we have built an entire sporting apparatus. Now that foundation is crumbling as a result of intense culture wars. Whether we are talking about bathrooms, gender affirming care for trans youth, or sports, the debate about who gets to decide gender is being litigated every day in every community. Many transgender and intersex athletes, from a South African runner, to a New Zealand power lifter, to a wrestler in Texas, to Connecticut track stars, have captured the attention of law and policy makers who want to decide how and when they compete.
Women’s sports, since their inception, have been seen as a separate class of competition that requires protection and rules for entry. But what are those rules and who gets to make them? Fair Play looks at all sides of the issue and presents a reasoned and much-needed solution that seeks to preserve opportunities for all going forward.
Copies of Fair Play will be available for pickup in the Women’s Center, Leavey 327.
About the speaker:
Katie Barnes (they/them/their) is an award winning journalist covering the intersection of sports and gender. As a feature writer at ESPN, Katie has profiled women’s sports superstars like Maya Moore, A’ja Wilson, and Amanda Nunes. They are a leading journalist in the coverage of legislation and policy affecting transgender and intersex athletes