Last week when I was looking around on AOL, I came across an article about Tennis Player Sarah Gronert. There is a big controversy about her because she was born with both male and female parts. She had to make a decision whether she wanted to compete against men and women. Her final decision is to play tennis against women; however people are upset because the speed and strength she plays with is that of a man rather than a woman. This would be a really difficult situation for anyone, even someone who may be transgender. However, to me, she looks more like a woman than a man--it just happens that she has some male parts. The Williams sisters are mentioned in this article because they are quite large and muscular for an average woman--even an athelte.
I have a feeling situations like this one or ones concerning transgender atheltes will become more commonplace in the future. Sports associations should probably make a set of rules or guidelines to follow in certain situations. That way fans and other athletes cannot complain about the gender a particular athelte decides to play on.
The link below is the article and a photo gallery with the Sarah Gronert controversy.
http://www.aolhealth.com/condition-center/womens-sexual-health/gender-controversy-intersex-conditions/
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Wow that would be a really hard decison of how to rule on that for the commisoner of any sport. Especially if a transgender individual would ever dominate in a certain sport. I personally am not sure what I would do if I was in the commisoners shoes but I would probably allow her to play with the women. If that is the persona that she takes on and thats who she is I dont think that you can really refute that, and she obviously looks like a female so I dont know how they could rule against her.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for sharing this story. I would like to add it to our readings for Sport & Gender. Believe it or not, I have not read about this situation. However, there is a similar scenario that occurred in 1976, after a former male tennis player named Richard Raskind, had a sex change, and later entered a tournament as Renee Richards. We talk about this case in Sport & Gender class. I am not sure if we discussed it in the online class, because I would not have been able to show the video clip that we usually watch in the f2f class.
ReplyDeleteBelow is a 1976 article about what happened:
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1091523/index.htm
Needless to say, there was a lot of controversy surrounding this event, as people questioned whether Renee Richards, who was formerly a male, and had the residual muscularity of a male, should be allowed to play against women. In the court case that ensued, the courts ruled in favor of Richards, and she played several years as a transsexual. After retiring, she coached Martina Navratilova for about a year, before returning to her previous occupation as an opthamologist.
I have also heard of stories similar to this. Years back an athlete from Germany competed as a woman in the olympics and won some medals in track and field. However, after the events they did a test to determine if she was female or not because many people had suspicions. It turned out that the results came back that she also had male genes and thus she was stripped of her medals. As far as for tennis it may not be fair that she competes against women but may be at a disadvantage against men.
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