Gender policing in youth sports

In early June, the story of Mili Hernandez, an 8-year old soccer player from Nebraska, made national headlines. her team, playing in a youth tournament, was disqualified right as they were about to play in the finals because organizers thought Mili was a boy. Rather an anonymous person told officials that a boy was playing on a girls' team. And the team had to go home. {I have a breakdown of this situation below.}

There was outrage and support from current and former professional soccer players. It was not a Title IX issue because it was a youth sports league run independently from interscholastic sports governance. So, though outraged it did not make it onto the blog. But now another story of questioning gender in youth soccer has arisen, and it seems like a good time to bring Title IX into the discussion.

A girls' club soccer team in Madison, Wisconsin has several short-haired players (some of whom model their style on favorite players like Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe) who experience what Hernandez did but on a regular basis. They have not been disqualified from games or tourneys but other teams ask questions of their parents, coaches, officials, and of them. They try to "catch" the girls by asking them their names. The team is accused of cheating. This persists even though the club system in which the team plays requires birth certificates from each child before she can be rostered on a team. The certificates are used to check for age and for sex. Cheating, in other words, would require forging birth certificates.

In some ways it is very simple. Some people have short hair and some people have long hair. And some people style their hair after people they want to emulate (remember the Rachel?). And kids play soccer.

The thing about gender is that everyone knows what it "should" look like--even if one cannot or chooses not to conform to the norms or expectations. This means that if a girls' team was to engage in cheating by including boys on the roster, the boys would be feminized in some way so as to avoid getting caught.

I can't believe I had to write that sentence. I do not want to live in a world where people are convinced that short-haired female soccer players are not boys because boys trying to pretend they are girls would know how to look like girls. That is the logic of the deeply gendered culture in which we live.

But there must be something else going on if people cannot stop and use that logic. And that is why gender is complicated. Because it is imbued with power. It is about access. It is about boundaries. In sports, those boundaries remain very tightly monitored.

What was interesting about the Madison situation is that the coach was initially skeptical about what her players' parents were saying about how the team was treated. This is likely because the team is based in Madison--a liberal college town. But one, a town that is sports obsessed and two, is in a a conservative state. In other words, how a region or town interprets or polices gender norms differs. For example, a look at the map at TransAthlete shows state interscholastic associations' gender identity policies.

The policy in Nebraska, where Hernandez plays, is the same as the old IOC policy. It requires gender reassignment surgery (we are talking about children remember) and a waiting period after the start of hormone treatment. The policy in Wisconsin is that each case is assessed as it arises. These policies reflect the cultural beliefs and can be used to predict how, for example, people might respond to short-haired soccer players on girls' teams.

Again, the interscholastic associations make their own policies, club teams and leagues make their own policies and Title IX has nothing to do with them. But it can influence thinking. Unfortunately the current administration's application of the law makes policies like the one in Nebraska--which is now more regressive than the IOC's--look more reasonable. It tightens the boundaries and it impedes logic.