Where are “protectors” of women’s sports now?

The self-designated “protectors” of women’s sports who loudly oppose allowing a few transgender girls and women to compete remain oddly silent about practices that unfairly give hundreds of women’s playing slots to cisgender men year after year after year. An excellent USA Today article this week exposed some of the ways that college athletics programs routinely shortchange women’s teams. Three big ones: counting men who practice with women’s teams as women, double-counting women athletes, and packing so many women onto a team that most never get a chance to play, instead of creating more teams for women. For example, I […]

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Survivors face backlash

Advocating political and cultural change engenders backlash. Student survivors of sexual assault successfully pushed many educational institutions to do their Title IX duties in the last decade despite ongoing, painful pushback. They worry for the student survivors of gun violence who now command the media spotlight but face attacks from opponents of gun control. “Young people are really, really powerful and really savvy,” says Sage Carson, manager of the non-profit organization Know Your IX. “These amazingly powerful organizations such as End Rape on Campus and Know Your IX were started by young people because they know how to work with […]

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So long, Shakespeare; adios, Aziz Ansari

One of the byproducts of immersing myself into researching Title IX is an altered personal tolerance for sex discrimination. More and more, I don’t. Tolerate it, that is. And that means letting go of some formerly cherished cultural reference points and practices. In this time of upheaval between the sexes, a lot of people may be experiencing something similar. This isn’t a new phenomenon. People — and our society — change as we not only get our eyes opened to injustices but begin to empathize with those who suffer under them. The latter is more “woke” than the former. This […]

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Fake news generates fake history

Pop quiz: Who said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Go ahead, google it. You’ll find lots of sources all over the Web and social media agreeing that the quote came from poet and writer Maya Angelou. But they’re all wrong. The modern crisis of fake news has a corollary in fake history, which is why I find myself returning to original (“primary”) sources as I research the history of Title IX. It’s difficult to discern the fakeness of the quote above by online searching because it’s been repeated so often that it dominates search results. Eventually, another source […]

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Journalists ignore women’s sports

I saw ghosts in October. I could sense that female athletes were out there being sportsy and all, but in my local newspaper mostly they were invisible. I decided, on an irritated whim, to monitor the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of women’s sports for one month and write a Letter to the Editor each day, a horrifying exercise that left me cursing the Chronicle. Jump to the Oct. 31 letter below for a recap and the curse. Or follow along in these excerpts: Oct. 1: 10 pages, 22 stories, 13 photos. Women = 2 sentences. Nothing on the two exciting WNBA […]

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