roller derby

presenting roller derby to the masses on a show hosted by a bigot will definitely make the closet bigots in your roller derby league feel much better about their own conservative views and thusly make leagues less safe for marginalized communities.

If you know roller derby, you know Suzy Hotrod, a Gotham Girl star and incredible role model to young women everywhere. Recently,  Queen of Pain, launched their first-look trailer for their feature-length documentary about the incredible women of roller derby, as told through the lens of Suzy Hotrod and the women of Gotham Girl roller derby in New York.

As Suzy puts it, “[This is] a story of women surviving in New York. Roller derby is more than a sport, it’s a community and lifestyle.”

This is not just another sports doc, and it’s not just another flick about women who are interesting in a novel sort of way (no “by day/by night” fluff here). This is a celebration of female athletes who just so happen to be incredible women facing tough challenges in their lives — on and off the track.

For your background, Cassie Hay, co-director for the Queen of Pain film, was in roller derby herself, and has been in TV and film for nearly 20 years. This is not her first foray into the documentary world as she already has, The Liberators, under her belt which premiered at SXSW 2016, went on to screen at several film festivals nationwide, and found a permanent home on Amazon Prime.

But we need your help to help get this amazing documentary get made and to be shared with the world. We’ve already hit the ground running pulling together some of our own money to finance our first shoot and to cut a trailer, but we need your help to cross the finish line. Check out our Kickstarter, we’re 1/3 away from our goal and could really use your help!

I mean, yeah, it’s true there are unnecessarily gender-segregated sports and competitions of all varieties.

The problem is sports where physical strength and speed are unconditional determinants of success. Humans do in fact develop dimorphic secondary sexual characteristics, including stark differences in muscle mass, among various more aspects applicable to sporting prowess (for example, lung capacity).

In elite training, even minuscule differences in physiology produce a sizable impact. Men and women are different enough, physiologically speaking, that individual ability hardly matters when paired in competition. While the difference isn’t quite what I’d call “inherent,” it’s undeniable. The hormones behind such effects and compounds that promote said hormones’ production are banned as performance enhancers for a reason.

For boxing etc. where weight classes already exist, it’s vital to note women and men of similar size aren’t comparable in terms of muscle mass or strength. Training doesn’t do much to bridge that gap. (Unless you’re looking at an elite female boxer versus some untrained dude, I guess.)

Top competitors in most realms of sport, as per what the above posters are suggesting, would end up exclusively or almost exclusively men. Women wouldn’t be able to qualify as Olympians.

For a quick and easy example, these tables below (via Wikipedia) show men’s and women’s mile records:

You’ll see women’s record holder Svetlana Masterkova is significantly slower than Asbel Kiprop, man #25. In fact, Masterkova’s world record is bested on a regular basis by high school boys who’ve had fairly limited training.

Even figure skating’s jump-derived scoring would need to be overhauled, or again women wouldn’t survive as top competitors.

Let’s say a handful of professional soccer teams reach out to include one or two women. Where strategy and teamwork are concerned, each individual player isn’t required to be as fast as possible, kick at maximum force, et cetera. However, most women who play at present on top women’s teams are going to be SOL. The odds that those who remain on “non-gendered” teams are derided, harassed and end up relegated to an almost mascot-type role are 1/1.

Eliminating women’s athletics means eliminating women from athletics.

For most sports, your Divisions 1–3 will end up primarily if not entirely men’s domain. Divs 4–10, assuming such exist, will begin to include a greater proportion of women. Divs 18–20, finally, may be all women. Who’s funding Division 20? Who’s funding Division 4, even? Who’s its audience? Where is women’s prestige? Is that supposed to be irrelevant?

The overall effect is a raised, if not insurmountable, barrier to entry. Fewer women will be involved in competitive sports to start. You’re looking, from there, at a knock-on effect on young girls, their interests, their world-views.

It needs to be clarified, too, that competitive chess isn’t gender-segregated in the sense implied above. The WCC is open to women and men; women can participate in it and in WWCC games. Various levels of women-only tournaments exist to serve as outreach programs to get more girls and women interested in what is considered by society to be a male pursuit, and as voluntary reprieves from sexism in competitive chess. Calling women’s tournaments themselves sexist is grossly disingenuous.

The World Chess Championship’s open model would be acceptable, I think, even wise, to apply more broadly to sports. Women who want to compete against men should get that opportunity. Trans competitors whose hormonal states and/or genders don’t conform to traditional dimorphic standards should be able to participate in sports and not be misgendered or required to abstain from events early on in HRT. And in situations where no girls or women’s teams exist, for example in (American) football, those who want to play shouldn’t be barred.