Before Bruce Jenner was a reality star, he was an Olympic gold medal decathlete and national hero. Now that he’s chosen to live the rest of his life as a woman, we should examine its implications on sports. Is masculinity necessary to be successful? How can the sports world accommodate a transitioning athlete with only two clear-cut categories?
Last night, former Olympic gold-medal decathlete Bruce Jenner officially declared to the world that he’s transitioning from a man to a woman. In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Jenner, stated that at the age of 65, he will no longer be known as “Bruce.”
“For all intents and purposes, I am a woman,” Jenner told Sawyer in the two-hour special. “I was not genetically born that way and as of now I have all the male parts. But I still identify as female. It’s very hard for Bruce Jenner to say that. Why? Because I don’t want to disappoint people.”
And for all intents and purposes, Jenner’s 65 years on this earth have been far from a disappointment, even if he’s better known now for his role on the Kardashians, and less for his triumphant Olympic moment 39 years ago.
This moment, his moment with Sawyer — baring his soul to a world that still has much to understand about gender identity and sexual orientation — was groundbreaking, and he wasn’t relegated to being a supporting cast member or mere background performer.
“I’m not a girl in guy’s body. I hate that. I am a person — it’s who I am,” Jenner explained. “My brain is much more female than it is male. It’s hard for people to understand but that’s what my soul is.”
Few of us can truly understand what that means, to feel as though we’ve been born with a body that betrays our spirit. But make no mistake about it — it took courage, insane courage to do what he did, especially for a male athlete whose achievements were defined by masculinity — and he should be celebrated.
How many times in sports do we hear the phrase, “Don’t play like a girl,” or to be crudely honest, “Suck it up. You’re acting like a total [insert phrase for female genitalia]. Grow some balls.”
Bruce Jenner embodied what it meant to be an American sports hero, and it transcended into mainstream popularity, including a career in TV and film.
It’s not just on the playing field, but it comes from coaches and even parents. We’re ingrained, since the days of ‘Friday Night Tykes’ Pop Warner football, to teach our male children that to be anything less than macho is to be less human.
The same can be said for women’s sports. Whether it’s spoken or not, female athletes feel the pressure to shed their womanhood in the perils of competition because it, or they, get in the way.
Ask Ronda Rousey how she feels about her breasts impeding her performance, or talk to the women who competed in sports pre-Title IX who didn’t have the benefit of sports bras and suffered through back pain. It would have been a lot easier to take up knitting, huh?
Like most male sports figures, Bruce Jenner had been portrayed as macho-man, oozing testosterone and sex appeal, as seen here in this Play Girl cover.
There were female marathon runners who were once prodded with questions about their uteruses falling out. No wonder officials in the former Soviet Union and East Germany pumped their female athletes, even adolescent girls, full of anabolic steroids.
Why? Because somewhere along the way, we’ve been taught that to be feminine is to be weak, and there’s no room for that in competitive sports, unless it’s in women’s gymnastics or figure skating, and even then, we should include an asterisk because their careers often peak before puberty fully sets in.
But a decathlete? God-forbid we have a gladiator with the toughness and physical prowess to outlast any male opponent in one of the most physically demanding sports, and on the inside, he identifies himself as a female and longs to wear dresses, have well-manicured nails and wear a ponytail.
It defies logic. It defies conventional wisdom, right?
Or does it merely identity what’s wrong with our thinking?
You see, this whole thing says more about us and our skewed culture, sports culture included, than it does about Jenner. The laughing and the snickers surrounding conversations about his interview today are reminiscent of a seventh grade science class and the first time an instructor blurts out the word “vagina.”
The boys laugh. The girls cringe. And later on during PE class, the kid who is picked last for dodge-ball gets slapped with term by the resident alpha male, degraded because he doesn’t measure up physically. That’s where the cycle begins, and it doesn’t stop there.
To be honest, I’m not sure how many people who were watching Jenner’s interview last night were really thinking about him as an athlete, but I was. That’s how I came to know him.
I’ve also come to know that NFL locker rooms and baseball clubhouses can be cruel places where that seventh-grade playground mentality repeats itself, even among the world’s most talented athletes.
And don’t think for a second that the media, sports blogs and fans don’t play a huge role in this as well. The faceless cowards of Twitter and Reddit live to bash any athlete who drops a game-winning touchdown or ventures even the slightest bit outside the stereotypical norm.
Michael Sam stepping into an NFL locker room gave us an opportunity to discuss openly gay athletes in the NFL, but there are still closeted athletes who have remained silent, choosing to conceal their inner truth.
Although Jenner is not gay, and that’s a very important distinction to make with transgender people, he waited 65 years before he finally felt comfortable enough to be who he felt he really was. That draws correlation.
He told Sawyer about the times where, on the road, he’d enter his hotel room a man and put on dresses once he was inside. He even took the hormone estrogen for five years in the 1980s. He confided in each of his three ex wives to varying degrees about his struggles with gender identity.
How many closeted gay athletes are out there? And how many athletes are out there who struggle with whether they are male or female?
Despite the fact that these are two different situations, we encompass them together because of what “LGBTQ” stands for, with “Q” most recently added into the equation so that people who are questioning themselves have a place in this world too.
We should find a way for them to have a place in locker rooms and on the athletic fields too. There’s just no clear-cut answer as to how, doing so respectfully and without intrusion.
How do we best accommodate LGBTQ athletes so they don’t have to wait until years after their playing careers are over before they can finally start living their lives and becoming their true, authentic selves?
It’s not easy when there are only two categories of athletic competition — male and female — yet we’re seeing far more blurred lines when it comes to gender identity.
South African track star Caster Semenya unknowingly was born with male and female reproductive organs. The controversy surrounding her gender played out poorly in the media.
We saw some of this play out with South African track star Caster Semenya, who won women’s 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships as an 18-year-old. Semenya competed as a female and always identified herself as one.
Her muscular frame, angular jaw-line and startling-fast time quickly raised as to whether she was truly a female.
On September 11, 2009, Australia’s Daily Telegraph reported that test determined she had male sex organs, no womb and no ovaries. She became an alien, this “thing,” with every report about her even more demeaning than the next.
It’s one thing to endure humiliating testing. To have it played out in public, to have your body exposed the way it was — figuratively speaking — was downright wrong and a sheer injustice to a human being who merely wanted to represent her country and compete.
Did her fellow competitors have a right to a fair competition? Absolutely. Did the world have to know about it? To some extent, yes, given the stage of the competitions she participated in, but the details of her existence as a “hermaphrodite” didn’t seem to benefit anyone, and they still don’t.
Stop for a moment and think, if this was you, or someone you loved, how humiliating that would all be. For all the effort put in to making sports more inclusive, this is an area we’re still struggling in.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) truly botched its investigation and the press did a horrible disservice to her. Give credit to South Africa for embracing her as “our girl.”
Caster Semenya’s “feminine makeover” perpetuated a notion that one must conform to societal norms to gain acceptance.
But, that was also when she appeared on a magazine cover with a feminine makeover. Did that stunt make her any more deserving of admiration or respect? Why couldn’t she just be herself?
“God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I’m proud of myself,” she told You Magazine at the time.
Her set of circumstances was far different from Jenner’s. She didn’t choose to out herself that way, and that itself, is a tragedy.
Jenner got to do it on his own terms. For many of us, this will be the first time we’ve encountered someone in the process of undergoing a sexual transformation before our very eyes.
But what Semenya said — acceptance, being proud of who you are — is what deserves our respect, even if who she is can’t be defined by a label scientifically. In time, we’ll figure it out. We’ll understand how to ask these questions, how to have a respectful dialogue without offending people, and how to not botch another investigation of an Olympic track star.
And we’ll understand how to get it right with athletes — that’s what Jenner was in his pre-Kardashian days of wealth and red carpet events. Before all that, he trained eight hours during the day and sold insurance at night, making $9,000 a year to support his Olympic dream.
He realized that dream at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, capturing the gold medal and smashing a world record with 8,616 points. He instantly became a national superstar that transcended sports and pop culture, gracing the cover of the Wheaties box and meeting with President Gerald Ford. He enjoyed a TV and film career too.
Bruce Jenner’s athletic achievements earned him a spot on Wheaties cereal boxes, signifying the ultimate achievement in sports. He should be celebrated for what he did on ABC too, bravely proclaiming that he’s living his life as a woman.
In many ways, Jenner lived the American dream, and his life’s achievements are something so many of us can look to with respect and admiration, even if reality television circuit might not be seen as a noble profession by some.
That isn’t the point, however. The point is that a public figure, and a former athlete, one of the greatest American athletes our country has ever known, chose to publicly proclaim himself a woman, forcing us to redefine our very definitions of masculinity, femininity and sport.
And even though we’re having this conversation post-athletic career, perhaps it forces us to redefine how we perceive athleticism, and that it really shouldn’t be characterized by male and female characteristics, but instead, by the very spirit of the competitor and the person.
That, right there, is what’s easily distinguishable.
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