In this episode, Johanna talks with repeat guest and one of our favorite sports journalists, Frankie de la Cretaz, about their incisive piece for The Nation, "How Women's Swimming got so Transphobic." Per Frankie's research, "Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes - and that's because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root." Frankie first discusses the confluence of 3 main factors upon which the sport's dangerous transphobia has emerged: the sport's whiteness and related anti-Blackness, its history of rampant mainly cisgender heterosexual white men's sexual abuse of mainly cishet white girls and women, and the East German state doping program against its female swimmers during the Cold War. The sport's whiteness is not just a dangerous condition that impacts many people today (check out our 2020 episodes with Kevin Dawson and Matt Hodler if you haven't already); people also use it as a shield to claim that swimming "doesn't have a race problem" in a way that gives foundation to denying cishet Black female swimmers as well as trans women their gender. The invocation of the GDR's doping scandal for transphobia is a misappropriation of East German women's suffering that inaccurately denigrates their experiences and silences trans girls' and women's experiences today too. We also talk about USA Swimming's use of white women on its staff as a possible cover for its sexual abuse history, and how cishet white women are always the main beneficiaries of "diversity" schemes due to their proximity to the white patriarchy. Frankie moreover details the challenges they encountered in finding an outlet that would accept their pitch, and contextualizes the sport's transphobia compared to how other sports are responding to anti-trans activity. Johanna ends with a call to action to fellow cishet white women to directly challenge transphobic rhetoric and policies as they support the resurgence of violent fascism and its attempted genocide of transgender people today.
Read the Sports Illustrated piece that Frankie mentioned about Lia Thomas here.
Episode 79: Status Coercion in College Sport with Erin Hatton
Episode 78: “Understanding Gymnastics on its Own Terms” with Dvora Meyers, Part II
Episode 77: “Understanding Gymnastics on its Own Terms” with Dvora Meyers, Part I
Episode 76: Abolishing the Olympics with Jonny Coleman of NOlympics LA
Episode 75: Unfiltered with Kaiya McCullough
Episode 74: Buying Unicorns with Dogecoin at the Tokyo Olympics with Jules Boykoff
Episode 73: On the Rich Aquatic History of the Black Diaspora with Naji Ali
Episode 72: College Sport 'Apocalypse'
Episode 71: On Trans and Non-Binary Sporting Inclusion with Verity Smith and Abby Barras
Episode 70: Gender Expansive Gymnastics with Half In, Half Out
Episode 69: One Year
Episode 68: How Texas Changed the Culture of Athletics with Frank Guridy
Episode 67: Black Feminism and Contemporary Sports Culture with Dr. Letisha Brown
Episode 66: The Plantation Dynamics of College Sport
Episode 65: College Football and the Re-making of Oklahoma with Andrew McGregor
Episode 64:The College Sports Media Problem
Episode 63: On the NWHL, *That* Media Company, and the “Girlboss” Ethos with Natalie Weiner and Hemal Jhaveri
Episode 62: Covid-19 and College Basketball with Jordan Bohannon
Episode 61: Klete Keller, Sport Media, and The Whiteness Problem in Swimming with Christienna Fryar and Matt Hodler
Episode 60: Sport and Politics on the Field and in the Academy with Lucía Trimbur, Part II
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