There are a lot of reasons FIFA could be seen as a bastion of sexism. The women played on
damaging artificial turf that the men don't have to contend with, Sepp Blatter (FIFA president) said women players should wear tighter shorts to draw a male audience, women are hardly present in any executive roles at the organization, and the prize for winning the Women's World Cup is 40 times less than the prize for losing the Men's World Cup in the first elimination round (more on that will come in another post, as soon as I stop flipping over tables in a blind rage). After piling insult on top of injury, FIFA also has an
outdated gender verification policy that purports to be fair.
Although many Americans like to believe gender is a simple concept, it is anything but. Nowhere does this become more evident than when a person needs to somehow unquestionably verify their gender. You can't use genitalia, as that varies widely due to both nature and surgical options (not to mention, hello, privacy). You can't use hormones, since some men produce high levels of estrogen and some women produce high levels of testosterone. You can't look at chromosomes, either, since sometimes women will have a Y chromosome and sometimes men have two Xs. And then there's also a lot of gray area outside of the male/female binary.
The barrier to having a simple, infallible litmus test for gender is so great, and the idea so offensive, it's a wonder anyone would ever bother with it. And yet they do. You may recall all the hullabaloo in 2009 over Caster Semenya, the South African runner whose femininity was questioned so much the International Association of Athletics Federations chose to submit her to gender verification. Because, you know, there's an inverted relationship between amount of muscliness and amount of real-womanness... or something...
Dutee Chand of India was forced to undergo a gender test in 2014 that discovered she has "female hyperandrogenism," meaning she produces more testosterone than the average woman. The Sports Authority of India told her she would have to either get surgery or hormone therapy to "fix" the "problem." She said absolutely not, and is now challenging the entire policy.
FIFA's policy is more broad than the IAAF's and the Sports Authority of India's. Rather than go on a case-by-case basis, their policy states they'll do "random selection," and that every team is responsible for ensuring that their players have been gender-verified. Random selection like how the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy totally was random, in that it isn't random at all. Teams are responsible, yet while the women's team out of England had to undergo testing, Mark Leather, of the Bolton Wanderers in the English Premier League,
told The Guardian, "I've never come across testing being carried out for men. The footballing authorities don't make the men do any."
That's because it wouldn't be seen as a threat to the integrity of men's athletics if a man were found to have estrogen levels outside of what is normal. In other words, in doing gender testing, and in only targeting women for it, FIFA is saying, "this is what it means to be a woman," and "being womanly is a disadvantage in sports." As Kate Fagan at ESPN
points out, "the only reason this policy would be about fairness is if you believe it's "unfair" that some human beings possess a genetic deviation, possess too much natural testosterone, and therefore, hold some sort of intense competitive advantage. But that has never been proved. (See
here and
here.)"
I'll be celebrating our team's win all week, but I'll also be watching FIFA to see how they respond to the charges of sexism that are growing ever louder.
