Roller Derby Fights Transphobia
Nassau County’s Bruce Blakeman is trying to force women sports leagues not to include transgender women. Roller Derby, an athletic home for queer women of all shapes and sizes, isn’t having it.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
Women are coming together to fight back against the government’s attempt to impose alien values on women’s sporting events. No, this isn’t about the astroturfed conservative movement to twist Title IX into defining women as inherently weaker and inferior to men, I mean a real grassroots movement of queer women who are standing up for their right to include trans women in their sports league. As covered by Hell Gate, CBS News, and the Associated Press, the Long Island Roller Rebels, a roller derby league based in Nassau County, are suing to assert their right to include trans women in the league after Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman banned inclusion in all of Nassau County’s parks and facilities.
The move by the Roller Rebels turns on its head the usual talking points about transgender women’s inclusion in women’s sports, which has often been portrayed as an unwanted imposition on women by sports leagues or government nondiscrimination ordinances. Here, a government ordinance seeks to ban a women’s sports league which proudly welcomes transgender athletes. The Roller Rebels currently have at least one trans participant and have long been proudly trans inclusive, according to an interview with Curly Fry of the Roller Rebels for Hell Gate.
screenshot from Hell Gate
This story is about fighting a transphobic ban imposed by an out-of-touch politician seeking to make a name for himself by forcing women to exclude trans athletes they very much wish to include in their sports leagues. However, by placing Roller Derby at the forefront, it’s also a story about what the benefits of sports are, who deserves those benefits, and what meaning sporting competition has for its participants.
Roller Derby has a long history, going back to endurance races of the 1930s and experiencing the height of its popularity in the 1970s. However, even at its height, the sport was never exactly mainstream in the way that baseball and basketball are, or in the way that individual racing sports have been. Therefore, the sport has never developed a sports culture that focuses elite athletics that focuses attention and prestige on a sport’s topmost echelons, which many say can be to the detriment of ordinary people who play sports for teamwork, recreation, social bonding, and healthy active competition.
Roller Derby’s identity as primarily a women’s, amateur, contact sport and its long identification with queerness and defiant queer inclusion flies in the face of mainstream athletics, providing an example of what athletic competition can be outside of the distortions and pressures of elite sports culture. Participants play the physically brutal, often dangerous sport to push their physical limits, they play for the camaraderie, and they play to have a place outside of the social norms dictating what women can and can’t do. It’s a pure expression of all the best aspects of women’s sports, and within that pure expression of sporting sentiment, trans inclusion seems to have come naturally, effortlessly.
In the Associated Press story, there’s one quote that gets at this particularly well. It comes at the end, when Urena of the Roller Rebels has the chance to push back on the usual narrative that women in sports are diminished by trans women’s inclusion because trans women might have some competitive or athletic advantages. This way of thinking is foreign to Urena, who is thinking about sports not as a zero-sum game where winning is everything, but as an opportunity to push herself and overcome her limits. “I love playing against people that are faster and stronger because that’s how I get better,” says Urena.
screenshot from the Associated Press
Elite athletics can be inspiring and meaningful for many who will never reach those heights by showing what human bodies are capable when the furthest outliers of a genetic predisposition to athleticism are combined with a single minded determination and focus. However, exercise, teamwork, and healthy competition are things that can be meaningful and beneficial to every person, of every body type, not just the infinitesimal percentage of people who are able to participate in the elite sporting world. For people who are not elite athletes, the mindset of Urena, who revels in the chance to push herself against competitors of greater skill, is illuminating. While the commitment to trans inclusion among the women of Roller Derby is inspiring, perhaps it is this attitude towards sports that represents its most valuable contribution.
Evan Urquhart is a journalist and the founder of Assigned Media.