Female athletes’ bodies shouldn’t be policed

“You work hard, we just think you’re too fat to be a D1 athlete,” one of my male teammates told me at a party after my fastest cross country season yet. I laughed, shrugged it off, and sipped my beer. But the next time I went to practice, I had a panic attack.

That I didn’t fit the mold of a runner wasn’t a new idea to me. My body has been scrutinized for athletic potential since I could walk. Doctors, airport security agents, strangers and acquaintances have all commented on how I looked “athletic” but always reacted with shock when I said my sports were track and cross country. The refrains of “you look more like you throw discus” or “you’re a little thick for cross country, aren’t you?” followed me from childhood to high school to collegiate competition.

In my mind, my role as a competitive athlete made these comments appropriate. And for a long time, I believed they were. I had learned from the media, competitors, teammates and my parents this is how athletes are talked about. The people around me were just trying to make me better and help me reach my goals. But being told at 13 I’d run faster if only I would lose some weight didn’t make me a better athlete. Instead, comments like those just made me want to be thinner, look more stereotypically feminine and just have someone guess that I was a runner on the first try.

The scrutiny made me hate running

and my body. The never-ending critiques made me believe that being smaller was the only thing that would make me acceptable as a runner to those around me. Those feelings followed me off the track, too. I spent an inordinate amount of time in high school and college scrutinizing my body and trying to change the way I looked, rather than focusing on my training, my schoolwork and building community.

Though I felt isolated, I was not alone. This is the reality for far too many female athletes, especially trans women and women of color, and in particular Black women. Female athletes are told we are too big or not big enough, too feminine or not feminine enough.

When Lia Thomas took to the blocks this past week at the NCAA swimming championships, she had undergone more than two years of hormone replacement treatments leading to noticeable changes in her body and performance. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, Thomas said that she had shrunk about an inch and that her strength wasn’t the same. She also noticed that fat had been redistributed on her body and that holding her old practice paces was impossible.

Yet, despite Thomas following every eligibility rule set by the NCAA, protesters gathered at the pool claiming she should not be allowed to compete as a woman. Their primary argument was rooted in the way she looks: her height, the size of her hands, her muscle tone. The underlying message: as a trans woman, she is only acceptable as a female athlete if she does not excel. Women with bodies that do not fit the mold of what female athletes are supposed to look like are questioned and ridiculed, rather than celebrated, for their accomplishments. Women and our bodies withstand constant criticism particularly from men, but as Thomas’s experience shows, this criticism can be wielded as a weapon between female competitors as well. Sixteen of Thomas’ University of Pennsylvania teammates published an open letter stating she should not be allowed to compete. Her presence in the pool will end “women’s sports as we know it.”

Given women’s sports are underfunded and under-televised, opportunities for economic success are significantly limited compared to men’s sports. When opportunity is slim, it becomes a zero-sum game — transforming women’s sports into a cruel and antagonistic competitive environment rather than a space to celebrate each other for excelling and defying odds.

National and international athletic organizations have sanctioned this criticism at the elite levels of athletic competition. Since 1940 there has been a variety of “gender verification tests” aimed at successful female athletes who do not fit the standard of white European femininity — from Soviet track and field athletes Irina and Tamara Press in the 1960s to Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand in the 2010s. Thomas is just the latest example of how ubiquitous and ongoing this policing of women’s bodies is. She is one of many women who has had her identity, abilities and work ethic questioned under the guise of creating “fair” athletic competition.

I still shirk away from being referred to as an athlete. I know as soon as that descriptor is attached to me, my body will be scrutinized in a new way. I will be seen only as a body, detached from my humanity, judged on a perceived lack of athleticism because of how I look. By putting on her suit and getting in the water, Thomas is fighting a battle, alongside many other incredible female athletes, to be allowed to compete in the sport she loves without being reduced to a cookie-cutter idea of what a woman should be. I wish Thomas did not have to fight this battle. But my hope is that she can win it for all of us.