A panel of four came to the Dodd Center for Human Rights as part of the center’s Sport and Human Rights summit to discuss gender in sports and how issues relating to the subject connect to human rights concerns on Thursday, Oct. 23 inside Konover Auditorium.
The panel featured both experts in the field and former NCAA athletes. To begin the panel, each panelist was asked to respond to an initial question on how sports institutions can maintain balance and fairness when the politics of gender inclusion are continuously contested.
Schuyler Bailar, the first transgender NCAA athlete to play on a male Division I sports team, called into question what the definition of fairness is in the context of sports. Now running his own company, Pinkmantaray, Bailar also expressed the importance of finding the roots of current issues in the history and foundation of women’s sports.
“I think when people don’t root themselves in that context, it’s easy to think, ‘Oh my God, this is happening and it’s crazy,’” said Bailar. “But, actually, no, the type of impression that we are experiencing now is clearly set up in our history.”
Bailar pointed out the connections made by panelists between both Black civil rights and indigenous civil rights to gender categories in sports as ways that this history has affected different groups.
Other panelists at the event included Anna Baeth (Vice President of Programs and Research, Athlete Ally), Alisse Ali-Joseph (Assistant Professor of Applied Indigenous Studies, Northern Arizona University) and Amira Rose Davis (Assistant Professor of Black Studies and History, UT Austin). The panel was moderated by Risa Isard, the director of research and insights for sports marketing firm Parity.
Davis discussed both issues of gender such as the online backlash over the Minnesota Vikings employing male cheerleaders, as well as race-related topics such as the Haudenosaunee National Lacrosse Team’s push for a spot at 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. She also discussed financial subjects in relation to women’s sports, such as the monetization of youth athletics and the NCAA’s poor historic handling of Title IX. Davis said she feels that sports offer a unique environment for discussion of these human rights issues.
“I think one of the biggest takeaways from the panel was thinking about how sports are both a reflection and a laboratory for society,” said Davis. “Sports is inherently political, of course, but it’s also a place where we can have these conversations that you might not otherwise have in various other settings.”
Davis also discussed how a college setting allows a student the opportunity to “wrap [their] head around new ideas or see things separately.”
“A summit like this that we’re having here at the Dodd Center is exactly what you envision to have on a college campus,” she said. “People coming together and taking a big idea that doesn’t seem to have one simple answer and having the space for nuance; not for sound bites, not for trending clips but a place where we can really think about things.”