They zip around the rink, armed with helmets, pads and mouthguards. They push, bump and occasionally crash out as they jostle for position on the hardwood floor.
But for the women of the Long Island Roller Rebels, their biggest battle is taking place outside the suburban strip-mall roller rink where they’re girding for the upcoming roller derby season.
The nearly 20-year-old amateur league is suing a county leader over an executive order meant to prevent women’s and girl’s leagues and teams with transgender players from using county-run parks and fields. The league’s legal effort, backed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, has thrust it into the national discussion over the rights of transgender athletes.
Amanda Urena, the league’s vice president, said there was never any question the group would take a stand.
“The whole point of derby has been to be this thing where people feel welcome,” said the 32-year-old Long Island native, who competes as “Curly Fry” and identifies as queer, at a recent practice at United Skates of America in Seaford. “We want trans women to know that we want you to come play with us, and we’ll do our very best to keep fighting and making sure that this is a safe space for you to play.”
Just a reminder that there’s literally no reason to segregate sports by sex/gender when you can just create different classes like they do in some forms of wrestling.
The current state of competitive sports is hideously sexist.
I agree completely. As a side-effect, you could wind up with men not built like refrigerators playing football alongside some women. To me, that just sounds civilized.
The trick is that weight classes by themselves are not enough. Pound-for-pound, men and women are generally different strength-wise. So there’s still some kind of gendered grading curve involved here. But I think that’s actually doable with the right science backing it up.
thank you for this great idea. i’m saving it into my brain rn
Also a reminder that many sports segregated by sex/gender were because the men got upset at being bested by women and changed the rules to protect their egos.
Sorry to doubt you, but do you have a source for this? I can only find paywalled articles and the Wikipedia article doesn’t have anything to back this up
Here’s an example of this happening from about a month ago.
https://www.comicsands.com/kentucky-girls-basketball-championship-ban-2667435991.html?
Tl;Dr: Girls basketball team plays in the boys league, makes it to the championship, and then they get disqualified because they don’t want the boys to risk losing to girls.
And, as someone else has already mentioned, chess is gender segregated because men didn’t want to compete against women in a game they actually have a fair chance at beating men at.
Also I’m fairly sure in chess that there’s open and women’s leagues. I can’t find anything mentioning a men’s only league. I thought the women’s league was mostly around to try to encourage women into a male dominated sport?
The above post makes it sound historical, and the only/main reason for women’s leagues. I have no doubt in my mind there are select modern examples of salty boys being beaten by women’s teams, but that’s different from the origin of women’s leagues being that men were salty about being beaten all the time