THURSDAY THOUGHTS
Ain’t She a Woman?
Jumping through hoops to manufacture WNBA discourse on YouTube.
In 1851, human rights activist Sojourner Truth delivered a speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
Truth’s speech, which has been reproduced in countless anthologies over the nearly one-and-three-quarters century since, is famous today under the title “Ain’t I a Woman?” and it deploys an early version of what linguists today would call AAVE (African American Vernacular English) to deliver volley after volley of rhetorical fire against what was not yet called misogynoir.
Earlier this evening, I was Googling around, looking for additional information in the wake of the (expected, yet unwelcome) announcement that WNBA star Caitlin Clark would not be participating in tomorrow’s three-point contest or in Saturday’s WNBA All-Star game, for which she is one of the team captains.
bottom of the second act
I don’t ever like to see players in any sport get hurt, but Clark’s injury this week has an especially miserable feel, because:
- It came in the last 40 seconds of a game she won in the teeth of abysmal referring, spotty performances from even her most reliable teammates, and appallingly dirty play by the opposing team.
- As part of that dirty play, Jacy Sheldon of the Connecticut Sun kneed Clark in what I thought would be the FUPA but wiser minds have insisted was the groin.
- Clark has already missed five games with a groin injury this season, after missing four due to a quad strain.
- Jacy Sheldon was the same player who poked Clark in the eye earlier this season, in one of the games she DID get to play … and while I believed DiJonai Carrington, also playing for the Connecticut Sun in last year’s playoffs, when she said she didn’t poke Clark in the eye deliberately, I’m not sure I can say the same for Sheldon … as far as I can tell, hasn’t been asked about it anyway, so that might be moot, but since the video footage looks to me like she followed the eye poke up with a slap to the face, I think I’d have a hard time believing a denial.
- Clark was slated to play in this weekend’s All Star game and three-point contest, and getting yet another injury, at the very end of a game, just seems like heaping insult on injury.
Anyway, I was looking for additional perspective — the best I’ve found so far is here — and in the process I stumbled across a series of disquietingly-similar videos asserting that Angel Reese had recently taken sides, with Caitlin Clark, against Brittney Griner, for some darkly hinted intimidation tactics allegedly meant to keep Clark from “exposing” a secret supposedly held by Griner and the entire WNBA (in which case, I don’t see how it’s much of a secret, but I don’t think people who make 10-minute videos out of maybe 10 sentences of observation are inclined to let common sense get in the way of a good story … or a mediocre non-story, as the case may be).
we can do the innuendo
The videos making insinuations about Griner were all so much alike that (a) I think the titles and scripts were probably AI generated; and (b) I think they were all “seeded” by the same source, even if they were posted to different accounts. The AI thing might or might not be sketchy; the seeding effect definitely is, but it’s not my focus tonight. You can Google if you’re interested; I’m not going to give them additional traffic by linking here. Instead I’ll summarize:
The gist is that Caitlin Clark allegedly discovered a secret about Brittney Griner’s DNA that the whole WNBA has been hiding, and for reasons unspecified determined to go public about it, which led Griner to take preemptive steps to bully the snot out of the kid from Iowa. Angel Reese saw what was happening and spoke out, taking Clark’s side and defending her on behalf of the truth.
insane troll logic
There are more problems than you can shake a stick at here, but let’s try and break them down.
- If “the WNBA” knows, then Clark can’t very well have “discovered” anything; she’s a WNBA player, too.
- I’m pretty sure, from the dark hints in at least some of the videos, that “DNA” is more precisely referring to chromosomes, and that the “secret” is that Brittney Griner isn’t built on the XX model.
- How you get to the notion that Brittney Griner’s extraordinary height and startlingly deep voice have been flying under the radar all these years, I have no idea.
- At no point is it explained why Clark would feel like it was essential to go public — or, if she felt that way, why she didn’t just … get on Instagram or X, and take her shot. You can’t have it both ways. But since nobody I’ve seen so far has presented a single shred of evidence that Clark has “discovered” anything at all — except maybe which way her teammates are going to break once she puts her hand on the ball — that may not matter.
- The videos are noticeably short on examples of Griner bullying anybody. Somebody DID post a video, unrelated, of Griner being asked by an Outkick reporter whether she really called Caitlin Clark a “fucking white girl,” and Griner responding no, she didn’t remember what she said exactly but she was sure it wasn’t that because she didn’t use that kind of language. I’m reasonably certain she meant “white girl,” not “fucking,” but I don’t find it especially difficult to believe that Brittney Griner, a decorated star, is not going around throwing racist taunts at other players. She was playing “white girls” professionally when Clark was still a kid in high school.
- Also nowhere explained why Angel Reese would know anything about this supposed secret, other than because the entire WNBA apparently knows (again, not how secrets work).
- Even more telling, despite multiple allusions, nobody seemed ready to give an actual quote of Reese “defending” Clark, setting the record straight, calling out Griner, or otherwise … having any input on the issue, possibly because the whole thing has been made up out of whole cloth.
I have no idea what Brittney Griner’s chromosomes look like — and if you showed me, I still wouldn’t know what the hell I was seeing.
womanhood as a moving target (and goalpost)
I’m fairly certain that for WNBA purposes, that doesn’t MATTER, since I’ve yet to see any evidence that the WNBA requires chromosomal testing of its athletes. But based on the attempts at salacious hinting, I surmise that the allegation — made not by Caitlin Clark, but by these keyboard warriors and their AI tools — is that Griner has XY chromosomes. It seems to me she could just as easily have an unusual balance of androgens, but the only reason anybody is interested in this woman’s biochemistry comes down to this:
It’s a battle over who gets to decide who “counts” as a woman at all.
Which brings us back to Sojourner Truth, and the question, which I think might also be Brittney Griner’s question:
Ain’t I a woman?
The explanation I usually see pushing along insinuations like the ones made about Griner in those videos is that fair play and the “integrity” of sport demand that someone who is not a “real” woman be outed, on the strength of the assumption that someone merely “pretending” to be a woman (with remarkable consistency, over a period of decades, but I digress) will have an unfair advantage and therefore derail the whole premise of an equal competition.
Get Sarah G. Carpenter, Ph.D.’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I can’t say absolutely that that’s the theme of any of those videos; the one I watched in the most detail (I did a lot of transcript-scrolling because they were trying my patience) couldn’t really bring itself to acknowledge what the hidden “truth” was, much less why it mattered. But I think it’s a reasonable inference, and certainly it’s a very present narrative.
It’s also a narrative that Brittney Griner’s own example does a damn fine job of undermining. Whatever anomalies her “DNA” does or doesn’t have didn’t give her any obvious advantage in her team’s most recent match-up with the Indiana Fever, which Clark & Co won by a double-digit margin.
Griner was outscored by two of her own teammates, and by four players on the Indiana Fever.
I don’t think anybody is questioning Aliyah Boston’s womanhood card — but maybe you should, because I’ll bet you aren’t any more familiar with her chromosomes than you are with Brittney Griner’s.
I’m also not sure that chromosomes would really resolve the issue, because (as a biologist will tell you), chromosomes come in more than two possible combinations, and even then they don’t tell the whole story of biological sex.
Ultimately, there isn’t really any single, objective characteristic whose +/- determination will give us the “truth” about anybody’s sex … and that’s before we even get into the knotty social constructivist questions surrounding gender.
In the absence of the kind of clarity many people seem eager to invent and impose on nature, we have the option to accept people’s word for themselves — a man, a woman, an androgyne.
constructing ourselves and others
Which means that we can’t ultimately avoid social constructivism at all. “Man” and “woman” are not categories that have meaning in isolation. There’s no good reason (other than sheer enjoyment of a catchy tune) to sing along with Shania Twain’s litany of feminine enjoyment if “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” doesn’t resonate precisely because Twain’s itemization of fun activities for a girl’s night out sounds like your idea of a good time.
In which case, you’ve let Twain construct womanhood for you, and you’ve signed onto her discursive positioning not because it’s an accurate description of what a “real woman” is or enjoys, but because it sounds like fun to you, personally, and it strikes you as fitting within a constellation of tropes that you are used to associating with women.
That’s all fine, as long as you know that’s what’s happening — maybe as long as you just don’t try to insist that all other women must, also, wear men’s shirts and short skirts, and color their hair doing a dare.
As long as you don’t demand universal agreement that the best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun, we’ll probably all get along all right.
I don’t know whether you want to count hard fouls and layups in your understanding of womanhood, but I’m skeptical of the idea that you or I should have the right to tell Brittney Griner — or Angel Reese, or Caitlin Clark — what they get to include in theirs.
To the extent that “man” and “woman” are inherently social categories … I think we could get a lot of mileage out of reducing the number of scenarios in which we demand that those categories take center stage. Maybe height and weight classes should matter more in sports than sex or gender, and certainly more than they currently do.
The only instance I can think of in which being defined as a woman was genuinely important in my life is one I found out about after the fact.
I Tarzan. You Jane.
YEARS after the first time we hugged each other, my sometime-SO told me that in that first hug, he thought: This is what a woman is supposed to feel like.
To this day, I don’t know what to make of that sentence, even though I’m familiar with every word in it. What I do know is that it matters to him, because he considers femininity a desirable quality.
I don’t understand what exactly a woman is supposed to feel like, other than … like me … but I understand enough to grasp that likening me to his Platonic ideal of Woman is meant as a compliment.
Since I am a lot more invested in this one particular man’s sexual interest than I am in fitting myself to an abstract concept, that’s really all I need to know.
What actually affects my life, in practical and deeply personal terms, isn’t what a “real” woman is. It’s what this specific guy perceives as womanly, because he wants … womanliness, however he’s defining it, and I dgaf about gender but I do want him.
You can meet ONE person’s definition, of almost anything.
You won’t meet anybody’s definition of EVERYTHING.
You won’t meet EVERYBODY’S definition of anything.
I submit — and this is one of those times where I really am presenting a postulate for your consideration — that we, collectively, need to get a lot less demanding about the number and scope of definitions we expect others to fulfill on an at-large basis, in order to get, individually, much more dedicated to the people whose definitions we actually care to meet.
About the author:
Dr. Sarah G. Carpenter may not feel like a natural woman, but she definitely feels like somebody’s Girl Friday.
A lot of the headings in this week’s story were Easter eggs with embedded videos and other goodies — I hope you take the time to scroll back through and enjoy!!
