Relations Between Sexes in Sports

Sports are usually associated with positive outcomes for the health of individuals, who are engaged into it. Sport is able to make people stronger physically and morally and contributes to their active life style as well as could help to overcome some psychological problems. Unfortunately most of these positive aspects of sport are not related to professional sports. Instead professional sportsmen are to refuse from normal lives for the sake of reaching higher results and positions in professional sport. They suffer from psychological traumas and physical injuries and the only compensation for this could be their medals. The problem of gender identity in professional sport is discussed in the modern world, but still it is not enough investigated in order to offer any workable solution to it. Sport fans are used to seeing the sport stars happy and successful and they hardly think about their real lives, and there is pain and depression in their real lives, which sometimes even lead to terrible consequences. In addition there are a lot of controversies, related to gender binary in sports, which are faced by both sexes.

The author of the article Women’s sport and questionable sex Jaime Schultz provides the example of Santhi Soundarajan, who attempted suicide after she was deprived of her silver medal, when she was characterized to lack the sexual characteristics of a woman. Certainly the procedures, which are related to sex identification, have changed immensely with time and humans have already almost forgotten the times, when women were not allowed to participate in Olympic games purely on the basis of the fact that they were female, but still the tensions between athleticism and femininity is not over yet. Sports used to be the ground for proving masculinity, this is the reason, why females are to struggle with gendered binary, if they enter this “world” and moreover if they succeed in sports. Statistically two out of 100 individuals do not fit the binary model of gender identification, which is applied in sports. There are a lot of examples of the cases, when a baby is born with the chromosomes with one sex and has the anatomy of the other. In addition, sports do have their impact upon formation of individuals in differences senses, for example women are to become stronger physically, as well as men could strive to become more gracious, if they are professional figure skaters for example. The article by Andrew Sparkes and Brett Smith Sport, Spinal Cord Injury, Embodied Masculinities, and the Dilemmas of Narrative Identity is devoted to investigation of the real stories of four sportsmen, who had to overcome spinal cord injury, when playing rugby football and suffered from their disabilities. Investigation of real biographical data is important for better understanding of the actual problems, experienced by professional sportsmen, and the need to find the way to solve them in a large scale level. All of these individuals experienced not simply physical pain and suffering, but also had to face the loss of their athletic, as well as masculine identities. Sparkes and Brett (2002) write “Much recent theorizing about the body has tended to be cerebral, esoteric, detached, distant, and for the most part lacking intimate connection to the lived experiences of the embodied beings who are the objects of analytical scrutiny.” It is difficult to argue that there still exists some kind of strong bias in the current sociology of the body and it was not managed or was even reinforced during the feminization period. Mostly probably this could be explained by the fact that the real aim of feminists was not to fight to equal rights, rather to put females on the leading positions in the society. The experiences of Matthew, Craig and Eamonn are meaningful for overall understanding of the concept of masculinity in the modern world. They reveal to other people, how difficult it is for them to reshape their body-self relationships and sustain their identities for the future. Their stories are unique for representing of the identity dilemmas, which are so influential in the modern society and pose certain limitations for its male or female members.

 In reality, relations between sexes in all life spheres, including sports, are rather sophisticated and defined by a great variety of factors. There is a serious question here, whether the demand for sex identification is so important for finding the balance in the society, or it would rather reinforce the confrontation and misunderstanding.

Works cited:

Schultz Jaime. Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport. University of Illinois Press, 2014

Sparkes, Andrew, C., Smith, Brett. Sport, Spinal Cord Injury, Embodied Masculinities, and the Dilemmas of Narrative Identity. Men and Masculinities, Vol. 4 No. 3, Sage Publications, 2002 

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
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[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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