Why They Don't Let Girls Play ⚽️⚾

SUMMARY

This week, Remoy picks up the newscaster mic and shares some history about women’s sports. We are joined by young adult author and educator Kirstin Cronn-Mills, an activist supporting gender equity in sports, specifically for trans women.

• Sports have always been framed and regarded as a men’s activity by the powers that be, but in reality, all genders have always participated. Did you know that women were running their own soccer league in England in the late 1800s? How did we go from women being entrepreneurs turning away thousands of eager spectators at their sold-out matches to women being underrepresented in sports? Remoy charts the timeline of women’s soccer in England before patriarchy intervened.

• Before baseball was segregated, girls just played with boys. Did they have to create separate leagues because girls couldn’t keep up? Or was it threatening to boys’ status to have girls play in their leagues? Listen as Remoy gives the gray answer of what actually happened and Kirstin Cronn-Mills shares historical sports insights of her own.

• Our illustrious guest questions what it is about women’s power that makes men so uncomfortable and reveals how her work in sports and novels has informed her own parenting.

• Using pseudoscience to proclaim certain people’s superiority is not a new game! Remoy outlines how teams kept girls out of baseball and how real science exposed that the truth is quite the opposite of the arguments used to maintain sports as strictly a boys’ thing.

• Kirstin drops knowledge on trans athlete Lia Thomas and what it’s really like when trans women compete after their transition. Knowing the real science is really the key!

• Help us name our revamped interview segment! 🎙️ This week, it’s Remoy who deep-dives with our illustrious guest, Kirstin Cronn-Mills, and Samantha is back in the hot seat! Send us your suggestions at maskulinitypodcast@gmail.com.

• Kirstin Cronn-Mills shares some key insights and knowledge about sports and gender through her author and educator lens and she and Remoy ponder what sports might have been like had patriarchal control not intervened. 

• Things are on the up and up with women and queer athletes! Don’t miss the most exciting things Kirstin is excited about when it comes to the evolution of sports and gender.

• We give Serena Williams the props she deserves and find out who was nicknamed after her as a young adult! 

Referenced on this episode:

• Gender Inequality in Sports and LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

• Playing With the Boys by Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano

• Landmark Decision Allowed Girls to Play Little League

• The history behind the U.K.'s women's soccer ban

• The truth about Lia Thomas swimming against other cis women

COMPANION PIECES:

• Women Athletes: performing masculinity (and femininity) on and off the court

• Supporting LGBTQ Athletes in the Binary World of Sports

• Weaving the Fabric of Exclusive American Masculinity with the Boy Scouts

• Maria Pepe: the New Jersey girl who sued to play baseball with the boys

OUR GUEST THIS WEEK:

Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Young Adult Fiction Author, Educator

Kirstin comes from a family of word nerds. Her grandmother and her father passed on their love of language to her, and that love became a love affair when she started writing poems in elementary school. She still writes poems, but now she focuses on young adult novels.

In 1992 Kirstin moved from Nebraska to southern Minnesota, where she lives now. She writes a lot, reads as much as she can, teaches at a two-year college (she won the Minnesota State College Student Association 2009 Instructor of the Year award), and goofs around with her son, Shae, and her husband, Dan. Her first young adult novel, The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind(Flux, 2009), was a 2010 finalist for the Minnesota Book Award for Young People’s Literature.  Her second novel, Beautiful Music For Ugly Children (Flux/Llewellyn, 2012), won ALA’s Stonewall Award in 2014 as well as an IPPY (Independent Publishing) silver medal for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction.  BMUC was also placed on ALA’s 2013 Rainbow List (as a Top Ten Pick) as well as their 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults list.  Her third novel, Original Fake (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House 2016), was a Junior Library Guild selection and received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. It was also a finalist for a 2017 Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Literature and a 2017 Best Children’s Books of the Year selection from Bank Street College. Her fourth novel, Wreck, was published in 2019 by Skyhorse Publishing.

She has also published nonfiction books for middle and high school libraries: Collapse! The Science of Structural Engineering Failures (Compass Point Books, 2009) and Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices (Twenty-First Century Books/Lerner, 2014) and LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality (Twenty-First Century Books/Lerner, 2016).  Transgender Lives was placed on the 2015 Best Children’s Books of the Year list from Bank Street College, and LGBTQ+ Athletes  Claim the Field was a Junior Library Guild selection, a 2017 American Library Association Rainbow List selection, a 2017 Best Children’s Books of the Year selection from Bank Street College, and a 2017 Minnesota Book Award finalist for Young Adult Literature. Gender Inequality in Women’s Sports: from Title IX to World Titles was released in April 2022.