When I speak to women about self defense and their ability to fight back, I sometimes get told “It’s different for you because you’re big.”
It’s true that I am larger than the average woman. I am, in fact, about the size of the average U.S. man – or was, at least, until I began some of the inevitable shrinking that comes from age. I also have a pretty classic mesomorph body – sturdy, broad-shouldered, and so forth.
I am, in fact, larger than Mitsugi Saotome Shihan, under whom I studied Aikido for years, and was, in fact, also somewhat larger than my karate teacher back in the 1980s, who I think was around 5’7” and weighed about 140. It should go without saying that both of them could kick my ass, and still can, even though they’re in their late 80s now.
Which is to say that one thing spending half my life in martial arts has taught me is that size doesn’t matter. In fact, part of the lore of martial arts is that training makes it possible for small people to fight effectively.
Size can be intimidating – I’ve had large male friends explain to me that they never got into fights because no one wanted to start trouble with them. Though come to think of it, that was guys who were basically good natured. Guys with a chip on their shoulder tended to get into trouble no matter what size they were.
I might be big enough to telegraph “not worth the trouble” but I’m certainly not big enough to be intimidating to troublesome guys. But I do also have an attitude.
You can be small and still have attitude. I still remember back in my early days of Aikido coming into the women’s dressing room and hearing one of my fellow students – who was maybe 5 feet tall – say, “I was training with this guy who didn’t think women could do this, so I threw him over there and then I threw him the other way.” She was demonstrating hand movements as she spoke and I recall thinking that I was going to be very careful when I trained with her.
Here’s another thing: no one ever takes me for a man. I mean, I’m large for a woman and my voice is relatively deep – I used to be an alto, but my singing range is more tenor these days, maybe almost baritone. Not to mention that I’m loud and I’m hard to shut up.
It might be the hair – I have lots of it. Or my hips. Anyway, something about me tells people I’m a woman, and no one ever assumes I might be trans.
I have been able to use this effectively. I was once in a restroom with a trans woman friend and someone else said something about there being a man in the bathroom. And I said, “No, I just have a deep voice,” which left her very confused because she wasn’t talking about me, but couldn’t exactly say that.
That experience did make it clear to me that some women – both trans and cis – run into that kind of bathroom policing on a regular basis. It’s appalling and infuriating, but we live in a society that is determined to make it hard for people to take care of their basic needs.
I do rebel against gender rules, even if that’s not obvious from my appearance. My current opinion on gender can be summed up as the following: I am a woman and nobody gets to tell me I’m doing it wrong.
Though of course, they do. “Too big, too loud, too interested in the wrong things.” I don’t get misgendered, but I do run into men who are outraged by the fact that I refuse to shut up and do things their way.
But I’ve started to wonder, ever since the woman who won the gold in boxing at the Olympics was attacked as “really a man,” if part of the reason people assume I’m female is simply because I’m not a world class athlete.
I mean, I’m a jock, or at least, I spent a lifetime in martial arts. But while I know a lot, I’m in no way world class, or outstanding in the world of martial arts. I’m just someone who stuck with it and learned a lot over the years.
But what if I had combined perseverance with talent and taken up, say, judo, which is an Olympic sport?
I am, as I said, large. I’d be in the heavyweight division, no question. There’s no way I’d ever be small enough for smaller weight classes no matter how good a shape I was in.
Would people have labeled me a man if I’d been a judo champion, just because I was big and successful? Maybe.
It doesn’t sound anymore ridiculous than the absurd allegations against the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.
When people claim a talented woman athlete or other strong woman must be male, it’s because they can’t conceive of a woman being strong. That’s not girly. That’s not feminine. There must be something wrong with her.
It’s all rooted in a lack of respect for what women can do. And it’s rooted in the belief that men are always better at whatever the sport (or profession) is than women.
So a strong woman boxer must really be a man. And to prevent that, we must have invasive exams and toss out any competitor who doesn’t meet certain arbitrary criteria that the group doing the sport has decided means woman.
Trans women are excluded on the assumption that of course they’ll beat cis women because they’re “really” men. I would note that they don’t, as a rule, and the whole emphasis on this is just a right-wing ploy to rile people up.
The point is that the whole obsession with who is a woman for purpose of competitive sport is rooted in the idea that women are so inferior to men that any old guy can pretend to be a woman and win the gold.
Kind of like all those men who barely know how to hold a tennis racket but are convinced they could score a point off Serena Williams.