Time has come to eliminate gendered requirements from all school activities

When I heard that there was to be a school-wide dodgeball tournament, I was overjoyed! After all, I’m something of a dodgeball pro myself. However, I and many others' hopes were soon dashed when we heard the requirements: five girls and five guys required to make a team. You could almost hear the collective eye-roll that went around the room once that was announced. 

It’s 2022. Why are we still enforcing such blatantly transphobic rules in Snowblast and other such events? It’s unabashed discrimination against nonbinary students and needs to stop. Students shouldn’t have to feel like they have to invalidate their gender identities just to play some dodgeball.

Even I, as a femenine-presenting nonbinary student, still feel uncomfortable having to label myself as a “girl” in many situations because, even if I present my gender that way, that’s not how I identify. I cannot imagine how much harder it is for students who do not identify with the gender binary at all.

This rule only seems to either exclude or invalidate nonbinary students, which, frankly, the coordinators of these events should be aware of.

Even ignoring that, the very reason for the rule being in place is rooted in outdated gender norms. Supposedly, a team of five girls and five guys is supposed to be “balanced”, but what about that makes any sense? Is this rule implying that girls are “weaker” than guys? No matter how you look at it, it doesn’t make sense for this to still be a rule that is in place in our modern day and age.

The only argument I’ve ever heard for this rule is that “It’s just to prevent there from being teams entirely made up of football players” and to that I say- Why does that matter? Dodgeball is not just about how hard you can throw the ball. I’m good at dodgeball because I’m good at dodging- It’s in the name, for goodness sake! Even in Snowblast where this rule is also present, not every event is based on physical strength, so the athletic ability of a team should really not matter. And if it does to that extent, maybe those events could be modified or removed?

And to add to that as well, why are we assuming immediately that should this rule ever be lifted, it would immediately mean that men dominate every challenge? Are we trying to say that the only thing holding back “football players” from winning every event is the fact that they’re required to have women on their teams? That’s incredibly messed up, if so.

And even if we ignore all the previous evidence about how this rule is transphobic and rooted in sexist ideals, there’s still one more problem. It simply discourages people from making teams.

The annual worry every year with Snowblast is “Will we even have enough teams?” And that’s because team-making is actively made more difficult by this rule, and I imagine the dodgeball tournament faced the same problems. Most people are friends with a majority group of people who share the same identity as them. A friend group of ten people might want to sign up for a dodgeball team, but they have seven girls and three boys. Now they have to decide to exclude two of the girls from the group, and they have to recruit two other strangers to fill those gaps instead of just playing as a group of friends. Should people be forced to pick and choose between their friends just to put together a team? That only seems to encourage even more bullying and discrimination.

In fact, perhaps one of the reasons why majority athlete teams seem to win all the time is because they already know each other and work together in their sports, whereas teams who don’t have that advantage suffer with less team synergy, as they’re forced to break up their friend groups. I know it happened to me; I don’t doubt that it happened to many, many other people during Snowblast this year and in the years preceding. 

There is absolutely no reason why this rule should still be enforced, whether as part of Snowblast, the upcoming dodgeball tournament, or any other event. It should be abolished completely, and I know that I am not the only person who feels this way. In 2022, there is no excuse for continuing to reinforce a sexist, transphobic, elitist view of the world.

By Anonymous

March 18 2022

Volume 118 Issue VI