Cambridge Students: Eppur si muove…

[NitroNine]

Some of you may recall that a couple of years ago there was an article in The Tab about LGBT+ Cambridge students [and] their experiences in sport. The article focused On gendered language, problematic socials and trans-exclusive competition rules.

Turns out that all that insistence on sex being real & mattering when it comes sport was despite 7 years of CUSU trying to bring in Stonewall Law. As ever, lots about trans’ rights under the EA; square root of sod all about other protected characteristics. They do at least admit to having shamelessly cherry-picked the evidence they [think] props up their argument about mixed sex sports being totally fair & safe, but 🫣

One might hope the adults would have more sense. But of course not. The author of this paper is at Southampton Solent; but 2019’s Thinking beyond the binary: Barriers to trans* participation in university sport seems heavily inspired by that CUSU report from 2013. The author also asserts that sports are separated by gender. Not using it as a polite synonym for sex; but rather seeking to justify mixed-sex sports because they remain same gender. (The Journal was the “International Review for the Sociology of Sport” [Impact Factor: 2689, 5-Year Impact Factor: 2887, for those of you into that stuff]).

Despite this culture, students continue to privilege facts over feelings. The elite sports societies at Cambridge (membership open only to those who have represented the university in a sport) are still divided by sex - Hawks (men) & Ospreys (women). And they refer to their members as such - for example when they had Gosia Binek give a talk to the Ospreys about periods & adjusting how you train (see attached image).

Not all their “sex is real, binary & immutable” stuff is quite so… well, perhaps it’s in for a penny in for a pound? Because, realistically, they’ll be getting complaints - from people who’d never be eligible for membership regardless, too - about their use of language etc being transphobic. So cross-dressing at your pre-season bop (again, picture attached) as if it’s 2002 (or even 2012?) not 2022? Why not? And regardless of it being in poor taste, it is a quite noisy statement about their right to express themselves. Sport-of-Choice lads putting on a dress & a bad wig is just that - they’re not mocking trans women nor oppressing them nor doing anything but making a holy show of themselves when it comes to that (unless, obviously, a specific individual engages in transphobia while cross-dressing - but that’s not the same thing). It’s women who’ve a right to be offended when men cross-dress; it’s women they’re parodying; women where there’s a whole issue with power, systemic oppression & rape culture interwoven in the costume choices [predominantly young] men make for events like this. All rather incoherent as to HOW it’s transphobic, mind - but it’s definitely transphobic. It’s a very strange feeling to find yourself relieved a practice you deeply dislike has refused to die because of what that death would mean.

It’s not exactly a shocker sporty Cambridge
students have a
good grasp of the need for sports to be divided by sex or mixed sex sports to be properly & safely mixed, like mixed hockey, for example. I’m not meaning as in “oooh, Cambridge students are so very clever & special”; but rather that they’re fortunate enough to have access to a huge range of sports & sports facilities at very low cost; & even students who don’t themselves do sport will know people who do & who think it justifies their showering outside permitted hours damn their eyes. However, holding out is hard; & it’s apparent it’s been almost 10 years of “Be Kiiiiind!” over sports - featuring some quite astonishing determination to get ahead of the law; & of course conflating trans people & people with DSDs. I wonder how many universities that CUSU report was passed on to & used to browbeat administrations less convoluted than Cambridge into making change.

Apologies if this is overlong or doesn’t articulate with sufficient clarity. MN (yet again) ate the whole post as it was ready to go; & my brain has kept - literally - going into sleep mode, which makes writing/editing posts (& not braining cat in lap every time I drop my phone 🤦‍♀️) a bit tricky.

(In case anyone is confused by the sports societies doing things other than drinking copious amounts, while there is plenty of alcohol at bops/swaps/formals/garden parties etc; in Cambridge, if you wish to spend your spare time drinking you can just join a drinking society.)

" Apologies if this is overlong or doesn’t articulate with sufficient clarity. "

It was a very interesting read, i thought.
Thanks for posting and well done hawks and ospreys! Let's hope they continue in the same vein.

Really interesting - for example when they had Gosia Binek give a talk to the Ospreys about periods & adjusting how you train (see attached image).

All the most recent research is showing that women need completely different training regimes to men. And the added research is that they need to be aware of their cycle and can use it to max their performance. The pill slightly dampens this but not completely.

I believe that a football team (Chelsea?) got to the top of the league using a particular method (here: www.fitrwoman.com/) and wouldn't be surprised if England did the same. I believe the american football teams also were using the method previously.

Also Stacey simms has done huge amounts of research on this and also had to fight to get her voice heard amongst the men. She noticed that her results were completely the opposite to men when participating in a certain piece of training research.

www.drstacysims.com/

I believe that girls should be being taught this stuff at school tbh. Hopefully a lot of this stuff will start to filter through more.
England winning this year I hope will have had impact on young girls growing up

Was interrupted; I wanted to add thank you for sharing and explaining, it does give me hope!

My only query is if these sporty students though also participate in debate societies etc or are too busy training etc. it strikes me that both are very separate worlds in need of learning what is going on in the other.

What I find outrageous is that women's sports are expected to be both mixed-sex AND mixed-gender (with transmen and NBs participating), while men's sports can be both single sex and single gender. The hypocrisy and male favoritism stink.

Maybe Cambridge should stop being overly dominated by posh, white males and that might give other people of all backgrounds a chance.

@EpicChaos
Thank you - was just really struck by the Osprey’s Insta feed (occasionally the algorithm is right about what might interest one albeit for the wrong reasons) which reminded me of the “Tab” article & that in turn led me to the deeply dodgy research.

@WarriorN
Am glad it was helpful/useful - & yes, it’s excellent they’re making use of the research into the importance of training in line with needs dictated by your cycle. (Absolutely agree it should be taught in schools btw: might help with keeping teenage girls engaged with sports on top of the obvious lifelong safety implications.)
WRT very sporty students - it depends on the sport, but I knew an Osprey who was active in not only College sport on top (usual) but in music. So not up & speaking, but a different mix of people. You get both Hawks & Ospreys involved in “running” their Colleges as members of their JCR (or MCR, as applicable) Committee, which is basically a requirement for moving into a Student Union role. As with anything, it depends on the individual - including which subject they’re reading (some give you the freedom to effectively set your own timetable & we all know midnight oil exists for a reason) & how much they care about their Degree Class (Hugh Laurie is perhaps the most famous example of a Rowers’ Third).

@RiotAndAlarum
It’s almost as if it’s about men’s rights, or something, isn’t it? And from the institution that only started granting women degrees in 1948 🙀

@ZeldaFighter
There is now an uneasy approximate admissions balance in terms of sex - but Cambridge relies on the women’s Colleges to achieve it. And since that article Lucy Cav has gone mixed sex openly while at the time of writing Murray Edwards had already opted for mixed sex if you’re willing to say the magic words. (Newnham are still holding to needing ID documents not just Feelz.) I worry interviewers may be more likely to pool female candidates with the expectation (based [on their part] on nothing) they’ll be more likely to placed from it - again, though, with the women’s Colleges in mind. “Oh, women so easily get placed from the pool” - strange that the obvious conclusion of “far more women are pooled including applicants of a higher calibre & thus they find places at a high rate” doesn’t seem to have been explored in any way let alone reached.
The number of black students has increased dramatically & is set to keep building. I found Cambridge so disconcertingly white when I was there. I don’t expect, given the UK’s demographics, the entire country to be racially diverse - a university city, however? (I was also, of course, very aware of the privilege inherent in experiencing that discomfort as a white woman [albeit one with black family] & what it would be like as a black person.)
What is likely to help is the new Foundation Year - if I were applying now, it’s that I’d be applying for. Obviously its existence has caused shrieks of outrage from people who believe Oxbridge belongs to those who can buy a good education - & who have no shame in holding up scholarship pupils as a shield, claiming THEY are the ones being truly disadvantaged here. With bonus conspiracy-theorising about parents pulling their children from private education for Sixth Form to game the system. Which makes it appear their expensive educations were rather wasted, because if you bother reading any information about any of the schemes to improve access for teens who haven’t enjoyed equal educational opportunities, they’re very clear that they check where you were educated age 11-16 & the private sector rules you out 🤦‍♀️
It might be better to start a separate thread on this though?

I was an Osprey! I think I might still be one technically. (Are you one for life?) It was very new when I joined (1998 or 1999 I think) and I was never very involved in it. I joined because I did two sports for the university and was women’s captain of one so they very much courted me and my parents thought it sounded good so they paid the (ridiculously low in comparison to the cost of joining the Hawks) membership fee. But I’m really pleased to see that it has thrived and that it is really thinking about women and sports.

From my experience there is generally a gap between sporty students and political students. I went to a very political college (yes - that one!) and was one of a very small number of people in the college who played sport for the university. I didn’t have the time or the patience for student politics. (It seemed to involve a lot of running around shouting and asking people to sign petitions.) I think my only real involvement was taking part in a bar sit in. Or maybe many bar sit ins.

Having said that a college is a very small place and everyone talks to everyone. (Mainly because they are all snogging each other on a Saturday night in the college bar.)

I think Ospreys had life membership for a bit @Mumoftwoinprimary but now they’ve a different way of working with alumnae.

It can be a bit strange to try to explain how Cambridge works & how… together… students are. It’s not at all about some kind of “Oxbridge is better” nonsense; it’s about “Oxbridge is weird & ridiculous - & each institution in its own way - so you can’t make easy comparisons”. In several Colleges you live in for all 3 years of your degree; & you eat in the Buttery or Hall for lots of your meals to maximise your time to work & play which means being exposed to the most incredible range of ideas & arguments (sometimes in more senses than one) across an enormous range of academic disciplines. Not that students only talk about work, but it comes up. Especially if you go to lunch straight from the library & your books include “Mein Kampf” in both the original & the English translation.

We had a general election while I was up & a big bit of student politics was getting the vote (& incumbent MP) out. Was a tiny bit sinister, all the “are you eligible to vote here/registered to vote here?” through to, on the day, JCR reps in the Plodge with lists: “have you voted yet?!” Other than the people who were effectively bank partying the electorate. That was highly amusing. Anglia Ruskin Students who foolishly wandered into town didn’t know what hit them, bless them. Really foolish of the MP for Cambridge to count on students not to bother paying attention to their work & more so to expect them not to express their views on it at the ballot box 🤦‍♀️

Was that Anne Campbell? It was after my time but we still lived nearby. She was beaten by the Lib Dems if I remember right? Iraq war. Cambridge and the environs always used to make me laugh - one red blob in the middle of a sea of blue. Cambridge students voting for Labour, graduating, earning a few quid and suddenly become staunch Tories!

That was the one - a big issue was the fees cap: unwise to promise a bunch of students you’ll vote against lifting it & then do the opposite. Maybe she thought because we weren’t impacted by it we wouldn’t actually vote her out for it, if, as previously mentioned, she really believed students paid attention & voted.

I’d still not vote Tory unless possibly in a Gun To My Cats’ Heads type-hypothetical - but I’m one of the disabled people they think don’t deserve human rights but DO deserve a life of penury (hence no uplift for legacy benefit recipients during the pandemic despite their acknowledged higher living costs & lack of savings cushion) rather than sitting pretty atop piles of filthy lucre. Or indeed lovely clean lucre. So perhaps an outlier. 😁

I was interested to read last year while watching some Cambridge races that there are very clear and specific times when college rowing crews can be mixed sex (essentially, up to 2 women in a men's crew below the top 2 divisions). Most non University rowing clubs will have mixed sex crews from time to time, either because it's just whoever turns up, or because for a mixed sex race. It was less common in the colleges when I was learning, but that was a long time ago. And never for the main races which were all single sex then.

There will be mixed gender crews i think; maybe there already are; i think people who thrive on conflict will want to make that happen. But I'm glad that the Ospreys (I'm one too) are being strong and positive about the impact of sex on sport performance. Ignorant comments by people who've quite clearly never played competitive sport in their lives are too common.

@PermanentTemporary
Maybe the whinging in the Tab article I linked worked then - it was very heavy on “rowing is SO mean!” 🙄
I know at Small Boats they race mixed pairs & something else can be mixed if the number of entries is low. Checking the Handbook (all hail it…): the lowest Men's Crew of a club entered into a set of Bumps…may include up to four oarswomen. It doesn’t specify their having to be below a certain Division; but no Men’s Club is going to do it unless desperate to fill a boat, let’s face it.

Of rather more concern:
Rowers who were assigned male at birth, and do not identify as male, and whose testosterone levels are not suppressed below 10 nmol/L and who have not had a gonadectomy:
may not row in a women’s boat for their college,
may row in a men’s boat for their college, notwithstanding Rule 3.b above,
if their college has no men’s crews, the rower may choose one college where they are not a student to compete with for the duration of their rowing in men’s crews. This choice must be agreed by both the rower and the new adoptive club. They are to be regarded as a full member of that college boat club, and not to be limited to the lowest boat irrespective of CUCBC Regulation for Racing 4.b,
this decision is made once, does not need to be approved at the Captains meeting, and does not need to be declared every term,
when a rower previously rowing with an adoptive club under Rule 3.e.iii becomes eligible for Rule 3.f, they may elect to return to the original college or to begin rowing with the women’s squad of the adopted club, but this decision may be made only once.

Rowers who were assigned male at birth, and do not identify as male, and who could provide a letter from their GP stating that either their testosterone levels are suppressed below 10 nmol/L or that they’ve had a gonadectomy (the letter does not need to be specific about which criteria applies; CUCBC will cover the cost of said letter from the GP; this letter will be seen by one and only one member of the committee, who will not discuss the contents of the letter with anyone else):
may row in a women’s boat for their college.

Rowers who were assigned female at birth, and do not identify as female, and have not started testosterone treatment
may row in a women’s boat for their college, notwithstanding Rule 3.b above,
may row in a men’s boat for their college,
if their college has no men’s crews, the rower may choose one college where they are not a student to compete with. This choice must be agreed by both the rower and the new adoptive club. They are to be regarded as a full member of that college boat club, and not to be limited to the lowest boat irrespective of CUCBC Regulation for Racing 4.b,
this decision is made once, does not need to be approved at the Captains meeting, and does not need to be declared every term.

Rowers who were assigned female at birth, and do not identify as female, and have started testosterone treatment:
may not row in a women’s boat for their college,
may row in a men’s boat for their college
if their college has no men’s crews, the rower may choose one college where they are not a student to compete with. This choice must be agreed by both the rower and the new adoptive club. They are to be regarded as a full member of that college boat club, and not to be limited to the lowest boat irrespective of CUCBC Regulation for Racing 4.b,
this decision is made once, does not need to be approved at the Captains meeting, and does not need to be declared every term.
Rowers rowing for an adoptive college under Rule 3.e, Rule 3.g or Rule 3.h may elect to cox for one of their original or adoptive club.

If you are intersex and unable to apply this policy to choose an appropriate rowing team, please contact CUCBC for a confidential discussion.

We know it’s not all about testosterone. The healthy range for women is 0.7-2.4 nmol/l so even if it were just about that, having 4 times the amount of the stuff would be an issue. The testosterone level the NHS aim to keep trans men between? 8-14 nmol/l. Yes, you read that correctly, it’s routine for trans men in the UK to have a testosterone level below that which allows trans women to participate in female sports; but trans men are not allowed to play female sports once they start “doping”.

Oh pants. What a surprise. Guess I didn't read far enough.

I was really poleaxed by Helen Glover coming out in support of same-gender crews. I have responded where possible to British Rowing about these policies.

As always it is the women pushed out of opportunities that we won't hear about. I am also sad to think that it may well be the women's college crews that are the testing ground for these policies, if they haven't already been tested.

I think Murray Edwards are likely to be first: Lucy Cav are now mixed sex (& no longer postgrad-only); & Newnham SCR continue to hold the line on requiring males seeking admission to College to have ID that claims they are female. Which the JCR continue to insist is outrageously transphobic. Males having literally the whole of the rest of the university - including the other “women’s” College in which to “live as women” is not enough. They have yet to take a battering-ram to Clough Gates, or hang an effigy of a female student, but before anyone accused me of hyperbole, both those things have previously been done by violent male students because women had the temerity to ask to be respected & to dare to simply exist in a male space. (Well, & they demonstrated men are not automatically the smartest people in the room by virtue of their sex. That had to sting a little.)