‘Ain’t I an Athlete?’: ‘Protecting Women’s Sports’ Has Never Been About Protecting Black Women

The fight over who belongs in women’s sports will only increase the scrutiny of all female athletes — especially Black women and girls.

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It’s an old playbook with new opponents. Black women athletes are often criticized as too aggressive, too strong, too much of everything except what white and sexist sports culture deems acceptable. Their bodies are analyzed, their confidence is seen as threatening, and their strength deemed suspicious.

Now, the same people performing moral outrage over these supposedly “masculine” Black women are the loudest voices insisting that the fewer than 10 of the 510,000 student-athletes in the NCAA who identify as trans will ruin women’s athletics with claims that they have an unfair advantage. Because, suddenly, the category of "woman" must be firmly defended — when it’s politically convenient. It is not a coincidence that the newfound mass media interest in women’s sports, increased commercialization of such and the new anti-woke era have created a salty roux for the recipe of oppressing trans women athletes through policy and baseless scrutiny — scrutiny that will likely increase for all female athletes, particularly for Black women and girls.

Last month, a day after the Trump administration signed an executive order banning transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, the NCAA Board of Governance voted to update the participation policy for transgender student-athletes limiting competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth. The NCAA’s swift policy shift reinforced the administration’s exclusionary stance and tapped into a much older and more insidious narrative, one that has long been used to police the boundaries of womanhood in sports.

The fight over who belongs in women’s sports has always been more than just an issue of fairness. Per usual, it’s about power, control and exclusion. At this point, Black women athletes could write the playbook on being scrutinized, excluded and policed in sports because we’ve seen this game before, and it’s getting old. From Althea Gibson to Serena Williams, and Flo Jo to Sha’Carri Richardson, every generation brings a new excuse to tell Black women we’re too much to handle. And now, the same tired rhetoric is being recycled to justify excluding trans women, under the guise of “fairness” and “protecting women.” But if fairness was really the concern, we’d be talking about equal pay, equal media coverage and how women’s sports are underfunded. But instead, we have white men “protecting” women who never asked for nor needed to be protected.

Society loves to celebrate strength, resilience and competitiveness when it comes in the form of white women athletes. Billie Jean King is rightly celebrated as a trailblazer for women’s sports and was praised for her ability to defeat Bobby Riggs in the renowned “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. She was aggressive and unrelenting, and in the eyes of American sports media, these were considered virtues. Contrast that with the treatment of Black women athletes who break barriers. Serena Williams spent much of her career battling perceptions that she was too muscular and aggressive to be fully embraced by mainstream narratives in the way that her white counterparts were, despite being one of the greatest tennis players in history. WNBA player Brittney Griner has also faced scrutiny for being too masculine and fighting perceptions that she’s a man.

While white women are celebrated for their strength and intensity, Black women’s success comes with an asterisk, a lingering question of whether they really deserve to be here. It is clear that strength is only acceptable in women when it doesn’t challenge the status quo. When Black women excel, bigotry fights back. In 2018, World Athletics introduced new testosterone regulations that were framed as necessary for maintaining a level playing field, but in fact, it overwhelmingly impacted Black women from the Global South, including Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui, all of whom were banned from competing in their events unless they underwent hormone-suppressing treatment to lower their testosterone levels for six months. These women were not taking performance-enhancing drugs nor were they trans. They were simply born with hormone levels that fell outside of an arbitrarily determined “acceptable” range for womanhood.

The idea that Black women and girl athletes are “too masculine” and the claim that trans women athletes are “not real women” come from the same place — a covert fear of women who do not fit neatly into the narrow, white and delicate box of femininity that our society loves to celebrate. Black girls are hypersexualized while simultaneously critiqued if they’re not feminine enough as athletes. There is a shrinking box of what it means to be feminine if you are a Black girl who plays sports, and policies that narrowly interpret those terms of femininity do not help.

The argument of "protecting women" has also been wielded as a weapon to justify racism and sexism in the United States for a long time. It was this very dogma that led to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, when the original “Karen,” Carolyn Bryant, falsely accused him of making advances toward her. The same argument of protecting women fueled countless lynchings and domestic-racial terrorism, all in the name of defending white womanhood from perceived threats. While white women were being placed on pedestals in need of defense, Black women were never afforded the same shield.

Sojourner Truth asked a very germane question in 1851 when she delivered her iconic speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” When Black women are torn down, ridiculed and denied opportunities because they do not fit a white mold of femininity, where is the outcry for protection? The truth is that “protecting women” has never been about protecting all women. It is and has always been a mask to uphold white supremacy while enforcing Eurocentric gender norms. Today, Black and trans women athletes alike are reminded yet again that the shield was never meant for them.

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Dr. Brigitte Burpo is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and currently serves as a clinical associate professor of sports management, bringing years of expertise in sports marketing, strategic leadership and racial equity into her teaching, research and writing. A former DEI administrator, she is passionate about fostering inclusion and equity in sports and higher education. Her work explores the intersections of race, gender and sports, with a commitment to community engagement, empowerment and cultural preservation.