It's Past Time For Women To Start Loving Sports

"No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid."

Ever since President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law on June 23, 1972 it has had a far reaching effect on the numbers of women earning postgraduate degrees.

Before Title IX, many schools refused to admit women or enforced strict quotas in postgraduate programs. That was reflected in the fact that in 1972, the year Title IX became law, women only received 9% of the medical degrees awarded, 7% of law degrees and 25% of the US citizens receiving doctorates being women.

By 1994, those numbers increased to 38% of medical degrees, 43% of law degrees and 44% of all doctoral degrees awarded to US citizens were women.

One of the prominent effects of Title IX besides the increase in the percentages of women receiving postgraduate degrees is in the world of sports.

Athletics has also created the most controversy regarding Title IX, but its gains have also been noteworthy.

It's not unusual on any given day to turn on the television and see women's intercollegiate sports on TV. There's infinitely more attention focused on women athletes during the Olympics and on high school level girls sports compared to when I was growing up in the late 70's.

But one thing that bothers me as a sports loving person is the dismissive attitude some women have toward all things athletic. It gets to the point when in some cases, women who love or participate in sports are greeted with less than complimentary verbal epithets or have their femininity questioned.

Last year Seventeen magazine in conjunction with the WNBA partnered for a comprehensive survey that was published in the magazine's September 2008 issue.

WNBA President Donna Orender stated, "We are pleased to partner with Seventeen magazine on this important survey as we know first hand how the role of sports can develop young girls into leaders.

"The women of the WNBA are strong, passionate and determined individuals who exhibit these traits both on and off the court. As a result, we are true believers in the significance of participation in sports for all girls and women."

The Seventeen/WNBA survey revealed that 83% of teen girls play sports with basketball ranked as the number one participatory sport.

Girls play sports for a variety of reasons, but the top reason found in this survey is to exercise (68.4%). Other top reasons included forming friendships, competing and representing their schools.

Challenges that young female sports enthusiasts endure include insecurities; 33% of girls who don't play sports say it's because they're worried that they wouldn't be good at it.

In addition, 35% of girls also say their teams don't get as much equipment or field time as the boys' teams and 35% of girls have heard their peers make homophobic remarks about female athletes.

The Seventeen/WNBA survey also revealed that 66% of teen girls believe that cheerleading is a sport, not some sideline event, and 71% think female cheerleaders should cheer at girls' sports events.

Despite these factors keeping some girls from playing sports, teens today are able to look to inspiring women professional athletes and Olympians such as Lisa Leslie, Mia Hamm, Diana Taurasi, Serena and Venus Williams, Candace Parker and Florence Griffith-Joyner.

As young teens hone their athletic skills, they look upon these women as they endeavor to take women's sports to a whole new level and dismiss outdated stereotypes about the women who play them.

You also have young women such as Brittney Griner who are following in their role models footsteps and preparing to exceed even their lofty performance standards.

But despite the overwhelming evidence of the benefits of sports participation for girls and women, you still have mind-numbing fluff coming from women's magazines such as Cosmo that spout erroneous, outdated stereotypes.

In addition, women athletes in addition to having to battle feminine gender policing also have to contend with the sexist attitudes of male sports fans.

Led by the male dominated sports journalism world, the dismissive attitudes of sports talk radio and sports journalists about the level of play filter down to the potential male fan base and male athletes.

We should insist upon and demand consistent, professional coverage of women's sports from the male dominated sorts journalism culture.

Why am I so adamant about it? Sports teaches important life lessons that non athletes often miss out on. You learn that even if you practice hard and execute your game plan flawlessly, sometimes you come up short. You learn how to work well with others as part of a team. You learn how to lose with grace and win with class.

It's a pride builder when you come from a zero skills base to a higher skills level in your chosen sport and you see it translated into better performance on the field.

It's also a major self esteem boost when you kick the winning goal, get the key hit that wins the game for your team or you dig deep, pull yourself out of a love-40 hole in a critical game in a tennis match and come back to win, or run your personal best time to win a medal.

These are lessons that the male population has had ample opportunities to absorb (and some peeps need to reabsorb) and enjoyed through sports competition. The Women's Sports Foundation seconds my thoughts on the matter as well.

We should not only enthusiastically support the young girls and women in our lives who participate in sports, we should also take it upon ourselves to support women's club, high school, intercollegiate and professional sports as well.

I was a proud Houston Comets season ticket holder back home for several years during their championship run and it was the best money I've ever spent.

I saw the money I spent on my season tickets it as my investment toward keeping the WNBA viable and alive for future generations of sports loving girls. Those young girls who marveled at the play of WNBA pioneers such as Cynthia Cooper are now grown up and getting their opportunity to play in the league.

Even though I'm still pissed about the WNBA leadership not doing enough to give a local group enough time to organize and keep my hometown franchise alive, I still support the league.

Far from being something that women should ignore, sports and participation in them by their daughters should be embraced and encouraged.

The Story of Carlett Brown

One of the cool benefits of the recent Johnson Publishing Company deal with Google that allows digitizing of the iconic African-American magazines JET and EBONY is that it not only provides a record of Black history as it happened, it also is a cultural time capsule as well.

One of the things I've always pondered is African American transgender people and our history. I know I and other African-American transpeeps didn't just pop up out of thin air. We have a long fascinating history that just begs to be told.

One of those fascinating stories starts unfolding across several JET issues during 1953. Coincidentally it starts around the time Christine Jorgensen had become a household name after the December 1, 1952 news story broke about her surgery and just before her February 12, 1953 return to the United States from Denmark.

It centers on a 26 year old professional female illusionist and shake dancer from Pittsburgh whose birth name was Charles Robert Brown but later changed it to Carlett Angianlee Brown.

Carlett was in a relationship with a 24 year old US Army sergeant stationed in Germany named Eugene Martin. She'd served in the Navy, and during her service time was checked out for an issue with recurring monthly bleeding through her rectal area.

The medical exam revealed that she was intersex and had some feminine plumbing. The surgeons wanted to remove it, but she declined to have that done and opted for SRS instead.

In the process of weighing her SRS options with three surgeons in various countries, she discovered that the laws of those countries at the time didn't allow foreign nationals to obtain SRS.

Dr. Christian Hamburger, the endocrinologist who supervised Christine Jorgensen's transition, advised Carlett that if she gave up her US citizenship she could have it done in Denmark. Germany's then justice minister advised Brown that if became a German resident and took the steps to become a German citizen, she could have it performed there as well.

So Carlett decided to do just that. She applied for her US passport and made arrangements to travel to Bonn, Germany in August 1953 and meet Dr. Hamburger there for her initial checkup before having SRS.

Carlett's game plan once she completed SRS was to get married to Sgt. Eugene Martin

"I just want to become a woman as quickly as possible, that's all. I'll become a citizen of any country that will allow me the treatment that I need and be operated on," she said at the time.

Fast forward to June 25 issue. Carlett has now traveled to Boston and signed papers at the Danish consulate renouncing her US citizenship. She's doing some bookings in the area to help pay for her looming August 2 overseas trip and even hit Filene's to shop for her wedding dress.

She now has her US passport with her new name of Carlett Angianlee on it and all systems are go to become the 'First Negro Sex Change'.

Then fate intervened. Crossdressing back in the 50's could earn you a trip to jail, and the Boston po-po's promptly arrested and jailed her overnight for doing so as the July 9 issue reported. Carlett was still undeterred and was still planning to leave for Denmark and her date with history.

She then postponed her departure in order to get a feminizing face lift in New York with Dr. George J.B. Weiss, as the August 6 issue reported. It even mentioned that Carlett's face lift was going to cost $500 dollars.


Then she was hit with the news that she was ordered not to leave the United States until $1200 in back taxes were paid. The October 15th issue reported that she ended up taking a $60 a week cook's job at Iowa State's Pi Kappa frat house that a friend helped her get in order to earn the money to pay off those back taxes.

At that point the trail through those back issues of JET in terms of Carlett's fascinating story starts turning cold. As of yet I haven't found out if she ever did earn the money to pay off the back taxes, make that trip to Europe, have SRS, get married or even how the rest of her life turned out. If Carlett is still alive she'd be well into her 70's.

But thanks to JET, mine and future generations will get to read it.

Don't Want EBONY Or JET To Die

Tami had a post in March that discussed her take on whether we should do more as a community to keep our iconic magazines alive.

While some folks are hollering 'let them die', I have a problem with that knee jerk shortsighted view of the situation, even though I have mixed emotions about it.

As a historian, I don't like the idea of losing EBONY and JET, much less contemplating a world without its needed voice. As many of you did, I perused the older issues of EBONY and JET at my grandparents house growing up and I spent hours perusing those issues and reading the history that unfolded before my eyes. I also chuckled at some of the back in the day ads that served as a time capsule for the period.

It seems that everybody had a subscription to those two magazines when I was growing up, and whether you were at your cousin's house in Mississippi, your uncle's place in Los Angeles, EBONY or JET would be sitting in a prominent place in their living rooms. One of the first things I did after moving out of my parents house was get my own EBONY subscription.

Thanks to the late visionary John H. Johnson, these magazines since 1945 have been covering our stories, our people and our history when white owned magazines would barely touch our communities, much less tell our stories in a balanced way.

Without EBONY and JET, much of the Civil Rights history probably wouldn't have seen the light of day. Many of Dr. King's essays were published in the pages of EBONY. Our iconic stars on stage, screen, television and the sporting worlds wouldn't have gotten the coverage they deserved.

Our history would have less documentation, especially in the 70's when it seemed that every time you turned around there was another African-American breaking new ground or we had another 'First Black' making history.

And tell the truth, many of you already have copies of the issues of EBONY and JET relating to the historic 2008 election of President Obama, the inauguration and the historic Obama administration.

One of the reasons that African descended supermodels grace the catwalks now is because of Eunice Johnson and the Ebony Fashion Fair. Not only did it clue designers in on the fact that Black women had dollars to spend on high fashion clothes, the traveling fashion show has raised tens of thousands of dollars over the years for various charitable organizations in the African-American community.

Fashion Fair Cosmetics and its success clued white owned makeup companies into the fact there was a large customer base they weren't meeting the needs of.

But on the other hand both those magazines have been behind the curve for a while in terms of developments inside the AA GLBT/SGL community, something I've long complained about on TransGriot.

It's sad for example, when Isis got more love in white owned magazines than she did in our iconic Black ones (and ESSENCE falls in that category as well).

I'm for giving Linda Johnson Rice the help she needs because the Johnson family deserves that much from us. I'm seriously thinking about renewing my subscription especially since I'm buying them off the racks so much these days I may as well save myself some cash and get it delivered to the crib.

But my support comes with a condition and an ultimatum. I want EBONY and JET to do a better job of covering the entire African-American community. News of our community just doesn't begin and end in middle class African-American communities. There needs to be a serious effort toward inclusive coverage of the entire spectrum of the AA community.

Because as someone who grew up around Black radio and knows the power of Black owned media, it's easier to tell your story when you own the printing press, the television show and the radio station as opposed to depending upon someone else with built in biases to honestly tell the story of your people for you.

Happy 25th Anniversary SBH!

This month marks the 25th anniversary of what has become an iconic publication for Black women in the US, Sophisticate's Black Hair.

It has also been an invaluable part of my transition as well.

Sophisticate's Black Hair or SBH as we fondly call it has had my undivided attention ever since I spotted the debut issue of it on my local Walgreen's magazine rack back home in May 1984. That debut issue had a smiling Jayne Kennedy Overton on the cover and quickly become the go to magazine when you were looking for anything Black hair related.

SBH was the brainchild of publisher James B. Spurlock. It was his dream to meld positive imagery, great journalism and a powerful 'Black Is Beautiful' message inside the pages of a magazine. While EBONY, JET and ESSENCE did the Black community's heavy lifting in that regard, there was a need for an SBH as well to sing and celebrate the praises of Black hair.

And 'sang' they did. As I flip through some of my old copies it was not only a cultural mirror of the times, it also serves as a style time capsule as well.

There have been a wide range of people that have graced the covers of SBH from Oscar winner Halle Berry to Tyra Banks to current fave Rihanna. There have been SBH interviews done with various Black women about their hair styling secrets that range from our various sistah Miss USA's to various actresses to the First Lady of the United States.

SBH also covers the wide range of hairstyles from bone straight to natural to locs, how to replicate them and take care of it at home in between the salon visits. It even offers advice and tips on the business side of it and advice from beauty experts.

When I was looking for a shorter hairstyle I perused multiple issues of it until I discovered one that fit me perfectly.

I also loved its ongoing mission of focusing on the beauty of Black women, and they even focus on Da Fellas from time to time. They will interview well known African-American men who will wax poetic sometimes on why they love sistahs or other issues.

And in every anniversary issue they name the 10 Best Styled Women of the Year as chosen in a poll of SBH readers.

I know you're curious, so here are SBH's 2009 Best Styled Women:

Rihanna, Mary J. Blige, Keyshia Cole, Beyonce, Tyra Banks, Queen Latifah, Halle Berry, Ciara (take that haters), Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson.

So congrats SBH for 25 wonderful years of singing the praises of the beauty of Black women and our hair, and may the next 25 years be just as spectacular.