2011 Women's World Cup: perspective on Equatorial Guinea's "controversies"

When sports journalists describe Equatorial Guinea as an unknown quantity, I wonder if that's just their way of saying they haven't wanted to look too closely at the team and the country's football association.

Since they upset Nigeria in the 2008 African Women's Championship, they haven't been much of a mystery to followers of African women's football. Everyone who follows African soccer knows they are on the rise - if they are underdogs, it is not for lack of talent but experience.

Equatorial Guinea is a controversial team, though, there's no two ways about that. It has a large number of naturalized players (like the team's coach, who is Brazilian): The team has been accused of "buying" players (the country has the resources to do so) but team's manager has defended his selection. The Associated Press reports:   

Among Equatorial Guinea's half dozen players with Brazilian ancestry are standout goalkeeper Miriam and defender Carolina. Frigerio said buying players from other nations reflects the realities of a small country in a big world, and money is not a problem in a land rich in oil and gas. 

"The players all have roots in Equatorial Guinea," he said. "Either their parents or grandparents come from there."  (AP, "West Africans Making Headlines at the World Cup")

Jade Boho (in red) at the 2010 AWC

Jade Boho, the team's top striker was disqualified from competition for not having changed her FIFA affiliation when she should have (she was born and plays in Spain; she played for the Spanish U19 squad). So far, it looks like the FA mishandled the process.

That the team scouts in Spain or Brazil should be no more controversial than the fact that Mexico scouts in California's Central Valley.

[The story ought to be not why Jade Boho was playing for Equatorial Guinea, but why she isn't playing for Spain - she plays in the Spanish Super Liga, and played for Spain's U19 squad, who were European champions. Spain's senior squad is in such shambles that its best players steer clear of it. Now, that's a scandal, and the subject of a rant that should be up on Fox Soccer any day now.]

African teams have complained about Equatorial Guinea since at least the 2008 Africa Women’s Championship. They won the title in a terrific upset when they took the crown from the Super Falcons. According to a 2008 editorial in the Nigerian Observer, visiting teams complained about a lot of things.The tournament had been hosted by Equatorial Guinea, and in the wake of the big upset, Nigerian press accused the hosts of not only poor hospitality and organization, but outright cheating. Visiting teams complained about scandalously poor officiating (e.g. a referee allowed a player in one match to retake a penalty she had originally sent wide). Journalists complained about the absence of media centers and the refusal accredit journalists until the tournament was half over. Coaches complained about abusively noisy hotels and the lack of water given to teams during practice sessions. Of course, from what I can tell, tournaments can be full of this sort of shade - its why when teams show up to a World Cup and are treated well, they often express pleasant surprise.

The real problem, many argued, was the Confederation of African Football’s poor stewardship. To whom can one turn to resolve such complaints? CAF has a long history of ignoring complaints regarding corruption and mismanagement in the game, a situation as true of the women's game as it is of the men's. This hardly makes the regional governing body different from any other. 

High on the list of complaints made regarding Equatorial Guinea in 2008 was the accusation that the squad had fielded as many as three men.  The more sensitive journalists have translated these kinds of accusations into the only slightly less awful charge, in which the players are “accused” not of being men, but of being hermaphrodites. Three players on Equatorial Guinea squad were tagged with this accusation, and two have been removed from the roster prior to their World Cup games. (A third, who plays in Germany, defended herself against these absurd claims, with the full support of her club.) 

Equatorial Guinea is not the only country to field players who are accused of not being women. One African Female Player of the year (from another country) was accused of being a man, and Nigeria has lost a couple players over the years when they were disqualified for hermaphrodism, after their gender had been questioned. As Nigeria has been at the forefront of the complaints about Equatorian Guinea, plenty of fans of the latter team saw this turn regarding the disqualification of intersexed Nigerian players as karmic.

This is not only an African problem. Spanish and Indian track athletes have been (wrongly) stripped of medals, by officials who hardly know that they are doing. Can you imagine? And we all know more about Caster Semenya than we have any right to. Heck, I've heard women on my own teams wonder about opposing players, never seriously. But just casual whinging about the mannishness of a player makes me queasy.

Even given the fact of the intersexed athlete, this kind of charge floats around in women’s sports as a haunt, embodying the sports world's most intense conflicts regarding gender and it impacts all of us. For what does it mean to say a team is fielding men? It means the press gets an interesting headline, and it means that one body gets to be vehicle through the sports world conducts an exorcism, in the service of the maintenance of the fantasy that gender difference is absolute. 

It means that a team is fielding women who challenge received notions about femininity. It can be a player with broad shoulders, a flat chest and short hair. It can be a player with those attributes, who is also strong, fast, and plays aggressively. In the past, these accusations have led to horrifying groping sessions as referees sort them out in the locker room.

That the most public of these accusations fall again and again on African women athletes should be a red flag signaling the violence with which the body of the African athlete is policed. 

SO, note to journalists reporting on the team: the charge of being men hasn't only been leveled against Equatorial Guinea - it's been around in the women's game - indeed, women's sports - for years, and is used as a horrifying form of gender policing. It is casually used to 'out' women as lesbians, as not 'real women,' as 'unnatural' 'freaks' etc.

Because the effects of these accusations can be so devastating, people involved with the game have been asking FIFA to take the issue up, at least to prevent the reckless charges that teams have made against each other on this point.

At the end of May, FIFA instituted its first “Gender Verification Regulations.” This was surely done in advance of the 2011 World Cup with the hopes of warding off trouble regarding the complaints made against Equatorial Guinea. 

Basically, FIFA asserts that each national association is responsible for providing documentation regarding a player’s gender:

It lies with each participating member association to prior to the nomination of its national team ensure the correct gender of all players by actively investigating any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics and keeping complete documentation of the findings. Should a player’s gender be called into question, then, the FA has the responsibility of demonstrating that this player is, indeed, female. 

There are now strict procedures regulating who can call for a test (the individual concerned, an FA, or appointed FIFA medical officers), and there is also the possibility that “unfounded or irresponsible” accusations will bring on disciplinary action. Sanctions regarding gender-non-conforming players can only be imposed by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee – and, interestingly, the 2011 World Cup has its own specialist, hired to consult on these matters. A first.

On the surface, all of this looks enlightened – and it certainly is a step forward from what was in place before this – which was nothing, which produced intensely humiliating scenes as referees resorted to groping and looking into an accused player’s shorts.

But how will national associations "ensure the correct gender of all players"? What does "actively investigating any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics" mean? One might imagine a lot of the football associations in the world just going for feminine looking athletes, so they don't have to bother with this mess. Frankly, more than a few of them already do.

So today, the two players most frequently invoked in these complaints have been dropped from the roster. FIFA can pat itself on the back, no?

This is not a happy outcome: at minimum, we have two players exiled from the game and no explanation as to why, and no sense that we haven't just witnessed a very stark act of discrimination, in which mannish women are chased out the game so that we can maintain the illusion that the line between male and female is absolute.

How, I ask, is that any better than, any different from Nigeria's homophobic "witch hunt"?  

Why police the border between men's and women's sports? (repost w/ comments about Caster Semenya)

The topic of gender testing in sports has become a headline again. South African sprinter Caster Semenya became a news story when she went to Berlin and claimed the world championship in the 800, crossing the line at 1:55.45, two seconds faster than her nearest rival. She announced herself to the global press only a few weeks earlier at the African junior championships with what had been (until her race in Berlin) the fastest time in the world this year (1:56.72).

A number of athletes and commentators have cried "foul" and demanded that Semenya prove her sex for the IAAF. Rising above the phobic and cruel rhetoric of the press, her competitors and the track authorities, her family and supporters speak frankly of her boyish body and express anger at the way questions about Semenya's gender have been handled. In this interview posted on The Guardian's website, her father quite proudly defies the narrow minded to assert that his daughter looks "just like me" and "is a woman." She grew up playing football with the boys, being teased for being a "tomboy," etc. And, her family and friends chime in together, she is a woman. She is, quite clearly, a gender warrior. I've re-posted my previous article as a sign of support for her and other athletes like her.

The case of Caster Semenya raises the question of what it is we are looking for when we segregate men's and women's sports.

In 2004, Mexican National Women's Team superstriker Maríbel Dominguez was signed to a two-year contract with Celaya FC, a second division men's team. FIFA stepped in with an official prohibition and the assertion "There must be a clear separation between men's and women's football." The memo furthermore forbid her from playing in exhibition games with the men's squad. (See Jo Tuckman's 2005 Guardian story.)

My question today is why "must" the separation between men's and women's football be "clear"?

Dominguez played for years with boys - successfully disguising her gender and enjoying a level of play not available to girls of her generation. Nicknamed "Marigol," in 2004 she was a highly ranked international player who went on to play for the Atlanta Beat, FC Indiana, FC Barcelona, and the Girona team EU L'Estartit.

Nearly every feature story on Marta makes a big deal out of how she grew up playing with boys as if this were unusual. (See Michael Sokolove's 2009 NYT profile, for example). Of course it's fun to read about Marta's childhood years fighting macho attitudes on dusty pitches and in the street - but just once I would like to see it acknowledged that her experience is not extraordinary. It is in fact absolutely typical for female players - especially (but not only) those living in places where women's sports is not accepted. In the U.S., girls play with boys, by the way, and many also find themselves combating patriarchal attitudes about sports when they lace up their boots. Brazil hardly has a monopoly on machismo.

Playing with boys as you grow up is totally ordinary, in other words. Where girls don't have to sneak into boys games, they start off playing organized youth soccer together. There is much debate about at what age girls and boys should separate. As girls mature earlier it can be to their advantage to play with boys through much of adolescence - in Germany, they play together until they are 17 (I am not sure if this is true for the highest level of U-17 teams - I suspect the rule is that girls are only forced off boys teams at 17). Clearly this hasn't hindered the development of the men's or the women's game. Germany's NWT holds the World Cup, and are consistently ranked in the top three.

All of this is to say that Marta is unique not because she played with boys, but because she was one of the very best players on every boys team on which she played.

To return to FIFA's intervention against Celaya's inclusion of Dominguez on their roster: If a female player can handle herself in a men's professional league, why shouldn't she be allowed to play? What would be the harm?

I don't buy that FIFA is interested in protecting the development of the women's game in Mexico - not that I would endorse such an explanation (in which an organization dominated by old, white patriarchs is working to "protect" women against their own desires).

If Maribel Dominguez had played for Celaya FC, and held her own (never mind excelled) she would have profoundly unsettled notions about the difference between men and women.

The difference between men and women's football must be clear because the difference between men and women themselves must be absolute. Gender difference, however, is not absolute, and it doesn't take much research to find soccer stories which raise interesting questions about our investment in gender segregation in sport.

The South African National Team player Noko Matlou had her gender questioned by Ghana's National Team in 2007, who sent a match official into the dressing room to establish that she wasn't a man. Matlou was named Africa's female player of the year in February 2009.

The 2008 Africa Women's Cup was marred by a lot of things (bad referring, overt attempts to undermine press coverage of the games, last minute changes in scheduling of training sessions for visiting teams, etc). It was also packed with major upsets (see FIFA report here). Floating around the blogosphere has been a very interesting story: Two teams (Cameroon and Nigeria) filed complains with the Confederation of African Football accusing the eventual champions (and host team) Equatorial Guinea of fielding two men.

What little information I've found on this is not very helpful - limited by homophobia or ignorance. To this day, a lot of Nigerian players are insistent that they were MEN (one article reports that a Nigerian forward in essence felt a player up on the field). That doesn't necessarily explain the 1-0 loss, though. They'd played the same line-up previously and won and didn't file a complaint then. Their credibility is undermined by this fact.

While the Nigerian players say the two defenders were men, over time the language of the story as it has been reported in African newsletters has shifted to suggest the players are intersex - meaning, born with sexual characteristics that do not conform to traditional definitions of male/female gender.

Sadly, if the players are indeed intersex, they would be banned from the game for having for a physiology that challenges the notion that gender difference is immutable. And, as it happens, one of Nigeria's own players was recently "outed" as intersexed, and banned from the game. She was the second in the national squad's history to be so exiled - talk is that she may undergo surgery in order to become eligible to play women's football again. But should her body be medically altered so she can play football? Does women's football really need her to do so? Medical management of intersexuality is a frightening story of institutions deciding to force a body to conform to its ideas about sex/gender at great cost to the person on whose interests doctors pretend to be acting. Such surgeries are about managing the anxiety of parents and doctors - not about enhancing the life and happiness of the intersexed person.

In response to the scandal caused by the complaints about Equitorial Guinea, the Confederation of African Football will institute a "gender test" - naming a body that menstruates female. This test is notoriously unreliable, as is any other test grounded on a single factor (see "The Gender Trap"). The institution of this test in African Women's Football is a step in the wrong direction.

The policing of these borders creates problems for especially female athletes. The Journal of the American Medical Association explains:

Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticistist, endocrinologists and others in the medical community. One major problem [is] unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male psuedohermaphrodism)...A second problem is that only women, not men, [are] stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up [is] rarely available for female athletes "failing" the test, which often [is] performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up [is] crucial because the problem is not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism. (Simpson et al., "Gender Verification in the Olympics", JAMA vol.284, pp. 1568-1569, 2000 - cited in Wikipedia's Gender Verification in Sports)

These cases ask us to consider what it is that we actually want from the gender division in sports. What is it we are looking for in a women's game? Surely not a confirmation of the "femininity" of the people on the pitch. It must be something else - like how the women's game allows us to escape from narrow ideas about who and what women are. Why shouldn't women's football be exactly the game to welcome gender-bending warriors like the intersex athlete, and the transgender warrior? And why should the women's game be the only one to do so? Let's make the borders more porous. Better yet, let's imagine that it is possible to play across them - because the truth of the matter is, people do, every day, and it's not that big a deal.

Why police the border between women's and men's sports?

In 2004, Mexican National Women's Team superstriker Maríbel Dominguez was signed to a two-year contract with Celaya FC, a second division men's team. FIFA stepped in with an official prohibition and the assertion "There must be a clear separation between men's and women's football." The memo furthermore forbid her from playing in exhibition games with the men's squad. (See Jo Tuckman's 2005 Guardian story.)

My question today is why "must" the separation between men's and women's football be "clear"?

Dominguez played for years with boys - successfully disguising her gender and enjoying a level of play not available to girls of her generation. Nicknamed "Marigol," in 2004 she was a highly ranked international player who went on to play for the Atlanta Beat, FC Indiana, FC Barcelona, and the Girona team EU L'Estartit.

Nearly every feature story on Marta makes a big deal out of how she grew up playing with boys as if this were unusual. (See Michael Sokolove's 2009 NYT profile, for example). Of course it's fun to read about Marta's childhood years fighting macho attitudes on dusty pitches and in the street - but just once I would like to see it acknowledged that her experience is not extraordinary. It is in fact absolutely typical for female players - especially (but not only) those living in places where women's sports is not accepted. In the U.S., girls play with boys, by the way, and many also find themselves combating patriarchal attitudes about sports when they lace up their boots. Brazil hardly has a monopoly on machismo.

Playing with boys as you grow up is totally ordinary, in other words. Where girls don't have to sneak into boys games, they start off playing organized youth soccer together. There is much debate about at what age girls and boys should separate. As girls mature earlier it can be to their advantage to play with boys through much of adolescence - in Germany, they play together until they are 17 (I am not sure if this is true for the highest level of U-17 teams - I suspect the rule is that girls are only forced off boys teams at 17). Clearly this hasn't hindered the development of the men's or the women's game. Germany's NWT holds the World Cup, and are consistently ranked in the top three.

All of this is to say that Marta is unique not because she played with boys, but because she was one of the very best players on every boys team on which she played.

To return to FIFA's intervention against Celaya's inclusion of Dominguez on their roster: If a female player can handle herself in a men's professional league, why shouldn't she be allowed to play? What would be the harm?

I don't buy that FIFA is interested in protecting the development of the women's game in Mexico - not that I would endorse such an explanation (in which an organization dominated by old, white patriarchs is working to "protect" women against their own desires).

If Maribel Dominguez had played for Celaya FC, and held her own (never mind excelled) she would have profoundly unsettled notions about the difference between men and women.

The difference between men and women's football must be clear because the difference between men and women themselves must be absolute. Gender difference, however, is not absolute, and it doesn't take much research to find soccer stories which raise interesting questions about our investment in gender segregation in sport.

The 2008 Africa Women's Cup was marred by a lot of things (bad referring, overt attempts to undermine press coverage of the games, last minute changes in scheduling of training sessions for visiting teams, etc). It was also packed with major upsets (see FIFA report here). Floating around the blogosphere has been a very interesting story: Two teams (Cameroon and Nigeria) filed complains with the Confederation of African Football accusing the eventual champions (and host team) Equatorial Guinea of fielding two men.

What little information I've found on this is not very helpful - limited by homophobia or ignorance. To this day, a lot of Nigerian players are insistent that they were MEN (one article reports that a Nigerian forward in essence felt a player up on the field). That doesn't necessarily explain the 1-0 loss, though. They'd played the same line-up previously and won and didn't file a complaint then. Their credibility is undermined by this fact.

While the Nigerian players say the two defenders were men, over time the language of the story as it has been reported in African newsletters has shifted to suggest the players are intersex - meaning, born with sexual characteristics that do not conform to traditional definitions of male/female gender.

Sadly, if the players are indeed intersex, they would be banned from the game for having for a physiology that challenges the notion that gender difference is immutable. And, as it happens, one of Nigeria's own players was recently "outed" as intersexed, and banned from the game. She was the second in the national squad's history to be so exiled - talk is that she may undergo surgery in order to become eligible to play women's football again. But should her body be medically altered so she can play football? Does women's football really need her to do so? Medical management of intersexuality is a frightening story of institutions deciding to force a body to conform to its ideas about sex/gender at great cost to the person on whose interests doctors pretend to be acting. Such surgeries are about managing the anxiety of parents and doctors - not about enhancing the life and happiness of the intersexed person.

In response to the scandal caused by the complaints about Equitorial Guinea, the Confederation of African Football will institute a "gender test" - naming a body that menstruates female. This test is notoriously unreliable, as is any other test grounded on a single factor (see "The Gender Trap"). The institution of this test in African Women's Football is a step in the wrong direction.

The policing of these borders creates problems for especially female athletes. The Journal of the American Medical Association explains:

Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticistist, endocrinologists and others in the medical community. One major problem [is] unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male psuedohermaphrodism)...A second problem is that only women, not men, [are] stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up [is] rarely available for female athletes "failing" the test, which often [is] performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up [is] crucial because the problem is not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism. (Simpson et al., "Gender Verification in the Olympics", JAMA vol.284, pp. 1568-1569, 2000 - cited in Wikipedia's Gender Verification in Sports)

These cases ask us to consider what it is that we actually want from the gender division in sports. What is it we are looking for in a women's game? Surely not a confirmation of the "femininity" of the people on the pitch. It must be something else - like how the women's game allows us to escape from narrow ideas about who and what women are. Why shouldn't women's football be exactly the game to welcome gender-bending warriors like the intersex athlete, and the transgender warrior? And why should the women's game be the only one to do so? Let's make the borders more porous. Better yet, let's imagine that it is possible to play across them - because the truth of the matter is, people do, every day, and it's not that big a deal.