Diaz’s Victory Destroys the ‘Biological’ Argument Against Women in Sports
“The battle of the sexes” was a tennis event that championed women in sports and their rights in the 70’s. The forefront of the game was Billie-Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Riggs had discriminated against women, calling them inferior, and said they can’t handle the pressure of the game. However, when Billie and Bobby played against each other on September 20, 1973, Billie won, and this was a victory to combat centuries of oppression against women. While yesterday, Hidilyn Diaz, a Filipina weighlifter, won the first gold of her country, and this is not only the win of the archipelago, but also the win of the Philippine feminist movement, and women in general. I call this, “The Battle (Won) Against Filipino Machismo.”
The biological identity of the sexes is constantly used as an argument barricading women in different fields. This created social, cultural, and political stratification of the sexes. In societies, people are accepting the narrative that women are much more emotional than men (biological justification). In cultures, women are caged in homes while their partners hunt in the woods, or a minimal to great differentiation of muscular system and strength of guys and girls. In politics, a great example would be one of Duterte’s statements invalidating women’s right to have a position in governance. These structural barriers exacerbate the situation of women, stuck in a bottle full of misogyny.
The effect then is discouragement. Girls would most likely be in an atmosphere that dictates them to be “just” a woman: soft, skinny, white, which limits their abilities to flesh out talents. Further, this will allow male dominance, with no seats reserved for females, as we let them just be in the benches watching patriarchy.
Here is an analogy to whoever still does not get my point. When a child was born lacking chromosomes, which caused them to have certain disabilities, such as armlessness, but then, as the kid grew up, they finally realized that they wanted to become an artist. Reliving this analogy in real life, there are actually people using their feet to draw and paint.
The concrete intention of the analogy is even if the odds are against in your favor, people have no right to oversimplified situations (i.e. no arms = can’t be an artist) just because there are initial biological differences or just on the basis of sex. So, even if Hidilyn has natural differences within her body to male athletes doesn’t mean she can’t lift a weight — or at best, doesn’t mean she can’t win.
This is an issue of gender equality, even though others said it is regardless of the sex — it is not. I saw a comment about that, which proves the existence of the mentioned counter-argument. Because women — females — girls — are consistently being bastardized by society on the sole basis of their biological identity. So this is a titanic victory for all of the women out there, who would possibly be encouraged to join in sports, and not just chained from the arts and humanities.
Yes, it is a man’s world. But with the might of Hidilyn — she carried not kilograms — but, rather, the future of women in sports. She slammed biology by surpassing the limits of her body.