Wednesday, November 23, 2005 I'll nail it to Skateland's door, I guess
Yahoo won't work on my household internet connection, and 90% of the announcements and business that my roller derby league are on a Yahoo group. It makes life hard. I miss the drama, I miss the important announcements, and on the rare days when I'm able to get on for a while, either it's a couple days past the beginning of a big deal thread and I can't find the original post, or I try to post something and I fail.
So: recent controversy among rollergirls in my town about male refs. Started as someone saying she though the all-male ref crew and the all-female derby league was a little iffy. Some people said good things. Some people said things I disagree with. A BUNCH of people used "having a vagina" or "what's between their legs" as synonyms for "female" or "what gender they are." People were like, "But the all-female derby atmosphere reminds me of Michfest <3 <3 <3". I'm like "cringe, cringe, groan."
I want to address this, too, but I don't want to distract people from my point that several of our established refs (like Tracy) worked so hard to become refs, and we shouldn't just up and exclude them from a roll we already said they could have.
Here is what Yahoo wouldn't let me post:
Hey, ladies. Got to this thread late in the game. I'd stay out of it, except it's so close to my heart.
People have made really good points. I think it's important that every woman on in the league feels safe and respected, and if a ref or anyone else says or does anything out of line, we call that person on it.
The thing that gets me is that, like many people have said, a lot of the male refs have been working their asses off and support the league 100%. Tracy, for example, has come to every open skate I've come to, since July, and that's most of them. He promotes us every chance he gets. (That was his article on Metromix, for example.) I don't want to alienate some of our staunchest supporters.
Skill and knowledge assessments make sense, particularly knowledge. If there are any females that want to be refs, that's awesome, too. I would be upset, though, if the refs we already had got pushed to the back of the line by new ref recruits, strictly because the new recruits were female. We're going to need a lot of people to make the bouts a good time, including refs, announcers, water carriers, and scorecard holders, mascots, etc. We should keep that in mind, too, when we recruit people. There's still a lot of room in derby.
When we do bouts, the roller girls are going to fucking dominate people's attention. Male personnel at other leagues' bouts really don't seem to dampen the atmosphere of sisterhood and ass-kicking. I think we're going to be fine if we have a few male refs. posted by Frenz | 11/23/2005 08:38:00 PM
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