WHEN I WAS little, around nine or ten, I inexplicably became concerned I had breasts. My chest was not flat, I insisted to my mother. It was curving. I was already a woman! I did not want to be a woman. I wanted, politely, if it did not hurt anybody else, to remain a child. My mother peered solemnly at my naked body as I demonstrated the curves to her. Your chest will grow with puberty, she agreed as I held my breath, but there are no breasts there yet. Those curves, it was concluded, were just pectoral muscles.

I was born a sturdy baby who grew into a sturdy child. My younger sister and brother, as twins, had received half the sustenance in the womb, the running joke went, whereas I, floating in there on my own, conscientiously digested every molecule of nutrient available. All three of us played an immense amount of sport as children, but it expressed differently in our bodies. My siblings were both narrow and delicate. I was thick, framed by broad shoulders, strong legs. The twins were relatively tall for their age. I was taller. They had small appetites. I was hungry. They depended on dirty tactics when we wrestled – pinching, scratching, collaboration. I operated with integrity, pinning them down simultaneously, one neck in each hand.

For a long time, I was my body and my body was a container. The container, without pretence, held the total sum of me: every desire and movement and memory. It was used to eat, to learn, to cry and try; to love, to experience joy, to play basketball. It was not aware of itself. I was whole. When the slow fragmentation occurred – when I was still a container but suddenly the container could be seen, and I could see the container being seen – I did a decent job of ignoring it all. I was defiant throughout puberty. I would, though saturated in my allocated shame of girl-ness, still love myself.

My mother unfortunately proved correct: my chest did grow. I developed breasts. They seemed enormous – three whole letters down the alphabet, almost four. I adjusted to them slowly. And then, somewhere along the way, I lost them. 

When I was nineteen, the year I was offered a position in a professional basketball team, the first person I loved and who knew me intimately – an athlete herself – remarked on the size of my breasts. She said, ‘They almost completely disappear when you lie on your back.’ I had not noticed this about myself. It had been years but I was still reeling from their arrival. I absorbed the information as one might take on critique about their office desk: intrigued, vaguely stung, a little mutinous. I could not exactly control if my mass of tissue and duct and fat decided to be fickle.

The following year, at twenty, a teammate of the boy I was seeing wanted my attention. We were at his house, drinking, and from across the room, he called: ‘Get over here with your [first letter of the alphabet]-cup tits.’ I delivered a respectable performance of righteous outrage as I lectured him on objectifying women, but internally the instinctive mutiny had weakened. I was embarrassed. On a similar night out not long after, another of his teammates commented on the muscularity of my upper body. He held one of his biceps up to mine and whistled. ‘You’re huge,’ he said. ‘Look at these arms. Your shoulders. You’re bigger than me.’

‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Is that a compliment?’ 

He wrapped an arm around me soothingly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We still think you’re hot.’

Last season, almost six years later, two of my male staff members remarked as we walked out of our awards night, ‘I don’t know if we’re allowed to say this, but you are jacked. Your back’ – they shook their heads – ‘is jacked. I actually said to him, “Look how fucking strong her back is.” We didn’t want to say it to you though. We didn’t know if you’d be offended.’

‘Did you mean it as a good thing?’

They said yeah.

I said, ‘Then I’m not offended.’

Both men were so earnest. They were genuinely impressed. My friend who commented on my arms was trying to stir me, but he was not being malicious; he was impressed too. It was a compliment. I did not need to be offended. And I was not. But I still felt tender. Because any commentary around women’s bodies does not exist without layered context. Instead, a small, stretching history of implicit shame whispers within the four examples: female athletes don’t have breasts lol they have muscles. They are not real women. They are basically men.

THERE IS A correlation between the derision directed at cisgender women athletes and the oppression of transgender women, athlete or not. It is called rigid expectations of gender: you must act a certain way to be a real woman, you must look a certain way. It intersects with racism. Brown and Bla(c)k women who do not conform to (Western) ideals of femininity are not real women either. Regularly, there is homophobia in there too, or ableism, or ageism, or unique combinations. These prejudices all use shame. They try to breed it.

I played elite sport throughout my childhood. At twenty-six, I have spent eight years in professional sporting environments across two codes. Sport has consequently existed alongside me through various physical and emotional puberties. It has given me a lot of things: diverse skills, support structures, a wider understanding of myself. It still did not rid me of the self-consciousness attached to existing as a girl, then a woman. It perhaps worsened it.

There is a disparity between women – and non-binary – athletes, and men athletes. It is not just financial. Sportsmen are praised for becoming a physical expression of their activity. Their bodies, with hours of intent and focus, change and tighten and develop and expand and grow. Boys and men do not escape the strain of idealised body image but, ultimately, when they reflect their own labour, it is an achievement. When women work hard with similar results, it is widely accepted as a curse. We are taught to fear the changes our bodies make to adapt. We are taught to fear visible improvement. We are taught, passively and explicitly, to be ashamed. It is bad to look strong and muscular: our figures should not have a noticeable presence; they should not occupy too much space. The worst possible thing a woman can be is big.  

I have, in a lot of ways, surrendered my body to sport. I have sacrificed most of my autonomy over it for my performance, for my career, for my team. I lift what I am told. I increase the weight when I am told. I run as far and as fast. I then recover the required amount. I sleep the required amount. I eat the required amount, as regularly as necessary for my height and weight and caloric expenditure. This means I have inadvertently relinquished any modicum of control over my appearance. I have prioritised efficiency and my body reflects that: I am strong; I have muscle. I am not small. Sometimes, I find myself wondering whether my body’s capacity for growth is infinite. The thought, even though I continue to exercise and appropriately fuel, scares me. It equally irritates me. I should be proud. My body can run ten kilometres and bench press over fifty kilograms and squat more than a hundred. It tears, constantly, into its own fibres then rebuilds. It twists and struggles and falls and gets up. It competes. As it does all this, it meticulously prepares itself to create and house a baby, uses further resources to then destroy these preparations, only to begin the process again and again. I should therefore be defiant, mutinous, to any insecure thought, but it seems a leak in resources either way: I spend energy worrying that my body will continue to adjust to its load until I am no longer perceived as feminine…or I spend energy reminding myself femininity is an invention. It fluctuates across cultures, over generations. It is manufactured, like gender generally, and impressionable. It consequently should be a tool for expression rather than a prison. It should fit us. I can return to these understandings, but it still takes conscious effort to try to divorce my value from my appearance when the idea that it is my most valuable currency is reinforced daily.

In a rigged system, I still benefit; there are numerous biases I avoid. I do not get masculinised due to my skin colour. I do not have my identity questioned because of my clothes or the length of my hair. I do not compete in sport or move through the world with a disability, so I am not subjected to ableism – and as a result my body is never disparaged for not ‘working’. I carry fat on my body, like muscle or hair or skin, but fatphobia is not a form of discrimination I experience. I also get told I look like an athlete. I get told I look athletic. It is intended as a compliment, but I would challenge what it means. ‘Athleticism’ is defined as the physical qualities that are characteristic of an ‘athlete’ – a person who is proficient in sports. There are a lot of different sports; each prioritise specific skills and attributes that subsequently present across a range of body types. There are also certain jobs within a code, inside a team, that rely on strengths unique to various frames – speed, power, fitness, agility, resilience. What, then, does athleticism look like? What does an athlete look like? It seems these two concepts, which are brilliantly broad and diverse, are persistently reduced to a single aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that is not practical, or even possible, for everyone. Its constraints seem especially peculiar and arbitrary for women: female bodies that exercise are now allowed to be deemed attractive, as long as they have visible definition in the arms and across a section of the stomach (but not too much muscle) with absolutely no fat anywhere (except specific parts of the chest and backside).

It was a nascent awareness of these pressures that made me reluctant to develop breasts as a child. Because I was not consoled when told that instead I sported pectoral muscles; I was uneasy. I still felt a tiny twist of shame. I could sense myself being forced over the precipice: I would soon fall into a territory where I would be changed. It would not just be a personal alteration, like menstruation or pubic hair – it would be one that was somehow equally public but intangible. Soon, having or ‘not having’ breasts, for somebody who presented and identified as I did, would have repercussions. It would be used as a factor to ascertain my worth. It would be used to prove or disprove my legitimacy. My body, suddenly subjected to an array of new rules, would no longer be purely mine; it would instead evolve into a shared commodity, one that could be viewed and debated and, routinely, evaluated. I didn’t want breasts. I didn’t not want breasts. I wanted only to be.

There is a conversation continuing to gain momentum around active women and, maybe more than ever before, there is a push for girls of all ages to participate and remain in sport. It is an important time to interrogate the enduring politics of beauty, levelled disproportionately at one gender, even within the supposed freedom of sporting arenas. Our resources, no matter our chromosomes, should be directed solely to improving our craft and enjoying those improvements, not trying to shackle the expansive, invaluable, joyful containers that are our bodies. The containers do not exist to be observed. They exist to experience. Let them work.

Image by Kerelin Molina, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons