Jennifer Doyle reads from her forthcoming book Sex Test. SexTest makes a counter-intuitive argument for the power of women’s sports. Where many working in the queerer spaces of sports studies argue for the elimination of sex segregation, Doyle argues for not just the value of women’s sports, but the supremacy of women’s sports as the category through which we experience what it means to unravel and destroy our ideas about women’s capacities, escape regimes of sex policing. 

This reading will be followed by a 8PM screening of Kurt Mayer’s Erik(A), a 2006 documentary film about Alpine athlete Erik Schinnegger. 

Erika Schinneger was identified as female at birth, and raised as a girl and a woman. A gifted athlete, Erik(A) was the 1966 world champion in women’s downhill skiing and a massive celebrity in her country when, in 1967, she was identified as having differences of sex development by a newly mandated genetic test. Schinegger was put in an impossible place: she was coerced into withdrawing from competition and encouraged to have a “minor procedure” which would feminize her, and offered the hollow promise that if she did so, she’d be able to return to the national team. Schinegger chose instead to undergo surgeries that would bring Schinegger’s body into alignment with what had been, until then, a nearly incomprehensible experience of his difference. He was (reluctantly) invited to train with the national men’s team, but was shunned and pushed out of the sport. Today, he runs a popular school for skiers. Schinegger published a memoir of his experiences in 1988. This film (presented in German with English subtitles) is a rare document, centered on a trans/intersex athlete — we hear from Schinegger, his family, Austrian ski officials, and the women with and against whom Schinegger competed. 

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