Dr. Nicole LaVoi, teaching faculty in the School of Kinesiology and associate director of the Tucker Center, comments on the controversies surrounding Brittney Griner in the article, “What Brittney Griner says about us.”
“We disparage female athletes so we don’t have to make room for them,” notes LaVoi. “People can’t just say, ‘Wow, Brittney Griner is a great athlete.’ We need to have a caveat: ‘She plays like a guy, she looks like a guy, she must be a guy.’ These qualifiers marginalize what Brittney has done and serve to keep the current pecking order in place, whereby men’s sports are more valued, more culturally relevant — the norm.”
Griner, center for Baylor University’s women’s basketball team, has won numerous awards throughout her basketball career and continues to break collegiate records. For more on Griner and her statistics read here.