I Wanna Play Too

Offside

Hollie McNish & Sabrina Mahfouz

Firstly, this is a play. It is short and reads more like a long poem in several voices.

From 1921 to 1971, the British Football Association banned women from playing soccer on the grounds that they were too fragile. Too weak to play soccer, strong enough to give birth to a baby every year; too fragile to run after a ball, strong enough to work in munitions factories in wartime; too frail to get muddy on a pitch, strong enough to launder endless dirty clothes by hand. The mind reels at the double standard used to justify this decision.

The authors, who are British poets and playwrights, use their unique talents to highlight the hypocrisy of impeding women from participating in sport on the grounds that they lack strength and stamina. The spurious argument offered by officials in the not so distant past is still used around the world to keep women and girls out of certain arenas.

It is time to stop according so much importance to gender. Why do we need to know if you are male or female? Clearly, it is because we treat men and women very differently. If we know your sex, we know how to behave. Do we respect you? Do we dismiss you? We need to know your gender in order to decide.

What if we invented a neutral pronoun? What if it did not matter whether you have ovaries or testes? How do we get to a point where we measure the value of another person based on character and contribution, not on reproductive role?

I can envision a world where sexual identity is irrelevant. Can you?

In my world, everyone plays ball.