Episode 171: Challenges to the Gender Binaries at the Heart of Sport
This week, Brenda, Shireen, Lindsay, and Jessica talk about recent challenges to the gender binaries at the heart of sport and suggest some ideas for how to move beyond transphobic sporting cultures.
And, as always, the Burn Pile [23:32], Torchbearers starring Naomi Osaka [33:53], and what is good in our worlds [39:29].
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.
Links
Football's first fa’afafine: trans rights trailblazer Jaiyah Saelua on stardom and sisterhood: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/01/footballs-first-faafafine-trans-rights-trailblazer-jaiyah-saelua-on-stardom-and-sisterhood/
Hockey Pride: Harrison Browne and Jessica Platt on being transgender athletes: https://www.sportsnet.ca/more/hockey-pride-harrison-browne-jessica-platt-transgender-athletes
“Being Black and Non-Binary Is My Superpower”: Layshia Clarendon on Race, Gender, Social Justice and the WNBA: https://sportsarefromvenus.com/2020/08/18/being-black-and-non-binary-is-my-superpower-layshia-clarendon-on-race-gender-social-justice-and-the-wnba
Transcript
Brenda: Hey flamethrowers, it’s Brenda here, and I get to drive the bus this week, joined by Jessica, Lindsay and Shireen onboard. So, welcome once again to Burn It All Down. On this week’s show we’re gonna be talking about recent changes to the gender binaries that are at the heart of sport, and how to move beyond the transphobic sporting cultures.
Lindsay: I mean, WNBA doesn’t have trans policies. There’s so many leagues right now with zero trans policies.
Brenda: Of course we’ll also burn what’s been terrible this week in sports and highlight people putting in the work to change it all.
Shireen: And I believe is the first South Asian – whaaaaat! – coach in the NBA. Balle balle!
Brenda: A reminder that we’re now coming to you twice a week because interviews will be standalone and drop on Thursdays. Our amazing guests just simply need more space. In keeping with this week’s theme I’ll be interviewing Dr. Katrina Karkazis, a bioethicist; and Michele Krech, a lawyer and professor at NYU, who are experts on the Caster Semenya ruling and advocates for inclusion in sport. Before all that, I wanna ask you and get you talking a little bit about in this time if there’s something that you are doing that you tried to make into a sport that actually isn’t? I want you to keep it to one sentence. I won’t be as harsh as one word because that’s kind of impossible. But give me one sentence about something you tried to make into a sport. I’ll just give you my example, one sentence, just to model this for you – I’m looking at you, Shireen – which is, when I start to mow the lawn I look at my neighbor who mows his lawn like twice a day, and I look next door and then I just see who wins. That’s the sport that I’ve made it into. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, mine is 100% when I’m walking the dog I’ll try to pass people by going out into the road [Brenda laughing] because I’m a socially distanced passer, or if they’re on the other side of the street I’ll be like, “Come on Ralph. Come on Ralph!” and we will pass them and go faster. So that’s mine.
Brenda: Shireen?
Shireen: When I let Tara outside she hides underneath the neighbor’s thing, so we have like a race. I’m like, “Come on! Come on! Come on home!” and she’ll look and she’ll look both ways before crossing the street and see how fast she runs, and so I time her. So that’s her little sprint home.
Brenda: [laughs] Linz?
Lindsay: Also walking my dog, I try and make it so that the streets I turn down in my little neighborhood part of DC, that there will be no people, like, I try and pick the routes where there will be no other people. You never know til you turn the corner, right? Then you’re kind of holding your breath the entire block…And I avoid all the busy streets.
Brenda: I love how my co-hosts have projected their competitive spirit onto their pets. [laughter] BIAD pets doing sports is definitely a segment that I wanna see. This week we saw a number of interesting and sometimes infuriating challenges to the strict gender binaries of sport. First on Tuesday, September 8th, the Swiss federal court dismissed two-time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya’s appeal against testosterone restrictions in women’s athletics. That same day, Canadian national women’s player Quinn took to Instagram to publicly declare themselves as transgender. The following day, Chicago Red Stars forward Yuki Nagasato was officially loaned to Hayabusa Eleven in Japan – a men’s team.
There’s a whole lot that’s shaking the foundation of gender segregation in sport, and just briefly I think we can start the conversation by thinking how important sport has been in struggles to define gender, because it really always has been a site for imagining what the ideal bodies are like, what the limits of human capacity are. It’s also drawn the scrutiny of medical science and fans; that scrutiny is heightened when they’re Black and brown bodies, as we’ve seen in Caster and Dutee Chand, respectively from South Africa and India. It’s not surprising to me then that the first sex-testing, the mandatory sex-testing, was during the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin.
I think this is about a real political argument from the beginning, and that’s when Avery Brundage decided this was something that they needed to establish. Part of needing to establish it all the time is because there’s always been an understanding that these things are not as clear and not as scientifically binary as any politician would like to put on it. So, that's an assumption that these two sexes need to be distinct, even when they’re not, and even when science tells us that they never have been. I wanna start then, Jessica, with the reactions that you saw this week from Caster.
Jessica: Yeah, so, Caster took to Twitter a couple of times. On the day of the ruling she wrote on Twitter, “Chills my people, a man can change the rules but the very same man can not rule my life, what I'm saying is that I might have failed against them the truth is that I have won this battle long ago, go back to my achievements then you will understand. Doors might be closed not locked.” Then a couple days later on September 10th she tweeted, “I will continue to fight for the human rights of female athletes, both on and off the track, until we can all run free the way we were born. #youcantstopus.”
Brenda: What was your reaction to that reaction?
Jessica: I mean, on some level I’m sad about it, because Caster won’t be running next year despite the fact that she’s clearly one of the best 800m runners in the world. But I just am always in awe of her fight – she comes out swinging every single time, every single time this happens to her.
Brenda: And Shireen, from the Canadian perspective, how do you think the Canadian sports world reacted to Quinn’s announcement?
Shireen: We’ve never seen a trans non-binary athlete in soccer in Canada, so I’m fully expecting Canada Soccer to botch this up. However, that being said there's actually precedent in hockey for this with Harisson Browne and friend of the show Jessica Platt – they both are trans hockey players, the hockey community has seen this, you know? For a while Harisson Browne played on a women’s team, because I think the thing is that policy in Canada has not caught up. The only policy that’s fairly been updated has been U Sports, the varsity level, university and collegiate level. I wrote an article about it a couple of years ago, which we’ll add to the show notes. But professional hockey is nowhere near there, nor are professional federations and associations, and that’s a problem. So, they need to get moving in those boardrooms.
Brenda: So there’s the way that institutions will react, there’s the way governing bodies deal with this. Lindsay, what did you see this week in the media?
Shireen: There was a lot of media coverage of Quinn’s announcement, but a lot of it deadnamed them, and they actually came out on Twitter and said, you know, even the LGBTQ+ publications often deadnamed them. So, that was really tough to see. All the comparisons, a little bit as Shireen mentioned, have been to the past big name precedents in transgender sports, which has been typically trans men or trans women. Quinn did not clarify…As far as we know, Quinn is non-binary, and there hasn’t been as much precedent for that. I think it shows how the media doesn’t really…This is new territory, and we’ve seen it a little bit in the WNBA this year – Layshia Clarendon is non-binary, and their pronouns are they/them, also he/she. There’s been this great moment on ESPN when Ryan Ruocco was calling New York Liberty games where he has very casually used they/them pronouns in the middle of calling these games.
Ryan Ruocco: Another chance – Clarendon from three. They got it!
Lindsay: Not making a big deal about it, not doing the typical specification of, you know, “This is the preferred pronouns of Layshia Clarendon.” Just using them. It’s been this phenomenal normalization of non-binary athletes. But I think going forward what we really need to see…Again, a little bit to Shireen’s point, the WNBA doesn’t have trans policies. There’s so many leagues right now with zero trans policies. We need policies not just for trans men and trans women in all leagues, but also for non-binary athletes. I mean…Because there are different stages in the transition, and it’s important that regulations acknowledge that. If you think back to Harrison Browne, when Harrison Browne continued to play in the NWHL after he announced that he was a trans man he put off his medical transition until after he’d finished with the NWHL, but continued playing in the NWHL as a trans man. So, I think all leagues need to be prepared for all different ranges of possibilities of the transgender category.
Brenda: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, just to add on to what Lindsay’s saying, I think that Canada Soccer, although it has never dealt with a particular trans athlete issue, I mean, there’s a lot of out players on Canada’s soccer team themselves, and I think that’s really important. But we just really need to be careful to understand that whole sphere, the whole scope. This community is very different, it can’t just be “you're a man” or “you’re a woman” and identify as that. The point that we’re making is that there are many identities and they all need to be respected.
Brenda: It’s a great point about the relationship between rules and language, how a lot of times we think of what’s allowed, or, you know, because IAAF has us thinking about testosterone levels and these…Fighting on the basis of some scientific empirical differences, and any sort of league or federation is gonna have to take into account a much broader cultural shift. Speaking of being ready for what’s to come, FIFA actually does have a precedent that’s interesting. The American Samoan soccer player who played for the men’s national team in a qualifier for the 2014 world cup – but the qualifier was in 2011 – is Jaiyah Saelua, and actually there’s gonna be a film made about her, and we’ll link in the show notes some of the articles about her. She is a fa’afafine athlete and advocate.
So, she is under this Samoan umbrella which is defined as a third gender, and it was on that basis of a kind of cultural argument that she was able to play for the men’s national team. FIFA did not prevent that, nor did it also create – and they should’ve, at that point – anything to account for this and for how they’re gonna deal with this going forward. So it’s an interesting precedent and I think it might be an important one as FIFA gets pushed and challenged. Shireen, can you tell us a little bit about how you think it might impact global football?
Shireen: Yeah, just to say that Canada isn’t the only one that is not prepared or equipped to deal with this. There are examples of different federations all over the world including Iran, and there’s this article that I remember coming across because, you know, everyone knows that Iran is really in my line of sight. Just in terms of how the football federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran – that’s a mouthful, but they had terminated the contracts of seven players for being on the national team and they were accused of being men, and they were told they were either men who had not completed transition or suffered from sexual development disorder – and this is an article from Vice from Maryam Mohammed, who wrote it.
What ended up happening is they forced gender tests. That’s invasive, that’s violent, and it’s unacceptable. In a way of doing this we have to be…And when I say “we” I think sports federations, Canada Soccer, whoever in the world, need to be really careful that you don’t violate someone’s personal rights in doing this. I think there should be something mandated by FIFA or AFC or different federations around the world to mandate what can be done and how this should be done, because they’re not. And they should hire experts to do it, like Payoshni Mitra, friend of the show Dr. Katrina Karkazis. They need guidance on this because they simply don’t have it and that expertise doesn’t exist in said federations.
Brenda: Yeah, and we know if they leave it up to cherry-picking the scientists that they want what will happen. So, it’s a scary thought to think that they’re just going to copy the model of the IOC and the IAAF. It would just be, I think, a disastrous policy. But it does feel like there’s something positive about this kind of moment, that there’s so much activity that every day in all of these different kinds of sports it feels like we’re seeing athletes really bravely trying to shake at the foundations of that hard and fast binary that sports leaders like Avery Brundage since the beginning have tried to make sure is unshakeable. Jessica, is this evidence that the kids are alright?
Jessica: [laughs] I like to think so. It’s so interesting because at this moment when science is trying to define gender and sex more rigorously than ever we have the the youth, the yutes out there. They’re more gender-expansive and they’re willing to push on the binary more than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. So, Lindsay’s point about Layshia and the coverage in the WNBA, I mean, that’s a great example. It was also heartening to see athletes in other sports come to Caster’s defense – one of them being Simone Biles, arguably the most famous female Olympian in the world right now. She tweeted, “This is wrong on so many levels..once again men having control over womens bodies. 🙄 I’m tired.” Tianna Bartoletta, a track and field athlete whom Amira interviewed recently on episode 169, which…It matters that she’s in track and field specifically. She tweeted, “Question: when and where do I get my testosterone levels tested to confirm my eligibility to compete as a female in track and field competitions?” So, all of that is great.
I wanna shout out friend of the show Katie Barnes – I know they listen. Hello, Katie! Katie is a writer at ESPNW, an outlet whose name references the gender binary in sport. Katie, who is non-binary, uses that very space to report on gender expansive topics and athletes, but still…I’m trying to be positive here. But we can’t let go of the fact that there’s still so much work to be done, right? Earlier this week Katie did a short thread about their experience within sports media, and I just wanna read part of it. So, here we go. “One thing that I've really struggled with as of late is finding my place within communities of marginalized journalists. A lot of spaces designed for ‘Women in Sports,’ are explicitly not inclusive of someone like me. I'm not saying those spaces shouldn't exist, but my experience is that in the sports industry is that women's spaces center she/her pronouns and femininity at the expense of queerness broadly and gender expansive identities specifically. In a society that devalues femininity, the need for these spaces is abundantly clear. The unfortunate impact of that is the continuous feeling of acute isolation that I feel as a non-binary person.”
So, I’ll just end here: even in these moments when we’re really excited to see the gender binaries being pushed on in sport, we can’t let go of the fact that they still exist and do harm. Support for Caster is wonderful to see, but she’s still not gonna run the 800m next year in Tokyo.
Brenda: As a reminder, our interview this week is with Dr. Katrina Karkazis and NYU professor and lawyer Michele Krech.
Katrina: You know, the turn to testosterone I think is a molecule of convenience here. If testosterone itself was not gendered as a hormone I actually don’t think that they could be making these kinds of regulations and the arguments that they make about these regulations.
Michele: I mean, without women willing to stand up and unfortunately face all the scrutiny that comes with it we might not even know what’s going on. Their courage and determination really is what gives me hope.
Brenda: Okay. Now it’s time for everybody’s favorite moment of the week, where we take all the garbage in sport and throw it onto a metaphorical bonfire. Shireen, will you get us started?
Shireen: Hello. This week I’m going to be burning something that makes no sense to me, which is why it’s absolutely in partnership with the USSF. They nominated all their folks for the hall of fame and, you know, there’s all your expected men and whatnot. However, there was one name that was left out: Hope Solo. Now, I have admired the way she plays for a very long time. I think she’s an incredibly strong goalie and I say this as a woman who has birthed a child who’s obsessed with Hope Solo’s technique. I’m also a huge fan of the Nadine Angerer fan club and technically I think Hope is very strong, there’s no question. Why was she omitted? Was she omitted because USSF dealt with that situation really poorly? Was she omitted because there’s literally something missing from her world championship winning play – Golden Glove winning experience! I don’t know, USSF, but I’m gonna try to find out. There’s been a lot of wondering and secret soccer writer WhatsApp groups I may or may not know of. However, USSF, this is a disaster. Hope Solo, however complicated, deserves to be in the hall of fame. I wanna burn that down. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: I’ll take the next one. I wanna burn Skip Bayless’s comments on Dak Prescott’s public announcement. The Dallas quarterback admitted to his struggle with anxiety and depression following the suicide of his brother, related according to Dak because of their mother’s struggle and ultimate death from cancer. That would seem not to elicit criticism but leave it to Skip Bayless to find a way to pollute anything. He said he did not have sympathy with him going public. The Fox Sports fodder-maker said basically, “The sport you play, it is dog-eat-dog. It is no compassion, no quarter given on the football field. If you reveal publicly any little weakness it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spot, and it can definitely encourage others on the other side to come after you,” end of terrible quote.
Obviously this is an awful way to talk about mental health; it's also an objectification of a man of color by referring to him as an animal from the get go. I don’t think we need to spend a ton of time to realize why this belongs on the bonfire, so I’m just gonna quote the bard, Richard Sherman, here, who referred to Skip Bayless as, “Ignorant, pompous, egotistical, cretin. I’m going to crush you on here because I’m tired of hearing about it, I’m tired of your ignorant pollution.” So I would like to throw Skip Bayless on the burn pile – only just barely metaphorically. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Okay. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, so, this is a bit awkward for me to take as the only non-mother in the group, but bear with me, bear with me. I’m not trying to insult my co-hosts here, but I do wanna burn the turning of mothers into inspiration porn that we saw at the US Open this week. We had three mothers – Serena Williams, Tsvetana Pironkova, Victoria Azarenka – make it into the quarterfinals. It was a historic moment. News media did not play it chill, neither did the tournament itself before the quarterfinal match. Pironkova and Serena Williams were both introduced by the in-court announcers as, “Mother of…” and then their children’s names, like, as they were coming onto the court. Then if you look at any of the coverage of these matches, Serena played two mothers back to back in both Pironkova and Azarenka, and all the headlines were, “Mother of all matches!”
It is crucial that we remind and encourage those who have given birth that they are not washed up and done, that they can still be competitive athletes, that their life continues. That is wonderful. I love seeing mothers do it all. But it is equally as important that we not stray too far in the other direction and imply that the only way to be a phenomenal woman, the only way to be a phenomenal female athlete, is if you have given birth, that that is the only way we will see you as a hero – that it is just downright unthinkable that a woman could give birth and go do this! [laughs] I think we strayed way too far in the other direction.
I want to focus not on the heroism of these people but on the polices that have made this possible on the support they received and on getting that support to be more egalitarian, in the US Open in particular. Pironkova was only able to come back because Serena and Azarenka fought for better policies, so she got longer to come back and use her special ranking after birth thanks to work that Serena and Azarenka – who have a lot more money and a lot more resources – were able to help the WTA include. That’s what this subject should be. I’d like to conclude by having Azarenka’s quote when she was asked once again, “How does it feel doing all this as a mother?” [laughs] She said, “That’s not the only thing that we are. We are also women who have dreams and goals and passions.” She said that on the court she didn’t feel like a mother, she just felt like a tennis player competing. [laughter] So, let’s burn the fetishization almost of motherhood in this sporting context. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Jessica.
Jessica: So on Saturday in Norman, Oklahoma, a town of roughly 120,000 people, about 20,000 people gathered in a football stadium to watch unpaid college athletes play football. Two days earlier, the state of Oklahoma reported 771 new cases of COVID, and 13% of those – 103 cases – were in Norman alone. According to Emma Keith at the Norman Transcript, “Norman’s new case number is the second-highest single day case increase the city has ever seen, behind only Saturday's 196 new cases.” After the game, which Oklahoma won 48-0 against Missouri State, the head coach for the Sooners, Lincoln Riley, confirmed that the game had been in jeopardy because of the number of cases of COVID on his football team. Not that we would’ve known that going into the game, because Riley has decided not to release COVID testing data information about his team anymore. Quote, “I think we're to the point now where we're playing games and obviously any active case or contact trace is going to have game repercussions. So, just like we would with an injury, we made the decision to not broadcast that. I know we've been probably the most transparent school in the country up until then, but you don't want to give your team a competitive disadvantage, so we're not going to do that.”
As friend of the show Nicole Auerbach pointed out on Twitter following Riley’s announcement, plenty of teams have refused to release any testing data, saying their decisions are about privacy, but then still comparing the release of those numbers to releasing information on injuries. It’s all so callous. To care more about your competitive advantage than your overall community’s health, even as you’re making decisions that could very well negatively impact that community…It’s not that I’m necessarily angry at Riley or only at Riley – I’m mainly angry at a system that encourages these men to make these bad choices over and over again. It rewards them, actually, for it – at the expense of the health and safety of their players and their communities. So I just wanna light that system on fire today. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: And now for our new segment that we’ve dubbed the Torchbearers, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of our burn pile are people doing amazing things to change the culture of sport. So, this week, for our innovator of the week: who is it, Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, congratulations to Sonia Raman, who for twelve seasons coached the MIT women’s basketball team. She has been recently hired by the Memphis Grizzlies as an assistant coach, and I believe is the first South Asian – whaaaaat! – coach in the NBA. Balle balle!
Brenda: Woo! Okay, and barrier-breaker of the week. Jessica, who’s it go to?
Jessica: Yeah, it’s Neilson Powless, who is Oneida, one of five Iroquois Nation tribes. He is believed to be the first tribally recognized member of an Indigenous people’s nation to race the Tour de France.
Brenda: Wow. Okay. I get to award the person-kicking-sexist-ass of the week: hall of fame broadcaster Doris Burke will become the first woman to serve as a game analyst for conference finals in the NBA finals on ESPN. Okay, can I get…I know it’s a different segment, but I’d like the same sad drumroll please. Gimme a drumroll!
[drumroll]
[laughs] Linz, who’s our fire master and torchbearer par excellence this week?
Lindsay: It is none other than Naomi Osaka, who won the US Open in a phenomenal three set comeback [scattered woo-hoos] over Victoria Azarenka. Osaka is only 22 years old; this is her third major grand slam. She wore the mask, during her seven matches, of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Castile, and then in her final match Tamir Rice, to draw attention to the Black victims of police brutality, whom we’re still seeking justice for. In her final match she was asked during the ceremony about what she meant to say by the masks. She turned around the question…
Reporter: You said from the beginning you had seven matches, seven masks, seven names. What was the message you wanted to send, Naomi?
Naomi Osaka: What was the message that you got…Was more the question. I feel like the point is to make people start talking.
Lindsay: …And I think in all ways she was a champion.
Brenda: In the dark times we like to talk about what’s good in our worlds. Lindsay?
Lindsay: [laughing] …
Brenda: Enough said. [laughs]
Lindsay: Yeah, uh…My co-hosts know I’ve been going through a particularly rough phase of life, so…You know, it sounds cheesy but it's the things that keep my going anyway: it’s my co-hosts, it’s family support, and also women’s sports have been great. We’re in a good time for women’s sports. Power Plays readers, Burn It All Down listeners are kind of these forces in my life that keep me going day after day, even on days where I think that, these days, I really can’t keep going. So yeah, I just wanna send a shoutout of love to everyone who has dealt during COVID with trying to caretake at facilities where you cannot enter and where you have to do it fully by phone. I’ve been introduced to that world just over the last week and I cannot even fathom doing it for six months. So a special shoutout to the caretakers inside of these nursing homes and these hospitals who are doing the work, and to loved ones who are trying to bridge that gap even though it is nearly impossible at times.
Brenda: Well said. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, well, one thing that’s good for me is that we’re now doing this on Zoom so we can see Mo behind Lindsay and that always makes me very happy. I see him right there – see! there he is. Honestly, it’s still my book! It’ll probably be that for a while. I’ve been doing a lot of press for that. Of course I got Shireen’s photo with her book this week…There, she’s holding it up, y’all can’t see it. Also, this is birthday week in our house. My son turned 12 yesterday and Aaron’s birthday is three days from now. I just really enjoy all the cake that we have in the house during this week, and I didn't make any of it this year. So I just get to eat really good cake from a local bakery here called Sugar Mama’s that I love so much. Then the other thing…On Friday night Aaron and I watched a great documentary called 20 Feet From Stardom, about backup singers. It’s from 2013, and it is so so good. It’s one of my most favorite documentaries I’ve ever seen in my life, in part because the director lets them sing for long periods…Like, you just get them singing, and it’s spectacular. It’s on Netflix right now and it’s about to leave, so, by the time you hear this you have maybe a week to go watch it before it leaves the platform, so I wanted to tell everyone about it.
Brenda: You heard it here. So, I’ll take the next one. What was great is we had a very socially-distanced masked visit with co-host Amira Rose Davis. It got late and we both have…You know, my daughter’s 7, and she followed [Amira’s] son through the yard, Jackson, with a flashlight. They played all kinds of games and picked green peppers and then tried to make faces out of them, it was the cutest.
Shireen: So jealous.
Brenda: I know. I mean, my kids loving Amira’s kids is pretty much what’s good in my week. She would love all my co-hosts’ kids and just them in general, and Mo and dogs and everything. But it was especially cool to see them get along, and also our teenagers who bonded over their love of Harry Styles, and it made me feel less of a failure that Amira had also raised someone that thought Harry Styles was worthy of this kind of attention. So, that was great. And also, maybe some of you don’t know, but the theorist Roland Barthes wrote an article called The World of Wrestling which is in a book called Steel Chair to the Head; I had never read it, it’s super interesting, and I was excited. Shireen?
Shireen: Yes. So, I completed my first week as grad student, and it was fun. Pretty wild. I was all stressed out about it. Thank you to all the wonderful people in my life, academics in particular, for preparing me. I reached out to a bunch of you, and a bunch of you sent me really wonderful messages of good luck, because there was a lot of ideas I had before doing this. So, week one ended with this absolutely amazing culinary experience – and y’all know how much I love food, this is no secret. I went with my best friend Eren who has just moved here from Edmonton, so that’s very exciting. I was still kind of mourning the loss of the Raptors…I’m okay, and thank you for those who’ve checked in. I’m fine. We’ll go next year. Prayers up for VanVleet. I’ve been okay. My mother was great, she was very supportive.
Eren and I went to an Indigenous cuisine experience called The Seventh Fire. So, the chef, Rich Francis, who was a finalist on Top Chef, prepared us incredible things like…Oh my god, bison. We had turmeric and ginger encrusted salmon, we had salad and a Three Sisters soup. It was probably the best meal I’ve ever had on Turtle Island, and I told him that. Almost close would be sushi I had in Vancouver, and I’m very particular about food, and this was incredible. He talked about food sustainability, offers to teach people about that and traditional cooking techniques. While he was speaking I asked what one of his inspirations was, and he said stories from the land. That moved me so completely, because as a settler it’s really important to understand where food is, where it comes from, and whose land we’re on. You know, things that we adopt without thinking…Not adopt, things that we take over rather, and it’s in every aspect of our lives, including food.
So that was really, really awesome. And they made this super amazing iced tea which was just tea but with orange and basil and flowers. I was like, y’all, I’m gonna post a photo of this because the photos were wild. God, I could have a whole podcast about food. So that’s what’s really good and will carry me over not so much the thousands of pages of reading I have to do, but that’s okay. So if you see me a little less on Twitter and whatnot it’s because I’m reading. Or pretending to read.
Brenda: Okay, and as part of a new segment we wanted to let you know what to watch for in sports this week. We’re watching: WNBA playoffs – the first and second rounds, which are knockouts, will take place this Tuesday and Thursday night. Barclays women's soccer Super League is actually ongoing, and it’s back and you can see Women’s World Cup champions like Rose Lavelle play on Man City and the like. Also, the NWSL fall series. That’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down. On behalf of all of us here, especially more than ever September – burn on, not out. This episode was produced by wizard Martin Kessler and Shelby Weldon extraordinaire does our website and social media. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher – really any of those types of things.
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