How No One Benefits from the Gender Norms of Chasing
/Taylor Angelo, of the University of Sydney Quidditch Club, and captain of the USyd Unbreakables in 2019, writes about her experiences, observations, and thoughts around gender norms in the chaser game: how women are routinely pushed out of ball-carrying roles into wing positions, how they are underutilised in these positions still, how this can produce “ball-anxiety”, and how this can not only negatively affect non-female players but the team as a whole.
The absence of purposeful discrimination is not the absence of sexism. To be a “good man” is not defined as “not being bad”. Just because you haven’t done anything wrong doesn’t mean you’ve done anything right either.
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There are women who have come to me about the sexist attitudes displayed by male team mates on and off the pitch, and who have expressed the presence of their “ball anxiety”. That used to be me too. Even when I have actively tried to put myself into the male dominated positions of the field, my role there is still constantly under threat.
Whether it’s intentional or not, women often get pushed into the same roles over and over again. As chasers, that role is the wing/receiver. Meanwhile, men take to the pitch with all of the confidence, regardless of experience, and put themselves into the roles of keepers, ball carriers and laterals.
This often pushes women out of those positions, and this can take several forms. Whilst some may be more polite than others, I believe none of them should be happening. Here are some of them, from my personal experience:
1) Being asked. Being asked if I want to play wing or lateral is a fine question, as it gives an opportunity to elect the lateral role. However, sometimes the question is phrased as “Taylor and [insert female player name here], would you like to go on the wing?”. The problem here is that when you address this question to the only two female players on pitch, it conveys the assumption that that is where female chasers belong.
2) Being ordered. Sometimes a male, typically a keeper and typically someone who doesn’t play with me enough to know my preferences, will order me to go wing. The worst memory I have of this was when the Unspeakables training squad and the state teams had a shared training. I was playing on the Bluebottles side and had just secured the ball from a successful defence. I was so happy to have the ball, as I wouldn’t have to ask for it or rely on someone to give it to me. But then two men subbed on and ordered me to give them the ball and go on wing. I very reluctantly and slightly angrily passed them the ball and did as instructed. In that same offence I was able to make a cut, revive the ball and score. However, this was quite conflicting as I scored the goal but I only did so because I had been put in a position I didn’t want to be in.
3) Having my spot physically taken. Sometimes, after I have established myself as next to the ball carrier, a reasonable passing distance away, a man will run in and occupy the space between myself and the ball carrier. This forces me to either silently go onto the wing so that there is a reasonable passing distance between players once again, or say something. Even as the Unbreakables captain, it was sometimes hard to find the courage to speak up for myself, and when I did, I often had to repeat myself several times before the person in question listened.
With this happening, you would think that if women are reserved for the receivers that they’d be scoring most of the goals with their timely cuts and quick dunks, but no. The QNSW goal scorers data for 2019 shows that during the regular season in division 1, 16% of goals were scored by females, which was the same in division 2. In division 1, the top non-female goal scorer has 37 goals to his name, whilst the top female had 12. In division 2, the top non-female had claimed 58 goals, whilst his female counterpart was responsible for 25. So even though women are being assigned this role which ideally entails cutting in at the right moment, receiving a pass and scoring, they aren’t even being used effectively or at all in this position.
Meanwhile, for the women who do get to occupy the lateral position, some men don’t even pass to them either. They may pass only to male wing chasers, or, in a terrible play which I told my team to avoid if at all possible, pass diagonally or over the lateral. In fact, when I told my team I didn’t want to see any long, diagonal passes (gives beaters lots of time, easy to intercept etc.) I had a male beater say that I shouldn’t do it, but people like him could get away with it. I even had one of the perpetrators say that you should only pass to the best people, and that the better chasers should be running around into positions to receive the ball rather than passing to everybody.
But if you don’t pass women the ball, they won’t get any better at what they do, and they won’t be able to demonstrate the skills they have. They develop “ball anxiety” because the quaffle is in their hands so little that they forget what they can do with it, leading to panic and mistakes. Even having actively worked on dissolving my own “ball anxiety”, the pressure of receiving balls on game days occasionally results in silly fumbles that wouldn’t normally happen, all because in that split second my first thought is “wow he actually passed me the ball”. “Ball anxiety” is unproductive to any team. It leaves men to either play as if they are players down because they think they can win it all themselves, or their women panic when they finally acquire the ball.
Having watched and commentated State Shield games, I have noticed that when women save a defence, they either immediately turtle or pass the ball straight off to a keeper, whilst men are more likely to go straight into the next offence, whether it be a fast break or a controlled offence. In this way, the manifestation of “ball anxiety” is also observable, not because even our state rep women panic at the thought of having the quaffle, but because it is so ingrained in us as we learn the sport that this is what is done on auto pilot - pass the ball back to a male as soon as possible - and it’s a hard mentality to undo.
This also affects our men too. Not all men want to play in the roles we force them into. I know a few who really like playing wing, yet they feel as if they are obligated to hold a position at the front of the offence. This goes for defence too, where I’ve had a male chaser on my team put himself in point thinking that was where he needed to be, despite previously expressing to me that he’d generally rather mark the wing, whilst I actually did want to be on the point. We were able to swap in that game, but it goes to show that this goes both ways in some instances, where we assume that our boys will take on positions such as point, lateral and ball carrier, even though they may actually desire to play on the wings.
All positions are invaluable and important to a team’s success. People need to learn to play their positions well, and they are more likely to do so when they like where they are. It is even easier to grow and develop within that role if one isn’t constantly having to fight for it. People should be playing the positions they want to play, and if multiple people like the same position, negotiations and compromises can be made in the sub box or before a game. Ideally, every chaser should know how to play every chasing role on pitch anyway, and be able to be flexible in their roles. But the reality is this is not always the case, especially on more inexperienced teams. We need to train our women up as if you would our men, and get rid of these stereotypes and assumptions as to how each gender plays. Because whilst only a small few of us work to erode these instances of underlying sexism, the problem will only continue to erode the potential of our players and our teams.
Editor Note: The original author’s title for this article was “Don’t need balls to ball carry: how no one benefits from the gender norms of chasing.” While meant to represent the issue that people assigned into binary gender roles at birth are routinely pushed towards those gender roles on pitch in quidditch, regardless of the gender they currently identify as, this was edited after members of the community voiced concerns that the original title conflated gender with genitalia in a cis-normative fashion that was not in keeping with Quidditch Australia’s all-gender-inclusive attitude. Reinstatement of the original title is currently under discussion pending consultation.