The Vancouver Women's Field Hockey Associationvotes next week on players’ uniforms: skirts or shorts?
The association will hold the vote because of pressure put on them through repeated and increasingly public requests from some players. Chief among the advocating players is Kaity Cooper, a field hockey player since the age of 13 who has made three formal requested to wear shorts instead of the mandated skirt.
Each was denied, she outlined in a blog post on Rabble.ca.
In the men’s game, players wear shorts. Cooper wore shorts in a September game and was ejected.
“… if you'd have told me when I was 12 that at 28 I would be forced to play a sport I love wearing a spandex miniskirt I would not wear to the bar, I probably would have had a similar reaction,” she wrote Dec. 4 on a social justice blog “F is for Feminist.”
“The last request was made by my team on Nov. 20, 2014. […] We did not have in mind anything radical. We knew that many players like the skirt and so we had no intention of taking that away from them. We merely wanted to give individual players who, like me, might not feel comfortable playing in a skirt, a choice. And so we asked that ‘or shorts’ be added to the definition of uniform in the League constitution.”
Cooper went onto explain she believes all players should have the choice to wear a skirt or shorts. She made a video to emphasize the gender discrimination.
