Footsteps Episode 5

Welcome to Footsteps, the podcast of the Master of Human Rights program housed in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba. Join us as we explore and uncover inspiring stories about human rights, human rights education, and the remarkable journeys of our students, human rights advocates, and change makers. We're excited to have you with us on this journey. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Footsteps. I'm Adi Novosad, an upper year student in the Master of Human Rights program and your host for today's episode. I never thought about what I do as like human rights. Like that sounds so official, but it's true that that's what it is. That was professional skateboarder and Canadian Olympian Annie Guglia. She made history as the first woman to represent Canada in street skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics. But Annie's impact extends far beyond these athletic accomplishments.

For more than a decade, she's been organizing and advocating to remove barriers that restrict the full participation of women, girls, and other marginalized people in the sport. The United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights talks about why this work is so important. While sport is anchored in human rights values like fairness, non-discrimination, respect, and equal opportunities for all, sport also faces human rights related challenges. But on the other hand, it is a conduit for societal change. Whatever sport represents in your life, whether you're an amateur or professional athlete, a referee, a coach, or a member of the audience, contributes to who we are. Annie and I talk about this as the basic right to play, the work that she's doing to create a good first experience. And we also explore the two sides to structure and policy, how they can help open up spaces and opportunities, but can also be used as a double-edged sword.

And we reflect on how sports are possibly taken too seriously, raising questions about how we balance fair what fairness even means with that fundamental right to play. Annie, I'm so excited to be here with you in Montreal. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a while since I last saw you and we did some skateboarding together. I haven't been skateboarding for some time now, but I know you're still very involved in the sport. Actually, it's funny because I am taking a little bit of a break from the practice of skateboarding. I still organize events and stuff, but I'm I don't know, my legs are tired. I want to make sure that my body's healthy despite the 25 years of skating. You're in a really unique position within the sport. I mean, you've experienced it as both an amateur athlete and a professional athlete competing at the highest level.

You have experience at the governance level, but you've also remained active at the grassroots community level. And now you're working at a nonprofit that works to increase gender equity in every sport. How do you think about the relationship between sport and human rights? Yeah, it's funny 'cause when I got your first e-mail, I was like, I never thought about what I do as like human rights. Like that sounds so official, but it's true that that's what it is. And it made me reflect on it because I never really thought about it that way. And for me, I think the reason why I'm so, like I do everything that I do is because sport for me is a reflection of society. And so I think it's really dumb that people don't have access to sport in the same way that everybody should have access to, or like the right to live. So everyone should have the right to play.

And I guess it starts from my first experience with skateboarding when I was like too intimidated to go to the skate park. I stayed in the grass. So when I see a lot of the time it's going to be girls like just sitting in the grass that are too afraid to go skate. So I was like, I'll just create those spaces where people can learn how to skate and just have that first good experience at the skate park. So like that's how it started. Most of the time it starts from somewhere in your life. And for me, that's where that starts. I started skating because my brother got a skateboard for Christmas. Around 2000, he was eight, I was 10, approximately. And it was just another random toy, but then he learned how to ollie. And for me, that was so, I was like, how does that work? Like a lot of people say that to me now. They're like, how can you jump with your, like I was that person too at one point.

And our upstairs neighbor, I remember he could tray flip. But for me, that sounded so crazy, but when my brother impossible, physically impossible, I was just like, Wow, it's like you see someone backflip on a motocross, you're not like, Wow, I can do this, so I was like, Eh, but then when my brother learned how to alia, I was like, Oh, this is attainable, and then I really wanted to do that, so what attracted me to it was how hard it is, but also having proximity to it. seeing what I could potentially do with it.

Right. The way you describe that proximity to the sport through your brother and your neighbor really shows how having people you already know in the sport can make it feel accessible. And seeing someone you relate to doing it can make you feel like you belong there too. And when you started skateboarding in 2001, a lot of girls and other marginalized people didn't have that kind of proximity or visibility. And we know that alone can be a barrier to participating in sport. So much has changed since then, which we'll talk about later. But when you think back to the early 2000s when you started, was there a specific moment that you felt the industry needed to change in terms of removing those barriers?

And what made you feel like you could be part of that change? Yeah, so first though, I'll say I didn't want it to change because I mostly wanted to be long. I just wanted to be like every other skater. So there was that first experience, especially being a woman, you're like, you can't be too feminine. You can't do all these, you have to do these tricks to be accepted. So that was a big part of my childhood or teenage years where I just wanted to be able to do What was cool in skateboarding to be part of that, and then to be different from the other people, and it's funny 'cause I realized this having a conversation with Lindsey Westfall, who was the... owner of a drift at the time, but she was on the board of directors of Canada Skateboard with me.

Okay. And we had that conversation once and before she said that, I was like, wow, I never realized it. I think that's a really wise reflection. And what you said reminded me of a master's thesis written by Correa Gray. whose research looks at skateboarding, gender, and the right to the city. Gray says, quote, There's a very strong underlying narrative in skateboarding culture that men are the standard to which all others should be compared. And so it is not surprising that many skateboarders of all genders have internalized this idea. And I think this is exactly what we're talking about. And I really like that Gray also points out that, quote, Even something as innocuous seeming as constant demands to show what tricks you can do is a subtle way of asking you to prove that you belong in a way that male skaters are rarely ever asked to do. And yet you found ways to push back against this, so tell us about that.

In 2010, for me, it was around 2010, so I was part of a group of girls called Skirtboarders for a long time. So they started in 2002. I met them in 2006 until 2010. We were like, it was, I'll say like an exclusive group in the sense that it was a group of friends. But in 2010, Skirtboarders kind of fell off. Like our friend groups kept, like we all exist. But some of them started having families and moved away and stuff. And so like 2 years after, I was like, I was the youngest of the Skirtboarders. And I was like, I don't really have, like, there's no women's skate group in Montreal anymore, like what's happening? And so Vagabond is another group that started and I started doing girls skate events and I made a flyer on paint and just started doing that around 2012 maybe, because it was a little bit after. But then I just started doing these events because skateboarders didn't exist anymore and there wasn't really a space for people who wanted to start skateboarding.

I borrowed 10 boards from a local indoor skate park and maybe five of my friends came to help and we went to the skate park that day. And there was like, I don't know, two or 300 girls who showed up. Oh my gosh. What an amazing turnover. Yeah, so it was a big surprise. And also it showed me how much there was a need So that's when we started doing it with Vans too, and monthly, because I just did it once. I was like, I'll do that once. But yeah, no, at the time even social media wasn't right. That's why I was like Paint and Facebook was kind of like, I had Instagram, but I had maybe like 200 friends. And so, but yeah, so I just, I remembered the question, but it was like, how, or if I, realized that the industry needed change. For me, it wasn't really about that. It was more about what I saw. Because at that point, I had been skating for 12 years-ish.

And I finished high school. So I don't know. But anyways, a lot of people from high school were like, oh, that's so cool. You still skate. I wish I started when I was younger, but I was too afraid. And now when you're in your mid-20s, it's scarier to start something new. Definitely. So a lot of people told me, oh, yeah, oh, you skate?

Okay, I stepped on a board and fell the first time, so I never tried. So a lot of girls and women told me that. So I was like, they just need a good first experience to at least break that idea that skateboarding is unattainable. Right, absolutely. And the industry is not going to provide that. That's where I was going with this.

Yeah, it's community. Yeah, absolutely. issues of inequity or exclusion and can make us feel disempowered and discouraged, especially when we're looking at changing a sport culture or something like that. So I think it's important to remember those moments when we do feel like, well, we can actually do something to change that because we can, especially like you say in your story, like when we come together with some friends and just say, hey, let's do something about this.

Do you remember some of the other women and or 2SLGBTQ plus skateboarders who made you feel welcome or seen in the community and or who are your role models today? I know you mentioned the Skirtboarders. How did those connections come about? Yeah, Skirtboarders, definitely, because they were like the first time I saw a woman slash girl at the skate park was Louise Enoitier or Anne Sophie. I'm not sure. One of the two, one of two Skirtboarders. at my local skate park. And I just remember going up to Louise, who was 10 years older than me, and being like, ma'am, can I skate the mini ramp? with you. Because I was like, wow, another girl who skates, And I was, I don't know, 10 and she was 20, something like that, or 12 and 22. So yes, I like having these girls really were really changed my life really or my like hooked me to skateboarding. Then Villa Villa Cola and Vanessa Torres and all these girls from California.

It was pretty much a group of girls in California. who put up videos on YouTube at the time, maybe Facebook, MySpace. I don't really remember how I got to see them, something like that. They also had a DVD, like a video. We did that with the Skirtboarders too. So that's how Skirtboarders became like internationally known, because at the time we had to put out like a video, but DVD mostly. Villa Villa Cola and like Girl Skate Network, all of these were very important. And I'll say Leticia Bufoni too, because I knew her at the time. I met her when we were about 16, 15. And I talked earlier about how I was trying to fit in so much. And Leticia is really inspiring to me because she was like, absolutely not. She's a pro skater now. She's from Brazil. And I think that was really bold and cool of her to just like stay herself and do exactly what she wanted to do in skateboarding and she did it.

So I think a lot of people hate her for it, but I really think it's really punk. Yeah, absolutely. I think athletes who show up authentically make space for others to do the same. I want to hear more about how you've carried this practice of creating space for people to participate in sport as their full selves into your own work.

What does grassroots community organizing look like in skateboarding when it comes to removing barriers and building community? Yeah, so in skateboarding, most of the time it looks like you and I just like creating groups locally and giving people like a first good experience at the skate park. I think that's like I don't want to talk for every club organizers in the country, but for a lot of people I think that's what it looks like. And it's like you said, removing barriers. So sometimes public skate parks are free, so it's not always about money, but even just like landing a board helmet and giving tips on how to push, roll, break, turn, like the basics. And to me, that's a very big step that we can do that's relatively easy to give a lot of people the opportunity to realize if they're skaters. For me, that's what it looks like. I'll give 200 people, you know, a 10 minute class if three of them love it and keep, like that's good enough for me.

I don't, you know, like, and my point is I don't want people to have that experience of like stepping on a board, falling and never trying again. You know, for me, I mean, I just think it's sad when that's people's relationship with skateboarding, you're gonna fall, that's for sure, but not necessarily like the first time. And another thing is a lot of people see like white teenage boys, California skateboarding, you know, like you get skateboarding is literally just a tool. You can do whatever you want with it. You don't have to do all the, like what the kids are doing in the skate park, jumping downstairs, flipping into the handrails. like doing 5 foot airs, you really don't have to do that. Like you can take skateboarding wherever you want it, and something I learned that I thought was really cool in, I don't know if you've read the. Nat Porter's book.

It's a really good book about the history of women in skateboarding. And one thing I learned is that, I don't remember which decade, but basically women were better than men at skateboarding for a while because what was judged was mostly freestyle and it looked a little bit more like gymnastics, like handstands and stuff like that. And the boys didn't like it. They were like, let's jump downstairs. And that's going to be the cool thing. And everything else is stupid. That's so interesting how the culture has changed. And it happened in gymnastics too. At first the women were better than men, so the men created a whole other gymnastic field in which they are better. So skateboarding, that's what happened. And I think that's really cool to know because it is.

Yeah, because that's what I remember. I remind people is like, you can do whatever you want with it. You don't have to do a kick. Yeah, that's so interesting. What you're describing really connects to Korea Gray's research, which I'll go back to for a second. Gray says that upward mobility in skateboarding, as in comedy, art, music, and any other male dominated culture has been a highly patrolled boys club with almost all the cultural and financial power controlled by heterosexual white cis men, with much of the justification for exclusion coming from arguments about biology that are based on the idea that women simply are not naturally good at something like skateboarding. These arguments, Gray says, serve to hide the underlying histories of inequity and privilege that have allowed certain men to dominate many professions and fields because they are the gatekeepers and the ones with financial and cultural capital and power because of years of structural inequity.

So this focus on natural ability also naturalizes the idea that success in skateboarding is objective and is only based on the kind of tricks you can do and how high you can jump rather than any kind of institutionalized bias or privilege of certain communities and bodies. So I think, as you said, reminding ourselves of that is a really important part of the work being done in all sports. And I love that message that you don't have to skate in a certain way to be welcome or to participate in the sport.

What have been some of the biggest challenges and also best memories that you have from your work in community organizing? I mean, the biggest challenge in most grassroots is financial a lot of the time, and I'll link it to volunteer burnout. If we had money, we could pay people so that we wouldn't have volunteer burnout. So it's not necessarily just burnout, but just like going through a lot of volunteers. And I know for me, that's definitely been the biggest barrier for me for organizing events, because most of the things I do is volunteer work. So my full-time job, and I know we'll talk about it, but It's pretty recent for the past, I don't know, seven years, I'll say. Like I was mostly freelance and doing a lot of things, but the events that I was doing was always, or most of them, I don't want to say always, because maybe I got paid sometimes, but like I said, a couple $100, maybe.

But it's mostly, like it's mostly volunteer work. And then it's hard when you're, even when you're volunteering to ask people to volunteer, like it's just a lot of energy. So I'll say that's the biggest challenge, but it's so positive. Like I had an event in St. Sovar, which is the, I'll say the biggest event I've organized. So it was a multi-sport women and girls and non-binary folks event. And it was like introduction for let's say teenagers, but there was people from all ages. And it was skateboarding, basketball, hockey, and soccer. And it was like skateboarding with me, basketball with like pro basketball players. soccer with Les Rose de Montreal, which is our professional soccer team, and hockey with La Victoire, which is a professional hockey team. So that was so much volunteering, so much like organizing. But it was so fun. We had about 1200 people show up.

Oh my gosh, that's incredible. It was really cool. We introduced about 200 girls to skateboarding. Oh my gosh. In one day, in four hours actually. That's amazing. But it was not so much work, it was so much fun. It was so much work too. But it was so much fun. And for me, that's the, like you said, I like that you called it memories. That's what it is. And yes, it's about creating that day. I'll remember that day forever for sure. But it's also. Like all the messages you get after of my daughter started skating because of this event or because of that, you realize that, I realized that for me, I started skating because someone introduced me to skateboarding, and it completely changed my life, and so you can. have that impact on other people. And for me, that's the most important part. And also maybe another cool, I don't know what the word is in English, sorry.

No, it's okay. Someone like testimony. But like I remember someone who heard me say that like, I was sitting in the grass when I was, I don't know, 10, was too afraid to skate. And like a girl told me, At one of my events, she was like, hey, do you remember that five years ago or something, I was sitting in the grass at the skate park and you were like, hey, are you waiting for someone? Come, I'll teach you how to skate, whatever. And I just gave her a little class and then she still skated five years later. And those stories I think are very important. And I think it's easy, the more you have, you realize it. But even if you just do it once, you can change someone's life.

Absolutely. Isn't it so special how we always remember the people that extend that hand to invite us into a space that we may not have otherwise felt we belonged in? It's hard to forget because, as you said, sport can be life-changing in that it adds so much to our lives, not just in terms of physical and emotional health, but community and bringing people together.

Yeah, and I'll just jump in it, but you know how people say like, Oh, my door's always open. the skate park is always there, but are you inviting people in? That's very, two very different things. The culture and like it's changing A lot. Like you said, a lot because of social media, because it's really democratizing.

Yeah, you can see whatever you want now on social media, whereas before it was like medias, like traditional medias that had the control over what people were seeing. And for skateboarding, like that was white men in their 30s that decided what was cool or not. So now, with social media, you get to see like a twelve-year-old Japanese girl kick back lip the rail that you couldn't skate at the Olympics. And you're like, that's cool. and little girls see that, and then they're like, I want to do that too.

What was it like for you to suddenly step into the world of the Olympics where everything's structured and so much more visible? Skateboarding was very non-structured and against authority and against commercialization in general. Quickly we realized that we had to structure skateboarding in Canada. We didn't have a national federation, which is mandatory for every country in the world when your sport is going to the Olympics. So I was part of the founding members of Canada Skateboard, the National Federation. At that point, I wasn't skating much. I went to a World Cup and I got eight. I was one place from getting $100, and if I won, I won $900. And the guys, it was like $25,000. And I was like, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know I want to make more than $900 a year. And so I kind of quit the competition at 17. I was like, but I kept skating, not like training, far from training.

And so 2016, we founded Canada Skateboard. We had the opportunity to create the first national championship. Basically, the NSO, a national sport organization, is to create a pathway for skaters, in this case, to build their skills to be able to compete at the Olympic level. So there's like coaching, there's club structures, there's all these things that you have to create. So at first, I wasn't like, I was like, okay, let's do this because we have to do it. But then I quickly realized that it actually gave people opportunities. Like the Olympics allowed me to live my dreams of becoming a professional skateboarder. It wouldn't have happened otherwise. I quit. when I was 17 because it didn't exist. So it was good because it gave people opportunities and especially for marginalized groups and traditionally it's been a lot of men who got opportunities.

But now a gold medal is worth the same for men and women. So you have to have resources in both. So that was really cool. So for me, that really, I was like, okay, this is positive. We also know that when sport becomes more structured, it can introduce new forms of gatekeeping, exclusion, or discrimination. Earlier this year, the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, announced a new policy which will mandate that participation in the female category at Olympic events is restricted to quote, biological females verified through a one-time genetic screening for the SRY gene. The IOC has stated that this decision is for quote, fairness and safety. A number of human rights concerns have been raised around the policy. As someone who has competed for over a decade and as a dedicated advocate for gender equity in sport, how did you feel when you first heard about this decision?

I hate it. Obviously, it's terrible. Like it crosses your boundaries. So it's terrible for many reasons. For me, the fairness one is funny because sport is not fair. That's like the basics of sport competition is we all have different bodies, we all have different capacities, and then we compete. So if you play basketball, she's a feat taller than you. It's not fair. And it goes against my core values of inclusion and equity, I think, in sport. Like I said at the beginning, for me, I want everybody to have access to sport. And people take it way too seriously. It's a game. It's the Olympic Games. Like even at that level, I think people take it way too seriously. At the end of the day, like for example, for skateboarding, like it's not fair. Like if I skated against 11 year old, like my bone density is so much bigger than theirs and I'm taller and I'm like, what is this?

You know, like the only thing you can do is control your own performance. It doesn't matter who you're competing against at the end of the day. Like if you're competing at that level where it's the best people in the world, everybody's good. At that point it's who's better that day. And it's not like who's bone that day. That's not how it works.

Before we talk more about sport policy and its human rights implications, I want to hear more about the current work that you're involved in. So I work with Égale Action, so it's a nonprofit in Quebec. We work with all sport federations in Quebec to help them with gender equity in participation, but also in leadership positions. So for coaches, officials, managers, people on the on the board of directors and stuff like that. So yeah, more women and girls in sport.

What are some of the most common barriers that you hear about from athletes or see in your work? Yeah, and that's the part where I'll get a little binary for the sake of answering this question. And I'll answer with what was surprising to me because I, yeah, because like it was very eye-opening starting to work with the Égale Action. So I'll say the particularities of women and girls. So I never realized how much of what I was experiencing as an athlete came from like the woman experience. I'll say a lot of things I wasn't told like my periods were going to have an impact. Like when you're a teenager, like especially why do you think they drop out of sports? For a lot of them, it's like depending on what sports but it can be like pilosity could be like menstruation can be just the confidence like all like your body's changing all of these things like you like I remember how I felt at that age like if I was doing diving, I can guarantee I would have dropped out of sports, like skateboarding.

I'm like, okay, baggy pants. I'm good. You know, and like, but anyway, so there's a lot of things that are first, we don't know about women's bodies, because in sport, there was no studies. It's less than 10% of the research that's done on women. So a lot of things we don't know, but also we don't even talk about. And so those two things lead to a lot of people dropping out of sports because you think you're alone in this. And that goes for maternity, that goes for perimenopause, every stage of life. We don't talk about these things. So there's that aspect that's very physical. And then there's social norms and just the way we socialize. little girls, two kids going to the playground when the boy has running shoes and shorts and is ready to get dirty and play and the little girl has like, you give her a doll and you're like, please stay in the grass.

So why do you think she stays in the grass when she gets to the state park? Right. So it's like all these little things. That I didn't know about, and then there's another thing that we do, so we teach coaches about the particularities of communicating with women and girls of psychosocial, everything that's particular to women and girls, and then we do. Workshops for women and girls on empowerment we also teach coaches about the importance of having women and girls in sport, but also mixed city, so how to let's say in school, for example, a lot of girls hate physical activity because there's little boys around, and there's a lot of... issues about big city. So the reason why I like to create girls specific events is to give them a good first experience so then they feel comfortable going to the skate park in a big city environment. But at first, a lot of women and girls feel more comfortable learning by themselves or in a small group of peers.

So I learned all these things have a scientific basis, which is cool. So yeah, I'm learning a lot. It's really interesting. Like to combat, like obviously education for men and women, like for everybody. Yeah. Like especially coaches and parents also too, but like everybody who has an influence on women and girls who participate in sport. And in addition to this work, you have a lot of experience at the governance level of sport.

What kind of policy decisions do you think improve not only gender equity, but broader human rights and equity in sport? especially given that not all women and girls experience sport in the same way. So this is the most important part because you can do all the grassroots you want. Like I can do events every single day. If there's no structure, if there's no policies, it will change people's lives, but it's not going to change society.

Right. I'll give an example. So we have a trans woman on a podium at Canada Skateboards event. Canada Skateboards, a national qualifier. People started like, lashing out on social media, the first thing we did was we created a gender inclusion policy. At the board level, we voted it and we put it on our website. And we said, for us, it was very important to make it clear that as long as we had control, like obviously after we can't control what the IOC is going to say, but for in Canada, we want every skater to be able to participate in our events. And if it was another group of people, they could have said, nope. you're banned and then this person can't participate in events. And so you have a lot of power when you're in that situation. All these have massive impact on people too. At the governance level, I think policies and stuff, that's the reason why politics is so important too, because you get to choose who's going to make decisions for you.

It's kind of the same for in sports, you know. Yeah, and it's incredibly hopeful to me to hear that in the face of laws that have these negative impacts on the participation of women and girls in sport. There are national sport organizations that are making policy decisions to ensure that at least within what they can control, athletes will not be subjected to sex or gender testing or excluded based on certain sex or gender characteristics. And barriers like these are not new. Personally, I learned a lot about this from the historian Michael Waters in his book The Other Olympians. He details the rise of femininity inspection in the mid 20th century, which began as informal judgments where male officials decided whether certain women looked feminine enough to compete in the women's category. But by the 1960s, the IOC formalized these suspicions into mandatory sex verifications, which had devastating human rights consequences, especially for athletes who already experienced multiple overlapping forms of discrimination like racism and sexism.

And yet women and 2SLGBTQ+ athletes are instrumental to all sport industries and communities. What's something giving you hope for the future of sport right now? What I'm very Excited about is being a women's. I think two years ago when the PWHL started, I started making signs. I was trying to make it one side funny, one side educational, kind of. Just excited about women's sports and professional women's sports in general, because that's something that, at least for me, I internalized for a very long time that women are not as good. It's not as interesting. No one watches women's sports. All these things. And I think it's so sad that my generation, at least like we grew up believing that. And when I went to my first PWHL game, I cried so much, like the same way I cried at my first pride. Just like I was just crying and I was like, and I realized I was crying because I was like, my inner child cannot believe that there's actually people who are interested in this.

It gave me hope, you know, for the next generation, yes, for professional sport, but also because professional sport creates a virtuous cycle in society where like it leads to attraction to of fans, but also of players like little girls who are going to see themselves in PWHL like pro athletes and want to become them. So that's going to lead to more development in sports or more spaces for women and girls and just people in general. More development leads to more people just being pro athletes and that's a cycle that turns more like that creates more visibility and then more attraction. Like for me, it makes it very clear why it's important. The same way that everybody should have the right to exist in the world, everybody should have the right to play.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us today, Annie. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to Footsteps. I hope you learned something new from this conversation. If you don't want to miss our next episode, make sure to hit follow on whichever platform you're listening from. If you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review. It helps new people find us. Until next time.