She Speaks to Ghosts. By Nora Flynn-McIver.

I am Nora Flynn-McIver, a sophomore Congressional debater in the Carolina West District. In my time as a debater, I have noticed a fatal flaw in the activity that both Daniela Williams (a junior Congressional debater in the same district) and I want to address and confront.

As a participant in Congressional Debate, I have been trained to evaluate and argue about issues of equity and inequality. I can hold fast to a position, using data and moral argumentation. However, when faced with this same inequality in real life, I begin to doubt myself and wonder whether what I’m experiencing is valid, or if I am just making it up.

At the Carolina West Congress Districts tournament this year, Daniela and I were in the same chamber. It was the first half of the second session, and the presiding officer had been elected. We went through our first round of speeches, and I began to notice that something was amiss regarding my precedence chart. I checked and rechecked it, trying to see if I had made any sort of mistake. I hadn’t. The chart clearly showed that the male presiding officer had called on every male member of the chamber to speak before calling on any of the female members.

Daniela and I talked about it in the bathroom during a recess with a group of other girls in the chamber, and the two of us decided to sprint down to the tab room and report the issue. Returning to the room, I brought a point of order against the presiding officer. My heart was pounding, my hands were shaking, every part of my body was on edge, and none of this stopped when I finished my point of order. I remained nervous as the chamber proceeded. Shortly thereafter, demanding to see the PO’s precedence chart, the district committee marched into the room and sent the chamber into a recess of undetermined length.

As I sat in the front row, I set an intent gaze on the whiteboard in front of me and avoided eye contact with everyone else in the chamber. We all knew what the recess was about, and I found myself feeling overwhelmingly guilty. The completely misplaced feeling took over my entire being. Afraid of the judgement from other competitors and of the presiding officer’s reaction, I found myself wishing I hadn’t done anything, had just let the presiding officer get away with it, just to avoid this awful feeling.

My self-doubt was ironic because I work with data on a constant basis. I analyze facts and figures and figure out correlation. In any other circumstance, I would be completely confident in the accuracy of my deduction based on the facts I had collected. However, when it was applied to me personally, I didn’t know whether to believe it. This is indicative of the internalized attitudes that still persist in the activity I love, and this is what I want to fix.

Sexism in speech and debate is a ghost; invisible, considered long-dead, yet still wreaking havoc wherever it goes. The NSDA may no longer divide extemp into boys’ and girls’ divisions, but the problem still persists, unseen. Every single one of us, no matter our gender, has grown up in a largely sexist society. Starting on elementary school playgrounds, we’re conditioned to see boys taking charge as ‘leaders’ and girls taking charge as ‘bossy.’ Our government reflects these internalized attitudes - women currently make up only 19.3% of the House of Representatives, only 21% of the Senate, and therefore only 19.6% of Congress as a whole. Not to mention, we have yet to see a woman in the Oval Office. Consequently, when judges and competitors alike walk into an event where students simulate the government, whether consciously or not, these same hard-wired attitudes prevail.

However, because this problem stems from internal attitudes, it’s rarely visible and seemingly impossible to tackle. Our presiding officer at Districts didn’t realize what he was doing and protested loudly that he had no idea what the committee and I were going on about. When talking to a friend of Daniela’s about sexism in the community, he commented that he didn’t really know of any instances.

“But that wouldn’t be a problem I would really see,” he admitted. “I think the girls on my team would say something different.”

And girls’ stories do say something different. I know just as many girls whose judges dropped them because of an “unprofessional” skirt length or heel height as I know girls whose judges picked them up because they thought they were hot. I’ve watched countless male competitors refer to their male peers as “Senator” or “Representative” and their female peers as “Miss.” Once, one of Daniela’s friends tried to report a male competitor who had far overstepped his boundaries to her coach. “He’s just a boy,” the coach smiled. That same day, Daniela walked out of her round, panicking over whether or not she’d been too aggressive, and whether or not it would affect her results. Personally, I have been told on ballots that I need to “tone down my attitude” when responding to questions, while my male teammates have been commended for standing up for their beliefs. If I were to keep an itemized list of every horror story I’ve ever heard, watched, or experienced, I would need at least seven op-eds worth of space.

And despite all this, we still internalize the notion that sexism isn’t a problem in speech and debate. While talking to and interviewing female competitors on the circuit, we found that the reflexive reaction to sexism from judges, competitors, teammates, and coaches was simply to shrug it off and ignore it, but the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have one, and we do ourselves no favors by silencing our reactions.

If we ever want to solve for sexism in speech and debate, we need to start talking about it and taking it seriously on all sides. Boys need to self-examine, actively listen to girls’ stories, and work to promote respect for all competitors, regardless of gender. And as girls, talking about our experiences is crucial, as Daniela and I learned during our informal bathroom caucus at Districts. We only realized that no, the little voice in the back of our heads telling us “hey, there’s something wrong with this” wasn’t overthinking things when we came together as a group to discuss it. Therefore, Daniela and I have started She Speaks, to expose and confront the sexism we and others have faced. The more we talk about sexism in the community, the more we start lifting the stigma against identifying and reporting it. We can’t change cultural attitudes centuries in the making overnight. But we can work towards the equal future we want by changing our reaction, using the very thing we compete with every Saturday: our voices.

Co-founder Nora with Isabelle Freireich and Elizabeth Green after the She Speaks inaugural forum on sexism in politics.