Memphis, Andy Kaufman, & Inter-gender Sports

Step back fifty years in time with me if you will. A simpler time. You wake up in the house you could afford on a single income. Instead of blinding yourself with the light of your cell phone first thing in the morning, you wake up to make breakfast and coffee, your mind unencumbered by the stimulus of a thousand notifications. You can’t doom scroll (nor can you conceptualize what that even means).

You breathe in the moment, smelling your coffee with a deliberate, meditative inhale… As this brief moment of Nirvana passes, you decide to pick up the newspaper. You turn to page nine and see that Andy Kaufman, a comedian/performance artist you’ve seen on Taxi and Saturday Night Live, has declared himself “The Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.”

You are tempted to think this may be a joke, but suddenly you remember that you stepped back in time from the 21st century. You’re a modern person with evolved values. You ask yourself: is this an elaborate bit from Andy Kaufman, or was he simply ahead of his time? After all, you’re from the modern world where Imane Khelif is celebrated for his stunning and brave foray into women’s boxing (and where strangely, most news sources seem to deny that he’s a man).

All of a sudden, you abandon the bigotry of the past and invite Kaufman to come back with you to our present-day society. As you return to social media, endless notifications, a world full of stimulus, you ponder if Andy’s wrestling foray will be accepted for the beautiful thing that it is, rather than taken, without scrutiny, as a joke.

Exiting my narrative device now to speak to you directly: in the not-too-distant past, Andy Kaufman stepped into the ring and goaded women to wrestle with him. Back then, it was a bit. If such an act were to be replicated today, it would likely be celebrated and defended.

Inter-Gender sports pioneering aside, Kaufman's antics made Tennessee history; wrestling legend Jerry Lawler of Memphis went into the ring with Kaufman to relieve a female contestant and treated him to a Tennessee takedown.

Soon after, Jerry invited the comedian to bring his act to Memphis. Leading up to the match, Kaufman relentlessly mocked his Southern audience, with jokes flexing his intelligence as "someone from Hollywood" and teaching Tennesseans how to use soap. After challenging a few women to wrestle, he was met with a famous Jerry Lawler Pilediver. This led to a staged feud between the two of them. The pair even reached the Letterman Show, with Kaufman in a neck brace.

As far as I know, Kaufman never identified as a woman. I don’t think he (or others from this period) could have fathomed the trans-sports drama occurring now. That said, there is something to be learned from his elaborate inter-gender wrestling bit: we’re watching the absurd unfold on the public stage. We should refuse to be gaslit and adopt Andy’s terminology and call this what it is: inter-gender sports. Whenever a biological man competes against a woman in any sporting event, we should all insist on letting everyone know that it is officially an inter-gender competition.

Maybe this modern dilemma could be solved if everyone surrounding these events treated the whole thing for what it was: an elaborate joke. Imagine if we treated it like WWE. The whole audience already knows it’s rigged anyway. Such rules of engagement would leave true biological women’s sports alone; it would keep their pride intact and be an assurance of physical protection.