My point being that you don't have to be X to talk about Y. Just as that reporter didn't have to be a football player/man to talk about route running, the person who wrote that Op-Ed didn't need to be a man to talk about expectations and the role of masculinity in society.
The real problem would be if either of these women attempted to represent themselves as something that they're not. You'd obviously and rightly take umbrage with the reporter asking questions in a way that would suggest she'd played in the NFL. Or the Op-Ed writer claiming "based on my personal experiences of being a woman I understand exactly what it's like to be a man." Neither says that or represents their points as such. In academia, one often pulls from the research and experiences of others in order to make and defend a point. Given simple laws of averages you will almost certainly come across a man in your daily life. You may even build a relationship with that person. Getting their perspective is of course important and can help shape our understanding on the experience of being a man. That then allows that person to speak from a more enlightened place, especially when weighing that experience against others and possibly even combining that with trusted academic works on the subject in order to form a greater understanding of the subject.
We therefore don't need to resort to the notion that only certain people are allowed to talk about certain things based solely upon such shallow criteria as "you aren't the correct gender to discuss this topic."
