Justice for Trans Athletes

The last decade has seen significant positive changes in global attitudes, policies and practices that impact the lives of trans people. Meanwhile, the world of sport has been notoriously slow to follow these social justice initiatives. In fact, sport has the dubious distinction of lagging behind almost every other western social organization on issues of discrimination, whether based on sex, gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, social class, religion or ability. Underlying these trends is the binary thinking that has formed the basis for gender categories of sport and physical activity for over a century.

The introduction begins as Helen Lenskyj extends the issue of justice for trans athletes beyond the scope of sport. Next, the contemporary socio-political contexts in the US, UK, and beyond are outlined. A brief description of the common ground between justice for trans and intersex athletes is provided, while noting that the focus of this book is on trans athletes. An overview of terminology is presented.

Ali Greey then describes their personal experience competing for Canada as a non-binary athlete. Engaging Gleaves and Lehrbach's (2016) work, their argument challenges the viability of making trans-exclusive physiological equivalency synonymous with a rhetoric of fairness. Finally, the authors explain the volume's analytic frameworks and present an overview of the contents, summarizing the key themes and findings.

As advocates and scholars dedicated to advancing equality for women and girls, we believe that sport can empower all people – and to change the world. Exclusion and restrictions for transgender athletes undermine this cause. Transgender athletes are not and have never been a threat to women's sport. There are, however, serious and well-documented threats to women's sport that warrant attention, including unequal opportunities in participation and leadership, inequitable funding and pay, uneven media coverage, a lack of sponsorship opportunities, sexual harassment and abuse and incomplete implementation of gender equality policies (Bisgaard & Støckel, 2019; Cooky et al., 2021; Hindman & Walker, 2020; Lough & Greenhalgh, 2019; Novkov, 2019; Pape, 2020; Raso, 2019; Schultz, 2018; Staurowsky et al., 2020; Yanus & O'Connor, 2016; Zerunyan, 2017).

A close reading of peer-reviewed, researched-based and credible sources allow us to better understand the experiences of trans athletes, to dispel the dangerous misinformation peddled in recent media accounts and political debates, to outline critical legal and policy discussions about trans athletes, and to highlight why access to sport matters for everyone. There is a clear consensus across multiple disciplines: the future of sport includes transgender women and girls.

In recent years debate has intensified over the inclusion of transgender athletes in athletic competition at all levels and across sports. Debate has emphasized trade-offs between safety, fairness and inclusion. In some settings the issue moves from sport governance to political debate and even legislation. On social media, discussion is vigorous and sometimes vitriolic. The intensity of the debate and politics can make it difficult to make sense of the regulatory and policy issues at stake. This chapter focuses on Olympic sport and argues that transgender athletes represent the latest battleground over inclusion in sport, which has in the past focused variously on female, black and disabled athletes. The long arc of history in sport and in the societies that sport is a part of has generally trended towards ever-greater inclusivity, though not without overcoming significant opposition and while recognizing that full inclusion of all people in sport is far from being realized. In the context of these broad societal trends, I make a case against the exclusion of transgender women athletes from elite women's sport and for their inclusion. Experience in law, policy, regulation and science in other contexts where fairness and inclusion are in conflict provide guidance. Ultimately, I argue for a pragmatic approach to inclusion consistent with consensus science and reflective of broadly shared values in sport and society Under such an approach, sport can demonstrate to the rest of society how to successfully grapple with a challenging issue, rather than serving as a political battleground.

While transgender people have had some success in gaining recognition and human rights in the collection of nations known colloquially as ‘the West’, a well-financed reactionary movement is attempting to roll back these gains. A constellation of white supremacist, conservative, and heteropatriarchal organizations and movements are in collusion with so-called ‘gender critical feminists’ to resist feminist and gender-inclusive challenges to traditional gender and sexual hierarchies by targeting trans girls and women – more so than trans boys, trans men and non-binary people – for surveillance and exclusion (Sharrow, 2021a, 2021b). In the past several years, bills designed to delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways have been introduced in many US state legislatures. Within this larger anti-trans campaign, bills designed specifically to block trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport have been signed into law in 11 US states to date and proposed in many others. It is no accident that organized sport is a site for contesting the inclusion of transgender people and that transgender girls and women are the primary targets of these campaigns. Debates about criteria for female eligibility and a succession of pseudo-scientific forms of ‘sex testing’ in elite levels of sport highlight both the ideological nature of the two-sex system and the intense material and cultural investment in maintaining its façade. In this chapter, I mobilize moral panic theory to focus specifically on anti-trans campaigns in the United States aimed at preventing trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport as evidence of a testosterone panic.

After the first transgender athletes participated in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, some called for the immediate exclusion of transgender women in sports while others argue that this exclusion is discriminatory behaviour in violation of human rights law. Under current standards, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has sought to address the balance between fairness and inclusion by allowing eligibility to be decided on a sport-by-sport basis for all transgender athletes (IOC, 2021). What if an international federation or national governing body concludes that transgender athletes should be prohibited or subjected to rigorous conditions for participation? Would those qualifications stand up to legal challenge by an affected athlete? Will some athletes have better legal protection based on the location of their challenge?

The United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) have domestic legal provisions that protect transgender individuals from discrimination based on their gender identity whereas the European Union (EU) includes protections based on sex alone (Patel, 2021). This chapter will discuss transgender inclusion policies in Olympic sport and address how potential challenges to the policies will be handled in court using existing case law. Legal precedent in similar challenges is rare. However, when eligibility policies do not explicitly ban transgender athletes or appear to be a targeted response to a specific athlete or individuals, it becomes more likely that those policies will not be considered discriminatory. Courts are hesitant to interfere in a governing body's policies if that organization appears to have a legitimate reason for its sport governance decisions.

This chapter critically examines the unprecedented 2020 decision by World Rugby's (WR) primarily male leadership (92% of board members) to ban transgender (trans) women from playing women's rugby union. We examined the process that was followed and found a lack of consultation with those directly impacted: women. To address this critical gap in the policy development process we conducted interviews and focus groups with cisgender female rugby players (junior to elite) of mixed ethnic backgrounds living in England, Canada and Australia. This was done with the support of rugby governing bodies and professional rugby teams. We found no support for WR's blanket ban. Rugby players felt the policy was a contradiction of rugby's claims it is a ‘game for all’. The minority of players with safety concerns supported exclusion on a case-by-case basis, with exclusion justified in a small number of narrowly defined circumstances (e.g. elite male players who transitioned recently). Importantly, the women and girls questioned why rugby's leaders had chosen to focus their energy on ‘protecting’ them from trans athletes but had ignored serious problems which cause them direct harm, such as a lack of funding, pervasive sexist and homophobic behaviour, sexual harassment, and substandard coaching and training facilities (relative to men). Our findings are consistent with and they support the position of women's sports organizations which have called on WR's male leaders to discard their blanket ban and undertake a rigorous, science-driven, collaborative policy development process.

The participation of trans people is increasingly being framed as a defining issue for women's sport. A dominant narrative, promoted by various newly formed feminist organizations located in the Global North, is that (cisgender) women's sport will be forever changed – and negatively so – by the increased recognition and sports participation of trans athletes. The message is the following: first, that biological sex is fundamentally binary; second, that the place of ‘females’ in sport depends on the recognition of this biological ‘truth’; and third, that sports policymakers must choose between advancing the rights of interests of (cisgender) women or those of trans athletes, but can't do both. I call this phenomenon biofeminism: the wielding of scientific knowledge and expertise to claim binary, biological sex difference as the ‘true’ basis of (cisgender) women's experience and her rights. In this chapter, I offer an exploratory, empirical account of this variety of feminist mobilization by analyzing an awareness-raising event held in the United Kingdom in 2019. I approach this event as an opportunity to better understand how biofeminist actors are organizing, their epistemic strategies and the political frames they rely upon to give meaning to ideologies of binary sex difference and impact policy and legislation. Given the unfinished business of realizing gender equity within the institution of sport, I reflect on how women's sports organizations might counter biofeminist mobilization and pursue allyship between cis and trans women.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and challenge the fairness rhetoric used by many US lawmakers to prevent trans girls and women from participating in school sports. Legislators embrace faulty scientific claims to assert unfairness based on physiology and many sport philosophers work from the premise that the first priority of sport is to be competitively fair. We argue that this is a misguided notion and that sport must be just before it can be fair. Using Iris Marion Young's framework of justice, we contend that excluding trans athletes from school sport is an injustice. We propose that focusing on the eradication of injustice is the ethical path forward for the inclusion and full participation of trans people in sport.

In the months leading up to, and during, the 2021 legislative session – the most dangerous for trans athletes in the history of the United States – 1,224 news articles, public statements and opinion pieces were published through online sources about trans people having access to sport. Conducting a textual analysis of those mediated articles, we conclude that trans athletes are being used by conservative political forces to instigate a social, moral panic. We identified three primary framings being used to instil a moral panic in articles published between 1 December 2020, and 1 June 2021, inflaming the debate over trans athletes. First, trans athletes have been positioned as spectres haunting the future of sport. Second, narratives of fear frame trans women as psychologically malevolent. Finally, conservative politicians are creating a moral panic to paint themselves as protectors of cisgender girls in sport. We conclude by describing the ways fears about trans athletes are being politicized by larger conservative forces that may have especially harmful ramifications for both trans athletes and cisgender women athletes.

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Laurel Hubbard made history as the first openly transgender woman to compete in an individual sport. In the weeks leading up to and following her performance, hundreds of original news articles were written about her – few of which fully supported her participation. In this chapter, we detail our content analysis of written news media created in the weeks surrounding Hubbard's Olympic debut. Using Ahmed's (2000) theorization of the discursive creation of ‘strangers’, we relay how journalists' usage of imagery and narrative structures framed Hubbard as an ‘other’, separate from other elite athletes and undeserving of her status as an Olympian – serving to powerfully shape public perceptions of Hubbard's identity, humanity and her right to compete in the sport that she loves.

Formidable social-cultural and legal challenges face trans athletes, particularly trans girls and women, at the global, national and local levels. Two underlying and mutually reinforcing themes are in evidence throughout these analyses: the principle of sport exceptionalism, and the power of the media to shape trans-related discourse.

The longstanding concept of ‘sport exceptionalism’ is routinely invoked to justify trans girls' and women's exclusion: that is, rules applying to other social contexts and workplaces must be suspended in relation to sport, so that women's ‘safety’ and ‘fairness’ may be guaranteed.

Mainstream and social media contribute to trans exclusionary attitudes, by spreading misinformation and promoting a moral panic over the spectre of trans women taking over girls' and women's sport. Detailed analyses of media treatment of trans athletes Laurel Hubbard and Lia Thomas demonstrate these trends. Moreover, media play a significant role when they are reporting on global, national and local developments in sport policies and practices, with media distortion of scientific findings exacerbating these problems.

An examination of conceptual and applied responses to these challenges provides the context for exploring the way forward: new ways of imagining sport that are inclusive and just.