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In this study, we examined the association between girls’ participation in high school sports and the physical activity, weight, body mass, and body composition of adolescent females during the 1970s when girls’ sports participation was dramatically increasing as a result of Title IX. We found that increases in girls’ participation in high school sports, a proxy for expanded athletic opportunities for adolescent females, were associated with an increase in physical activity and an improvement in weight and body mass among girls. In contrast, adolescent boys experienced a decline in physical activity and an increase in weight and body mass during the period when girls’ athletic opportunities were expanding. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that Title IX and the increase in athletic opportunities among adolescent females it engendered had a beneficial effect on the health of adolescent girls.

This qualitative study focused on how girls' high school coaches in the United States Southwest thought about Latina teens' participation in school sports. Semi-structured interviews with coaches (4 women, 11 men) indicated they continue to rely on cultural (deficit) discourses implicating girls' families and culture when discussing Latina teens' sports participation. Coaches suggested that Latina teens' parents do not see the value of sports for girls, do not view sports as a pathway to college, are not involved or interested in their daughters' participation for cultural reasons, and are overly productive. These conceptualizations shape coaches' recruitment and pedagogical strategies within school sports contexts. More critical reflections could aid coaches and schools in developing more adaptive school contexts and strategies to better meet the needs of Latina teens and their families.

Recent research suggests positive links between adolescents' participation in sports and the quality of their relationships with their fathers. It is unclear, however, the degree to which the gendered nature of sports, and in particular the ways sports have been used to define and express masculinity, mean that these important links between sports participation and parent–child relationships might or might not extend to relationships with mothers. Recent scholarship connects joint recreational activities to mother–child relationships, but here we extend these ideas in connection to adolescents' formal sports participation. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health from the United States to evaluate potential connections between adolescent sports participation and maternal relationships, focusing on the adolescent's perspective on joint activities with mother, closeness to and warmth and communication with mother, and satisfaction with the relationship with mother. We also examine whether these associations differ for boys and girls. We found that adolescents' sports participation was good for relationships with their mothers, but also that there were gender differences in how sport paid off for boys and girls. We discuss our findings in terms of contemporary shifts in gendered norms and conclude that gender may remain salient to how sports participation can promote mother–child relationships.

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.

Over 30 years have passed since the enactment of Title IX, the legislation that required all schools receiving federal aid to provide “equal opportunity for both sexes to participate in interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural, and club athletic programs” (East, 1978, p. 213). Since 1972, girls’ and women's sport participation has increased in high schools, colleges and universities, the Olympics, and professional sports. Researchers interested in the study of gender and sport have raised critical questions and conducted empirical research concerning the meanings of masculinity and femininity, the implications of sport participation, the meanings of heterosexuality and homosexuality, gender equity, and media coverage of sports (Dworkin & Messner, 2002). One persistent theme in the literature on girls’ and women's sport participation is the connection between athleticism and femininity. Historically, researchers have used the role conflict perspective or the apologetic defense strategy to examine girls’ sport participation. In this chapter, I analyze athleticism and femininity on a high school basketball team using a third framework.

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.

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.