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This research explores why racialized queer and gay men work out prior to Pride events in Pride Toronto and Fierté Montréal. The findings show that muscular aesthetics are a type of gay social capital, and participants acknowledge that this may also increase undesired attention and limitations because of their racialized bodies. Participants voice the paradox of the “unspoken rule,” which derives from ideas of authenticity and superficiality. To be one’s most genuine self, racialized queer and gay men must achieve a high physical bodily aesthetic but may lose identity and agency. Yet, they transform their bodies as a daily dedication to their own well-being. Most seem to be aware of the contradictions and tensions in developing a muscled body, which is a personal journey each of them went through to find their own understanding and meaning.

Through qualitative interviews with rugby players and coaches from England, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this study examined whether players were now performing a more caring and respectful form of masculinity, as inclusive masculinity theorists have proposed. Results illustrated that players gained pleasure from linking themselves to hypermasculine performances through celebration of violence, drunkenness, and overt displays of heteronormativity. Moreover, the players distanced themselves from homosexual desire and displayed sexist tendencies. Yet, findings also revealed a modest reduction in on-field violence and greater acceptance of female rugby players and diverse sexualities. These modest and seemingly incoherent shifts in the performance of masculinities were traced to the effect of multiple sociostructural changes, such as rule changes, rather than a broad rise of an inclusive “form” of masculinity.

In the 2022 National Football League (NFL) season, Miami Dolphins’ quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, received two concussions in 5 days and was taken off the field on a stretcher. The media framing around Tagovailoa’s concussions was focused on the flaws in the NFL concussion policy and the poor decision making of the neurotrauma consultant. However, no mention of Tagovailoa’s race was mentioned despite historical racist practices regarding concussions in football for racialized athletes. Given the media’s role in the framing of concussions and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, I conducted a content analysis to explore ESPN media articles dedicated to concussion stories during the 2022 NFL season. Ultimately, this paper concludes that through subtle but pervasive frames, the writers at ESPN continue to perpetuate racial stereotypes that construct racialized athletes as physiologically superior, intellectually inept, and criminally dangerous.

A year after publicly coming out as trans, Canadian soccer player Quinn became the first openly transgender athlete to win an Olympic medal when they won gold at Tokyo 2020 in the women’s tournament. They then participated in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, another first for a trans person. These accomplishments created an important media coverage that this paper sought to examine. Inspired by a queer methodology and the concept of “trans joy,” the project proposed a creative way of documenting trans stories that were either accurate and positive or less trans-inclusive. The findings were discussed in light of the existing literature on the media coverage of trans athletes, as well as that of women’s soccer. Recommendations for the media are also included.

Responsive to the recent proliferation of anti-trans sports policies and state legislation, this essay argues for a deeper collaboration across sports studies and trans studies. I offer an analysis of the 2020 Gender Inclusion Policy enacted by USA Ultimate (the North American governing body for the sport of ultimate frisbee) alongside an analysis of my embodied experiences while playing the sport. I develop a set of interrelated terms—the sporting body without organs and un/Gendered assemblages—that build upon Deleuzian and trans studies onto-epistemologies. Beyond an exploration of the gendered policies of ultimate frisbee, this essay’s broader purpose is to redirect the conversation about trans athletes and anti-trans policies away from the topic of how and why bodies become organized into categorical inclusion/exclusion, toward a focus on sporting moments and movements when gender can become a malleable element of play.

In response to growing reactionary movements pushing an antigender, transphobic moral panic, sports organizations are increasingly pressured to implement policies for the women’s category that more heavily regulate and/or exclude marginalized groups of women. These efforts are the latest iteration in a long history of the paternalistic, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal governance of women athletes. Drawing on a panel convened at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport in November 2022, we present an intersectional, interdisciplinary dialogue on how “sex” has been, and is currently, weaponized to reinforce normative gender logics. Throughout our reflections, we offer perspectives on raising the stakes for representation in women’s sport, following Jennifer Doyle, to rethink women’s sport as a “radically inclusive space.”

The equestrian sport of Charrería is the national sport of Mexico. This ethnographic study illustrates ways in which Charrería helps legitimize unequal gender relations, and in some circumstances, provides opportunity to challenge and rework the wider gender order. Hegemonic masculinities are performed and reified through the gendered performances of male charros and the complementary, opposite, yet unequal, gendered performances of female escaramuzas. Yet hegemony requires constant renewal and consent, and Charrería illustrates the potential for equestrian sports events to also contribute to challenging and reworking the wider gender order and reconfiguring relations between men and women, masculinities and femininities, to be less hierarchical and oppressive.