We welcome you to the first of two special issues1 on transgender (or trans) and nonbinary athlete inclusion and gender equity in the Sociology of Sport Journal (SSJ). In recent years, there has been growing interest and discussions on this topic both in academic and public spaces. In academia, particularly through qualitative research, scholarship on trans and nonbinary athletes is quickly expanding. Following Birrell and Cole’s (1990) foundational media analysis of U.S. tennis player Renee Richards—one of the earliest sociology of sport pieces focused on a trans athlete and questions surrounding trans inclusion—SSJ has continued to publish high-quality articles on trans and nonbinary athletes or eligibility policies, with over half of its pieces published in the last 6 years. Mirroring this growth, other sociology of sport journals (e.g., the International Review for the Sociology of Sport) and journals from related fields (e.g., sport philosophy, sport management, sport and exercise medicine) have increasingly contributed to this nuanced and intersectional conversation, through media analyses (Baeth & Goorevich, 2022; Billings et al., 2019; Brody, 2020; Love, 2019; Nelson et al., 2022; Scovel et al., 2023), policy analyses (Bekker & Posbergh, 2022; Buzuvis, 2013; Sharrow, 2017, 2023), (auto)ethnographies (Greey, 2023; Keesler, 2025; Klein et al., 2019; Tagg, 2012), commentaries (Tannenbaum & Bekker, 2019), and other qualitative methods like interviews and focus groups (Erikainen et al., 2022; Fischer & McClearen, 2020; Lucas-Carr & Krane, 2011; Phipps, 2021; Robinson et al., 2024). Moreover, rigorous and meaningful attention to the intersections of trans identities and sport have manifested outside of sport-specific fields, as illustrated in Transgender Studies Quarterly’s (TSQ) recent special issue titled “The Sports Issue,” which featured and was led by sport scholars and sociologists (Jones & Travers, 2023).
Notably, the rapidly growing interest and discussions in academic fields about trans and nonbinary athletes reflect a broader cultural, political, and societal trend. Since the mid-2010s, reactionary movements (i.e., mobilized and coordinated efforts that seek to maintain the social, political, and economic status quo) have focused their attention on gender expansive people (including, but not limited to, genderqueer, transgender, and nonbinary people), seeking to overtly and covertly restrict their participation and inclusion in society. Conservative U.S. lawmakers2 have sought to implement laws banning access to gender affirming care (especially healthcare; Choi & Mullery, 2023) and continue to make attempts to prohibit trans athletes from participating in sport in ways that are consistent with participants’ gender identities, instead requiring individuals to participate in the category of the sex they were assigned at birth (Caraballo & Greenesmith, 2022; Movement Advancement Project, 2023; Reed, 2024). These attempts have progressed to the point of overturning governors’ vetoes in Indiana, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Utah, resulting in even more bans on trans and nonbinary athletes (MacPherson, 2021; Whitehurst & Metz, 2022). Similar political and legal efforts have manifested outside the United States, in places such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. In the United Kingdom, for example, in 2021, the Sports Council’s Equality Group recommended the exclusion of trans women from women’s sport (Sports Councils Equality Group, 2021). Three years later, the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (i.e., the Cass Review) did not recommend offering gender affirming care for people under the age of 17, shifting England’s National Health Service previous approach (Cass Review, 2024). As the targeting of trans and nonbinary people in sport occurs across multiple geographical locations and cultures, our special issues seek to interrogate, problematize, and dismantle the multidimensional sociopolitical issues, contexts, and realities that have allowed for the reproduction of gender policing in sport.
One way of doing so is through the examination of proliferating strategic propaganda and popular discourse that seeks to radicalize the general public through messages such as “save women’s sport” (Brewer, 2024; Jakubowska, 2024; Jones, 2021; Karaçam, 2022; Posbergh, 2022b; Storr & Bekker, 2024). Such messaging implies that cisgender women need to be protected from trans women, despite evidence to the contrary (Fischer, 2023; Posbergh, 2022b; Pape, 2023). Also, these policies and rhetorics strategically use postfeminist language to create a political wedge issue among women’s rights advocates (Pearce et al., 2020). However, the ripple effects of these efforts have also harmed cisgender women, as illustrated in recent mischaracterizations of Algerian boxer Image Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting as trans women during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games. While Khelif and Yu-Ting are cisgender, the vitriol underlining the media focus3 on their bodies, identities, and sex/gender mobilizes and is mobilized by global transphobia and expectations of who “is” or “is not” a woman (i.e., those who do/do not fall within white, Western, heteronormative, colonial definitions of “woman”). Further, the purported legitimacy of these attacks is spearheaded by gender critical feminists (or, as they have [in]directly been likened to, “gender fascists,” see Bassi & Lafleur, 2022; Butler, 2021; Travers, 2024) who have co-opted science and policy in service of their antitrans and anti-inclusion aims, to construct a mirage of irrefutable and objective “Truths” (Jordan-Young & Karkazis, 2019; Pape et al., 2020; Stryker, 2006).
In response, discussion and debate of who belongs in sport (i.e., who is “allowed” into the sport, specifically the women’s category, and who is celebrated/villainized in sport) are increasingly becoming the (pernicious, harmful) norm (Posbergh, 2022b). Consequently, there has been a proliferation of discussions debating the feasibility, ethics, and fairness of including trans individuals in sport, from local to international levels. The tensions of this topic in academic circles and public spaces invite (or, as we argue, demand) thoughtful, innovative, and compassionate research and responses. To create a space for such conversations, we sought an outlet with rigorous intellectual standards that also encourages theoretically driven, methodologically nuanced, and empirically rich research, which led us to SSJ. This decision was made for several reasons. First, SSJ’s host organization, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS), is one of the few major academic organizations to publish multiple resolutions on issues of antitransgender bills and laws (NASSS, 2020a, 2021) and gender equity (NASSS, 2020b), and has hosted a critical mass of conference panels, sessions, and keynotes on the topic (see Travers, 2024). This reflects the organization’s, and by extension SSJ’s, alignment with its broader commitments to social justice, diversity, and equity: values central to our approaches as researchers, advocates, and individuals and that we sought to instill in our special issue. SSJ’s critical and thoughtful attention to this topic stems back to Birrell and Cole’s (1990) article on the complexities surrounding Renee Richards’ existence and participation in (women’s) professional sport, which is a “major site for the naturalization of sex and gender differences ... [and] continually reproduces men as naturally superior to women” (p. 18). As one of the earliest pieces in the sociology of sport written on a trans athlete/trans participation policy (and also in the top 5% of SSJ cited papers4), this article set the tone for the type of deliberate, forward-thinking scholarship we sought for this special issue.
Indeed, it was during and following the 2022 annual NASSS conference that our interest in developing a special issue focused on this topic emerged. Along with hosting and/or presenting in several sessions that elevated issues of trans and nonbinary inclusion in sport, physical activity, and physical culture spaces such as elite women’s sport, locker rooms, gyms, and the media, several of our guest editors participated in one of two panels focused on gender equity and inclusion. The first, titled “Justice for Trans Athletes,” included Dr. Anna Baeth and Ali Greey (along with Drs. Travers, Anima Adjepong, CJ Jones, and Libby Sharrow), and the second, titled “Critical Reflections on the Governance of Women Athletes,” included Drs. Sheree Bekker and Anna Posbergh (along with Drs. Travers, Cheryl Cooky, Madeleine Pape, and Sarah Teetzel; see Posbergh et al., this issue). While these panels were initially pitched to the conference organizers separately, they took place back-to-back at the conference and, collectively, allowed for an extensive conversation on the policing, disciplining, and surveillance of “nonnormative” (e.g., women’s, trans, nonbinary) bodies in sport. The scrutiny of nonnormative bodies was also connected to similar historical efforts (e.g., gender verification), nonsport spaces (e.g., prisons), and other modalities of oppression and discrimination (e.g., colonialism, racism, nationalism). Although presentations, sessions, and panels focused on LGBTQ+ inclusion and gender equity are not new to NASSS, there was a particular urgency underlining these discussions reflected in current public scholarship (Baeth & Goorevich, 2022; Cooky, 2022; Sharrow et al., 2021; Storr et al., 2021; Thorpe, 2022; Thorpe et al., 2022), academic scholarship (Greey & Lenskyj, 2023, 2024; Jones & Travers, 2023; Posbergh, 2022b; Scovel et al., 2023), and sociocultural momentum within North American and global (geo)politics (Pieper, 2022).
During the 2022 panels at NASSS, Travers noted that while it is encouraging that many have begun contributing to this important and highly salient body of work, some recent scholarship lacks necessary grounding in the subject’s rich history (see Adjepong, 2023; Gill-Peterson, 2014; Jones, 2021; Jones & Travers, 2023; Posbergh, 2022b; Travers, 2021, 2024). More specifically, some of this contemporary work that seeks to engage with trans and nonbinary inclusion does not adequately, if at all, attend to issues of racism, classism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism: issues that are intrinsically linked to and at the core of transphobia (Bey, 2022; Clare, 2001; Jones & Travers, 2023; Snorton, 2017; Sykes, 2014; Travers, 2021, 2024). Along these lines, scholars in and out of the sociology of sport who have been “doing this work,” including (but not limited to) Sykes (Sykes, 2014, 2016), Susan Stryker (Stryker, 1998; Stryker & Whittle, 2013); Eli Clare (Clare, 2001, 2015), C. Riley Snorton (Snorton, 2017), Anima Adjepong (Adjepong, 2018, 2021, 2023), Marquis Bey (Bey, 2017, 2021), and Jules Gill-Peterson (Gill-Peterson, 2014, 2024) have too long been overlooked in the current rush to publish on a timely topic. In this vein, it is vital to recognize that trans inclusion and justice in sport are not limited only to sex/gender but are deeply entangled with colonialism, white supremacy, racism, classism, and ableism. In this way, and in heeding Travers’ call at NASSS 2022, the articles in both special issues attend closely to these intersectional aspects and engage the foundational contributions of black, queer, trans, disabled, and decolonial (feminist) scholars (see Caudwell, this issue; Jones, this issue).
In all, to incorporate the politics and sensibilities of these entangled elements of gender equity and trans/nonbinary inclusion, we believe the relevance, salience, and necessity of meaningfully, thoughtfully, and reflexively engaging with this topic cannot be overstated. In the contemporary moment, there is increasing visibility of trans and nonbinary athletes at every level, in nearly every sport. Alongside this rise in awareness of trans and nonbinary athletes is the political mobilization of “debates” about trans inclusion (or, as is more common, exclusion) in sport. The rapidly growing interest and related discussions in the sociology of sport, alongside other fields (e.g., sociology, sport philosophy, sport management, sociolegal studies, feminist studies, sports medicine), reflect a broader cultural, political, and societal trend. In recent years, both conservative movements and what sociologist Madeleine Pape (2023) referred to as “biofeminist reactionary movements” have mounted mobilized and coordinated attacks against trans and nonbinary people. These attacks attempt to (c)overtly restrict trans and nonbinary people’s participation and inclusion in sport and seemingly attempt to erase trans and nonbinary people with wider society. As such, our special issues look to elevate trans and nonbinary voices, problematize power hierarchies that underpin sport’s white Western biocentric structures, and build solidarities with other underrepresented groups. In particular, we hope these special issues are complementary to, and build upon, the conversation started in CJ Jones and Travers’ special issue in TSQ (both of whom are included in this issue). We aim for our special issues to approach this topic through a critical sport (sociology) lens, thereby providing a discipline-specific outlet and subsequently, a resource for sociologists of sport (and those in adjacent areas of study).
From the Guest Editors
In our respective professional roles, personal lives, leadership positions, and community engagement activities/responsibilities, we have witnessed and felt the heightening attention and politicization of trans and nonbinary inclusion in sport across all levels. We have also observed (and experienced) the swath of misinformation, tension, and hatred that has emerged in response to trans and nonbinary participation in sport. In response, we recognize the need to amplify empirically driven research that troubles the structures underpinning the proliferation of conversation around trans and nonbinary inclusion in sport (and gender equity more broadly) while elevating the voices of the athletes at the center of these questions. Collectively, we are an interdisciplinary team of scholars, activists, and educators with backgrounds in the sociology of sport, physical cultural studies, sport management, and sport injury prevention. We bring a range of training and educational expertise, lived and field experiences, and positionalities to these special issues. Through our research, advocacy, and educational efforts, we have endeavored to build an intersectional feminist collaboration that draws from a black feminist-derived feminist ethics of care that centers individual expressiveness and a deep capacity for empathy and emotion: politics that are at the heart of each article in these special issues (Collins, 1989; Hooks, 2000; Nash, 2011). Notwithstanding our shared values, we arrive at this topic in diverse ways and in different contexts that we felt important to share in this introduction.
Dr. Anna Baeth (she/her) is a critical feminist scholar and a cultural studies practitioner of sport. The Director of Research at Athlete Ally since 2019, Baeth leads national conversations around transgender and nonbinary athletes. Her research centers on the gendering of sport spaces, the eternally moving body, and social movements and sport. At Athlete Ally, she has built a team of over forty researchers and has developed four longitudinal research projects centered on homophobia and transphobia in sport via media representation of LGBTQIA+ athletes; the sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions of collegiate athletes; Title IX and state level sport policies on gender; and an indexing of LGBTQI+ inclusive policies and practices of NCAA institutions. Most recently, Baeth’s work has focused on the stories of trans athletes and the nonbinary athlete experience, on allyship to the trans community, and on the intersection of Trumpist populism and antitransness within the U.S. Beyond her scholarly pursuits, Baeth is a cyclist and part-time assistant field hockey coach at Mount Holyoke College (MA). A queer, able-bodied, white cisgender woman and a Quaker, Baeth aims to use her position as a public scholar to hold space for all people (including trans and nonbinary athletes) to have capacious experiences—including joy, sadness, and wholeness—in sport.
Dr. Sheree Bekker (she/her) is an associate professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department for Health at the University of Bath. Her work focuses on feminist perspectives of sport and athleticism, with a particular interest in injury prevention and safety promotion. As a queer white woman from South Africa living in Bath, England, her research on LGBTQ+ topics is informed by diverse cultural experiences and a commitment to intersectional understanding. Navigating privilege and marginalization, Sheree aims to amplify queer voices, fostering inclusivity and challenging systemic inequalities in scholarly work. With a passion for challenging conventional norms, her research re-imagines sport as a space for social justice: transcending traditional gender norms and fostering an environment where everyone, regardless of gender, can participate and thrive. She is coauthor of a forthcoming book on the matter (Reaktion Books, Spring 2025) and colead of the Feminist Sport Lab. Sheree completed a Prize Research Fellowship in Injury Prevention at the University of Bath from 2018 to 2020 and received the 2019 British Journal of Sports Medicine Editor’s Choice Academy Award for her PhD research. In 2023, she was part of a research team that won CIHR-IMHA Inclusive Research Excellence Prizes in two out of five categories—“research impact” and “team science.”
Dr. Roc Rochon (they/them) is a culture worker, founder of Rooted Resistance (a grassroots practice reimagining physical activity for queer and trans people in the United States.), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Educational Leadership within the Sport Management program at the University of Connecticut. Their work is both qualitative and interdisciplinary, broadly exploring the intersections of sport, race, gender, sexuality, and place. They use Christina Sharpe’s wake theory and wake work as an intervention within sport and physical cultural studies that recognizes, “... the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearance of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 21), in addition to the arena, stadia, erasure, commodification, and imperialists exploitation of black bodies (domestically and in the Global South). Given the constant presence of the slave ship, Rochon’s orientation toward black queer, trans, and nonbinary liberatory bodywork is borne out of necessity. Their work speaks to a desire toward more black life as Saidiya Hartman (2008) described, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction” (p. 7), or as a way to combat what Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) called, “the sheer terror of disembodiment” (p. 12). Rochon is committed to exploring questions that tend to the black queer diaspora, liberation, rupture, the body, and movement cultures. They accepted the invitation to be a guest editor of this special issue because black queer perspectives and scholarship remain sorely limited on this topic within our field. In addition, these stories need to exist in multiple mediums; while the Sociology of Sport Journal is one, importantly, they must be told and continue living far beyond academia.
Dr. Anna Posbergh (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University. Her work broadly examines the governance and representation of women athletes, particularly through policies. Through this focus on policy, she specifically considers the politics of policy-making processes, such as which types of evidence are selected and how they are interpreted into policy. In her dissertation, she examined policies that strategically mobilized understandings of “protection” (i.e., through safeguarding athletes’ health, defending fair competition, and policing the social/medical definitions and boundaries of “woman”), culminating in an idea she coined as “protective policies” (Posbergh, 2022a, 2022b). This idea has since then informed the work of other feminist sport scholars (see Pape, 2023; Schultz, 2024). In subsequent research, she has examined the politics of selecting and translating trans science into policy, which constitutes her current area of research. As a biracial, heterosexual, cisgender woman who completed all her postsecondary training in the United States, she recognizes that she both occupies a space of privilege in conducting this research and is an outsider to the LGBTQ+ community/communities. Her involvement in this research topic, however, is motivated by her status as an ally and, to borrow from Denise Levy (2013), “seek[s] to challenge social injustice and foster understanding about the experiences of LGBTQ individuals” (p. 201).
In This Special Issue
The articles in this issue span geographical regions, levels and types of sport/physical activity, qualitative methods, and theoretical lenses and are written by scholars at varying professional career stages. Amidst these diverse considerations and perspectives, all share a commitment to interrogating, troubling, and/or dismantling the binary and normative structures that underpin sport (internally and externally). Janeanne Levenstein’s study in A sporting body without organs: Theorizing un/gendered assemblages explores the interconnections between sport studies and trans studies. Levenstein analyzes how the 2020 Ultimate Frisbee Gender Inclusion policy alongside their experiences playing reorient the dominant discourse about trans athletes and antitrans policy, revealing “un/Gendered assemblages” in sport as a component of play and movement culture. In their contribution, Queering gender equity policies for trans college athletes, Molly Harry and Ellen Graves consider the future of trans college athletes given the NCAA’s policy shift to follow each respective sport’s national or international governing body’s polices (e.g., World Aquatics, World Athletics, the International Basketball Federation [FIBA]). Specifically, they analyze gender equity and inclusion policies from eight sport governing bodies to interrogate the ways in which understandings of sex/gender are embedded, challenged, or negotiated in policy texts. In doing so, they offer three avenues to queer college sports participation and policy development to elevate trans individuals’ voices, provide greater accountability and transparency, and disrupt essentialist and exclusionary norms. Drawing from one of the NASSS panels that inspired this special issue, Anna Posbergh, Sheree Bekker, Madeleine Pape, Sarah Teetzel, and Travers’ dialogue shares their insights on the weaponization of “sex” and the antitrans movement in their dialogue Critical reflections on the governance of women and gender expansive athletes: An intersectional interdisciplinary dialogue. In particular, they discuss and problematize sport organizations reactionary policies and regulations that exclude women from participating in sport.
A significant part of the global antitrans movement consists of “gender critical feminism,” an idea that often underlines transexclusionary movements and advocates (Bennett, 2024). C.J. Jones’ article Gender critical feminism and trans tolerance in sports systematically reviews gender critical feminist rhetoric in sport, identifying a “trans tolerance” strategy that is simultaneously transaffirming and transexclusionary. Findings reveal that nonpartisanship, biofeminism, and trans tolerance are key themes in three gender critical feminist organizations, and calls for deeper analysis of transphobic rhetoric beyond a simplistic protrans versus antitrans framework. Michael Burke and Matthew Klugman’s contribution directly engages with gender critical arguments and narratives as they pertain to trans (anti-)inclusion. Through troubling key justifications for essentialized sex-based categories and illustrating the extensive harm to both cisgender and transgender athletes that results from a rigid, biocentric sex/gender binary, they ultimately argue for a more inclusive, expansionist perception of women’s sports.
Importantly, binaries that underline exclusionary/anti-inclusion efforts exist outside of sport as well and are linked to other movements, policies, and/or practices, in and out of sport that seek to regulate, discipline, and stifle (women’s) bodily autonomy. In Saving women’s sport: The case for feminist dialogue with the unregulated majority, Madeleine Pape examines how feminist analyses of eligibility regulations reveal policymakers’ ideological efforts to stabilize the female athlete category despite inconclusive science. Focusing on the “unregulated majority” of women athletes who benefit from the cisnormative, binary system, Pape analyzes a 1990s case involving gynecological exams and chromosome screening, highlighting how influential women’s voices were circumvented and exploring whether a feminist dialogue could address hegemonic femininity in these regulations. Focusing on the tracking of U.S. high school athletes’ menstrual cycles, in Weaponizing sport: Exploring the legal and policy implications of menstrual tracking for transgender and nonbinary athletes, Lindsay Darvin looks at the scrutiny of gender identity, sports participation, and health care highlights concerns over this practice, particularly its discriminatory impact on transgender and nonbinary athletes. Darvin examines the legal and policy implications of such tracking, calling for more inclusive sports policies and updated regulations to protect privacy rights.
Part of developing inclusive (sports) policies, across all sectors (e.g., trans inclusion, athlete health, etc.) includes elevating the voices of those who are impacted by policies, namely, athletes. In that vein, there exists a general dearth of literature that explicitly incorporates and elevates trans voices (Rosenberg & Tilley, 2021): a gap that Alexander Perry’s study “I’m the kind of trans they don’t care about”: Experiences of trans-masculine athletes in the NCAA looks to address. Through interviews with 13 transmasculine NCAA athletes, Perry reveals that their (trans)gender and athletic identities are intertwined and mutually constituted, and although they are not the primary targets of antitrans policies, Perry argues they are still affected by broader antitrans rhetoric and legislation.
Media also plays an important role in developing public opinion of trans and nonbinary athletes, which can have an impact on policies and policy implementation (Scovel et al., 2023). In Transgender athletes’ testimonies of existence and resistance: Breaking gender binaries in online women’s sport media, Monica Crawford uses critical discourse analysis to analyze media representation and construction of transgender athletes through five women’s sport media outlets. Findings reveal that women’s sport media outlets act as a “counterpublic” to reactionary depictions of transgender and nonbinary athletes through polarized sport media. Canadian soccer player Quinn made history as the first openly transgender athlete to win an Olympic medal at Tokyo 2020 and later participated in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Barbara Ravel’s contribution, “Quinn, who goes by one name”: Examining the media coverage of the first openly trans nonbinary athlete to win an Olympic medal examines the media coverage of these achievements, utilizing a queer methodology and the concept of “trans joy,” and offers recommendations for more inclusive media practices.
In assessing past or contemporary shortfalls, scholars also discussed ways to move forward, both immediately within the sociology of sport and adjacent fields. Jayne Caudwell’s contribution, Trans women and/in sport: Exploring sport feminisms to understand exclusions, traces the development of sport feminist theory, particularly drawing attention to its limited (or absent) engagement with race and geography/coloniality in past sport feminisms. The result, Caudwell notes, was a narrow understanding of “woman” that inhibited present/future sport feminisms to adopt a more transinclusive theorization. To move forward, Caudwell advocates for an antiracist transfeminism, looking to key scholarship from postcolonial, black, queer, and transfeminists to disrupt the dominant (i.e., binary, white, colonial) model of womanhood.
In closing, outside of its academic significance, we view these special issues as resources for academics, activists, educators, and advocates to learn from and reference high-quality, scientific research. In doing so, our hope is that members from these communities can meaningfully advocate for the inclusion of gender diverse athletes at all sport levels and support more holistic, inclusive sport policies in the future. In particular, having SSJ as the outlet for these special issues is an intentional and important choice, given the social justice imperatives and historic political groundings in the discipline of sociology of sport, more broadly, and NASSS more specifically. Given the empirical, theoretical, and methodological rigor of each article in these special issues, we hope they can serve as a resource for those who are interested in learning more about this topic, both in and out of academia.
Notes
While we initially intended for our special issue topic to constitute a single issue, we were fortunate to receive several high-quality submissions to our call for papers. As such, and with the support of SSJ editor Cheryl Cooky and Human Kinetics, we were able to organize two issues: this one (December 2024) and one in 2025.
While conservatives in the United States have largely spurred antigender and antitrans politics, we want to note that this is not a strictly bipartisan issue. For instance, in January 2024, the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed two anti-LGBTQ+ bills with the support of both House Republicans and Democrats (GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, 2024).
At the time of writing this introduction, Khelif, who went on to win the gold medal at Paris in the women’s welterweight division, has filed a criminal complaint over “acts of aggravated cyber bullying” to French authorities, naming both J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk (who has a trans child), both of whom have frequently espoused transphobic comments and ideas (Keslassy & Ritman, 2024).
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Ali Greey for their contributions in developing this special issue, particularly the call for papers. We are endlessly grateful for your time, energy, and efforts.
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