Women’s sport has been and remains a site of intensifying public debate. Amidst its rapid growth and rising popularity, there is an equally increasing visibility of gender expansive people, particularly in the women’s category, subsequently prompting a global rise of reactionary social and political movements pushing an antigender, transphobic moral panic (Baeth & Goorevich, 2023). For instance, in the 2022 U.S. legislative session, there were more antitrans youth athlete bills proposed or passed than out trans athletes (Posbergh & Baeth, in press): a devastating political reality that extends globally (see Baeth & Goorevich, 2022; Lavietes, 2023). A key aspect of reactionary movements consists of what Judith Butler (see also Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017) recently diagnosed as antigender ideology, which they have also characterized as “fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments” (Butler, 2021, para. 16). More specifically, Butler describes “antigender ideology” as a movement that “insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction” (Gleeson, 2021, para. 16). In essence, antigender ideology aims to eradicate “gender,” positioning it as an existential threat and urges the return to “biological sex” as a singular “Truth” and the “correct” system by which to organize our social world.
However, in the sociology of sport and adjacent fields, there exists a substantial body of research that has problematized a separate relationship between “sex” and “gender” in a variety of empirical areas such as policies (Bekker, in press; Cavanagh & Sykes, 2006; Pape, 2019, 2021; Pieper, 2016; Posbergh, 2022), medical histories (Erikainen, 2019; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Jette, 2011), and media (Scovel et al., 2023). Within this area of inquiry, researchers have drawn from an equally wide range of theoretical and methodological tools to attend to the sociocultural and material realities bodily experiences, especially for women, which are influenced by entwined understandings of “sex” and “gender” (Newman et al., 2022; Thorpe et al., 2020). Outside of sport-related disciplines, there is ample work that has also dismissed the easily separable natures of “sex” and “gender,” in areas such as women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, sociology, and science and technology studies, to name a few. Though the focus on “sport” unites much of this research, several scholars have noted the mobilization of sport as a vehicle to stabilize the meaning(s) of sex and gender (Jones & Travers, 2023; Pape, 2019; Sharrow, 2023). These endeavors are part of a longer historical project driven, in part, by anxieties around the active female body and corresponding strategies to “protect” women and the women’s category, alongside broader societal, cultural, and (geo)political tensions (Butler, 2021; Cahn, 2015; Verbrugge, 2002; Wells, 2020). Theories involving the division between “sex” and “gender” have constructed ideals of athleticism and “fairness,” particularly across the extensive history of sex testing in sport, thereby demonstrating its “resiliency” and underpinning gendered, colonial, and racist logics (Pieper, 2016; Wells, 2020).
Overall, in the context of this broader history, the sociology of sport is placed at the center of these debates in this contemporary moment. Indeed, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) released a public response to World Rugby’s proposed effective ban on trans women’s participation in September 2020, followed by a public statement in April 2021 that condemned the proliferation of antitrans laws and bills in sport. Considering the current political and cultural reality, and the urgency of the sociology of sport and related fields to respond, we present this intersectional, interdisciplinary dialogue with critical reflections from feminist and sports scholars from diverse disciplines. Drawing on our collective expertise on the governance of women’s sport, we discuss how sport and “sex” have been and are currently weaponized to reinforce normative gender ideals, and utilized to exclude women who are not cisgender and/or “normatively” bodied, as well as queer and transgender people, from women’s sport. We focus on the framings of “governance” and “regulation” throughout our discussion given the extensive history of gender policing in (women’s) sport, and its influences on and from societal controls over women’s bodies. Such global efforts have proliferated in response to, as Butler (2021) describes, the passage of “progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex] and feminist movements” (para. 4) and the linkage of the term “gender” to “a diverse set of social and economic anxieties produced by increasing economic precarity under neoliberal regimes, intensifying social inequality, and pandemic shutdown” (para. 9). As such, the aim of this article, following a panel convened on this topic at the annual NASSS conference in Las Vegas in November 2022, is to come together to reflect on how we have come to this point, the challenges that lay ahead, and how we might move toward a liberated future.
Authors and Contributors
As early career scholars who have built an explicitly feminist collaboration, we (Anna and Sheree) were keen to bring together several interdisciplinary scholars across multiple disciplinary spaces (e.g., [sport] sociology, philosophy of sport, and sport and exercise medicine/sport science), as well as diverse knowledges and experiences. Subsequently, when we convened our NASSS Las Vegas panel, we invited feminist scholars with whom we had previous notably generous exchanges and who have a track record of applying a feminist ethics of care to their own work and collaborations on this topic (Collins, 1989). Drawing from work by Black feminist scholars (see hooks, 2000; Nash, 2011), we understood a feminist ethics of care to include “the value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy” in our individual and collective knowledge making and validation processes (Collins, 1989, p. 767).
In the next section, we provide a brief overview of our backgrounds, along with our invited coauthors (in alphabetical order), to demonstrate our expertise on the governance of women athletes, more specifically, and the maintenance of biocentric western sex/gender/sexuality logics in contentious (physical) spaces, more broadly.
Dr. Anna Posbergh (she/her): I am a second-generation Taiwanese-American cisgender woman who was born in the United States and completed all my postgraduate work at U.S.-based universities. Overall, my research looks at the governance and representation of women athletes, especially through policies (Bekker & Posbergh, 2022; Posbergh, 2022, 2023) and media (Posbergh, Andrews, et al., 2023; Posbergh, Clevenge, et al., 2023; Posbergh & Clevenger, 2022). For my dissertation, I examined the development and implementation of, what I call, “protective policies,” which are regulatory documents that seek to ensure the health and safety of women athletes, defend “fair competition” in women’s sports, and/or prevent the violation of social and medical boundaries that define who “counts” as a woman. In my current research, I focus on the development and implementation of trans eligibility policies, particularly around the politics of selecting and translating (scientific) evidence.
Dr. Sheree Bekker (she/her): I was born in South Africa, grew up in Botswana, completed my Ph.D. in Australia, and now call Bath (United Kingdom) home. My transdisciplinary research contributes primarily toward a feminist sport and exercise medicine/sport science. My current research is comprised of two key strands: (a) understanding the influence of gendered environments on sports injury (Parsons et al., 2021) and (b) conceptualizing gender inclusive sport (Bekker et al., 2023; Storr & Bekker, 2024). I have published critiques of various “female eligibility regulations” (Bekker, 2022; Tannenbaum & Bekker, 2019), on eligibility regulation as a safeguarding issue (Bekker & Posbergh, 2022) and as an athlete health issue (Bekker & Kolanyane-Kesupile, 2021), and on Advancing Feminist Innovation in Sport Studies (Thorpe et al., 2023).
Dr. Cheryl Cooky (she/her): I am a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Purdue University, United States. I am a cisgender white woman, born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. As a feminist sports studies scholar, my research focuses on the intersections of gender, media, sport in/and American culture. I am committed to advancing public sociology of sport (Cooky, 2017) and to advocating for gender equality in sports contexts (Cooky, 2022), and my research has examined policies of bodies in women’s competitions with respect to sex testing or gender verification in sport (Cooky & Dworkin, 2013; Cooky et al., 2013).
Dr. Madeleine Pape (she/her): I am an Australian Olympian turned sociologist of gender. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. My research has focused on how scientific claims about sex and sex difference become part of efforts to advance gender equality in both sport and biomedical research (Pape, 2019, 2020, 2021). My current work looks to understand how feminist actors shape definitions of sex and gender in policy and legislation and with what consequences, for all women and for the lives of trans people.
Dr. Sarah Teetzel (she/her): I am a cisgender white woman, currently working as a professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. My research focuses on applied ethical issues in sport and I have published on issues of inclusivity, policies, and fairness in the women’s category from a sport philosophy perspective, particularly around doping, trans inclusion, and allyship (Teetzel, 2006, 2014, 2020).
Dr. Travers (they/them): I am a professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. I am a trans/nonbinary white settler, born in Toronto, Canada. A central focus of my research is on transgender children and youth, as well as the relationship between sport and social justice, with particular emphasis on the inclusion and exclusion of women, queer, and trans people of all ages (Travers, 2008, 2018). My scholarship in sport studies also situates issues related to transgender kids and young people in white settler colonial contexts that are characterized by extreme social inequality (Travers, 2021).
We also recognize the limitations of both our perspectives and this article, particularly considering its origins at our NASSS panel and our academic positions at Global North universities. We acknowledge that our perspectives are steeped in whiteness and stacked with mostly cisgender experiences. This cannot be ignored given the history of marginalization both in academia and in sport. We hope that this dialogue supports the ongoing, crucial research by trans, nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, and disabled feminist scholars (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; Adjepong & Carrington, 2014], and Marquis Bey [Bey, 2017, 2021]). It is very important to us that we recognize that we are only the latest to contribute to a long conversation in this space, and we are indebted to the ideas and the work that came before us. As such, we have taken great care to pay attention to our citational politics of care (Ahmed, 2017; Smith et al., 2021) to reflect and recognize explicitly where our knowledge is situated within and informed by trans, nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, and disabled feminist scholars, activists, and people. In this way, we see ourselves situated as in dialogue and working intersectionally “in the interests of better addressing substantive interests that are of shared concern” (Evans & Davies, 2011, p. 265). We are all committed, ultimately, to “stay with the trouble” in this space (Haraway, 2016).
The remainder of this article offers a curated, intersectional, interdisciplinary dialogue, organized thematically, based on our panel’s discussion. We conclude with a coda reflecting on future directions.
A (Curated) Dialogue on the Governance of Women and Gender Expansive Athletes
What Is the Most Pressing Concern Around the Regulation of Women and Gender Expansive Athletes Right Now? What Should We Be Mobilizing Around?
Cheryl Cooky: I find it highly problematic that arguments and assumptions that have historically justified the exclusion of women in sport and the unequal treatment of competitors in women’s sports are being dangerously mobilized to exclude trans athletes. From a policy perspective, this history is essential in thinking about how ostensible “women’s sports advocates” are using those same problematic essentialist beliefs to exclude trans athletes in women’s competitive events. Excluding trans men or trans women from sports and women’s sporting opportunities is a threat to women’s sport. Trans inclusion is not a “[special] issue.” It is a part of the larger struggle for equality and equity in women’s sports. All of us who care about women’s sports should be mobilizing around and advocating for trans inclusion. It is unfortunate to me that some women’s sports advocates are espousing very transphobic discourses; and some of these discourses are really easy to translate to the public: “biological differences between men and women” or “trans women are men, they’re not real women.” That has a lot of traction (with the public), and as somebody who thinks about this through the lens of media and discourse, I think that that’s really unfortunate for the broader movement for inclusion and equality in women’s sports.
Anna Posbergh: I think the malleability of how we understand and implement “protection” is a key consideration and challenge, with “fairness” and “safety” (two arguments often used by antitrans inclusion advocates) contributing to who and what sport organizations, policymakers, athletes, activists, and any other involved personnel are protecting. Although girls and women face very real material and environmental harms in sport as a result of coaching pressures, abuse, and the association of unrealistically thin bodies with success (Ackerman et al., 2020), the inclusion of trans, queer, and nonbinary athletes do not contribute to these well-documented issues in sport. On the contrary, protecting traditional ideas of sex (segregation) and what a woman’s body should look like/is physically capable of through discourses of protection and fairness do enact these harms by reinforcing hierarchies that uphold sport’s whiteness, heteronormativity, and Westernization (Adjepong & Carrington, 2014).
Sheree Bekker: For me, the current challenge is twofold: (a) education around gender-expansiveness and (b) envisioning and communicating a future beyond the binary. This work, of course, extends well beyond sport, however, we also know that sport is a powerful source of social change. Women’s sport is currently having a major moment and I would challenge us all to think about how we can, as Jennifer Doyle (2023) writes, rethink women’s sport as a “radically inclusive space.”
What Are Your Thoughts on Sport Being Used as a Vehicle for Reactionary Extremism and Mobilization of the Far Right?
Travers: This underscores the need to ground our work in antioppression struggles. It is not new. Black men were lynched, not because there was a desire to protect white women and girls, but because there was a desire to economically cripple emerging Black businesses and to reassert white supremacy. The people driving the antiabortion movement are not concerned about babies and children at all. If it were, at least I would take them a little bit seriously and we could have a conversation. But that is not what it is all about at all. I think it is really important when we talk about antitrans policies in sport, that we really take care to ground it in these wider struggles because there is a long tradition of using emotionally loaded topics that construct these issues, so they tug on commonsensical understandings. Anima Adjepong (2018, 2021) has done some brilliant work in this regard where they point out that when the Christian right failed to win certain campaigns against abortion, against LGBT rights in the United States, so they went overseas to Africa and other places in the world. They tried it there, they perfected it there, and now they are bringing it back. In terms of access, we know that poverty is racialized in Canada and the United States so we are going to see the ongoing division between privileged and marginalized trans people being replicated, and that sport is going to play a certain role in this. Sport normalizes heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and social inequality, and produces a myth of meritocracy. If we narrowly focus on sport, then we are not doing our jobs.
Cheryl Cooky: This is not just happening in the United States either. It is really about a larger kind of push to a far-right political ideology and structure. The representation on this panel reflects a number of different countries that are struggling with far-right movements. And Travers, your comment about linking this is not new, and linking this to other histories is really important. If we are just confining the conversation to sport, we are doing a disservice in a lot of ways.
Anna Posbergh: Michelle Alexander (2010) “The New Jim Crow” comes to mind in this landscape of “we thought there was progress and then we moved back.” We see those same strategies: once they do not work anymore, you turn groups against each other, you turn feminists against each other, and you adapt your same strategies to fit whatever context is going on. To echo Travers and Cheryl, it is important to remember that these issues are everywhere and it is vital to draw those connections and build those solidarities so that we as sport scholars are not so isolated.
Has There Been a Return to Sex Testing? Are There Similarities and Differences Between What We Are Seeing Now Versus in the Past?
Sheree Bekker: I want to talk about the return of genital exams. In the lead-up to the U.S. midterm elections, we saw Republican senators advocating for legislation for grassroots and girls’ sports to have genital examinations because, they argue, that is the simplest way to assess who is a girl and who is a boy. While I do not believe this legislation passed, it is not hyperbolic to say that this is happening in sport right now, under the guise of scientism. I recently wrote a critique in The BMJ of the new World Aquatics policy (Bekker, 2022), which now mandates a series of tests, including chromosome testing (Barr body testing), androgen sensitivity testing, and blood testosterone limits, and an assessment of pubertal development using the Tanner Scale. These tests, as I discuss, are not reliable, inappropriate, subject to false interpretation, and an invasion of personal and medical privacy. As Frankie de la Cretaz (2023) writes, this is connected to the erosion of bodily autonomy and the potential for sexual abuse. Sports bodies have returned to sex testing through a bait-and-switch: utilizing old, outdated, and previously discarded tests and draping them in new pseudo medico-scientific language.
Travers: Jules Gill-Peterson (2014) is one of the most brilliant scholars on issues related to transgender embodiment and makes the point that endocrinology, at its foundation, is colonial. The Tanner Scale is an age-based progression from childhood through puberty and indicates what happens at each stage. There are pictures too, with cut-outs of little white paper dolls. It is very Eurocentric, very normative, and it is used to justify puberty suppression for racialized girls. But the Tanner Scale is accepted as this neutral objective scientific measure when, in fact, it is foundationally racialized and racist.
Sheree Bekker: It is important to recognize the connections between the rhetoric of “saving women’s sports” and “protecting women” with its colonial and racist underpinnings. We must ask “which women”, because as scholars (including our coauthors here) have shown, this kind of approach only tends to protect white women from the Global North (Bekker & Posbergh, 2022).
Madeleine Pape: I think we need to do a better job of articulating how the return of sex testing in sport puts all women and girls at risk, and not only those who have gone through a transition experience but also who have intersex characteristics, for which the potential harms are already considerably high. Any women and girls whose appearance does not conform to heteronormative, cisgender norms can be targeted, and indeed there is already anecdotal evidence of this at the grassroots and youth level. A guiding principle for all of us should be to strive to advance women’s interests in sport without having to rely on rights violations to do so.
Anna Posbergh: I think the way that “sex” is defined in sex testing policies is similar to discourses around Roe v. Wade, particularly with the “pro-life” versus the “pro-choice” labels. If we take both labels at face-value without considering the deeply entrenched religious, political, historical, and cultural meanings attached to them, who is not “pro-life” in the sense of “pro-life” being antideath? I would argue a similar strategy holds true for sex testing advocates. If we think about how we (simply) define and distinguish “gender” or “sex,” then sex testing itself might not seem like such a bad thing as Madi mentioned. But the reality is that sex and gender are much more complicated than conveyed by sex tests, in terms of how much they are steeped in Western, colonial, racial, and scientized norms. There is a similar case for trans inclusion and explains, to an extent, why it is perhaps easy for people to buy into seemingly commonsense logics that trans folks are “always” unfairly advantaged and are obstructing the progress and success of cis women and cis girls.
Travers: Within the science of sex testing, leading experts were saying, “this isn’t scientific at all” (Wells, 2020): something that Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young were really successful at explaining to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) because there is no science behind this. Therefore, the IOC finally goes, “you’re right, sex is not binary, it’s too complicated” and you have this millisecond that you think it is a win. Then the IOC says is, “you’re right, but it could be sports specific. We are abdicating our responsibility.” This leaves the dirty work up to individual sports federations. It is not accidental that it has gone the way that it has because there was a U.K. document discussing whether sports were gender specific. Archery or shooting is not whereas there are gender specific differences in weightlifting. We also saw it with Lia Thomas and World Aquatics, and before that we had World Rugby. In the United States, we are seeing this dog whistle politic around trans kids, trans girls, and trans women as predators in waiting and who are going to impede the success of cis girls and cis women in sport.
These are reinforced by this constellation of white supremacists, heteropatriarchal fascists who are aligned with these gender critical, and cisgender athletes who are bathing in naiveté to defend women’s sports and girls’ sports from this incursion. At the same time, the majority of the people who claim to defend women’s sports have absolutely no interest in gender equality and women’s sports at the time. I am really alarmed. It is so dangerous. It may just be that people like me who are white and middle class feel frightened that perhaps our privileges will not hold, whereas more marginalized groups have been dealing with this kind of vulnerability all along. This may just be a little moment of reckoning for me, that my privileges are no longer secure.
What Is the Impact of Sex Testing and Regulations on Girls’/Women’s Bodies on Youth and Grassroots Sports?
Cheryl Cooky: The thing that I also think is dangerous is that the IOC, World Rugby, and World Aquatics have the resources to do chromosomal testing, but how does that get implemented in youth sport organizations or high schools? They are not going to have those resources, so what are they going to do instead? What is the easiest way to verify sex? You make the competitors drop their pants. That is happening and has happened to kids. This is an issue for the larger women’s sports community: it is not just going to be targeted toward the gender nonconforming kids, but it might be all girls. If we want to “protect girls,” we need to be asking who is coaching, who is running sports? In many spaces, it is male-dominated. The team moms might be doing it [verifying sex] but either way, it is a trauma [for the athletes].
Travers: We have this long-standing practice of questioning girls and women who do not conform to gender normative appearance standards. Kids who have short hair are accused of being boys and then they have to prove their femininity. This was happening before, and it has been happening lately with the antitrans laws, policies, or bills that have been accepted, especially in the United States. When I wrote my book about trans kids in 2018 (Travers, 2018), I was concerned that current transinclusive policies, which were binary-based, were contributing to the creation of two classes of trans people in terms of who had access to gender affirming healthcare and who desired it.
For trans kids here, it is so important to do the work that we are doing. Last year, I was corresponding with a doctor in a U.S. state where trans affirming healthcare for kids was going to be abolished. She was a pediatrician and she asked me what to say, and so forth. She was very supportive of trans kids, and she said, “I don’t know what to do if it passes, I don’t know what to do.” In 2011, I was at a school board demonstration in support of a school adopting an antihomophobia policy. There were a bunch of high-school kids, unsurprisingly from the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, and one young woman said to me, “I don’t know what to do if they don’t pass it.” In the first story, they banned the affirming healthcare, whereas the school board passed the antihomophobia policy. But I said the same thing to both people: “there’s some kid who sees you standing up for them. You may win, you may lose. But that kid saw you right there.” I want to win. I am really tired of all these lawsuits. But being there is just as important because people see you. It is never wasted. Kids can come from horrible situations and some adult somewhere treats them well and with respect and it is enough. We have to keep going and not think that it is necessarily about the win or the loss, but we have to look at the small wins because they matter.
Sheree Bekker: We also need to recognize the grassroots sports do not have that top-down policymaking. They are often being led by their memberships, who increasingly are young, queer people who just want to participate in sports. These sports are increasingly working to find ways to make their sports reflect their membership, as retention to them is more important than regulation. Young people today tend to be much more open and inclusive than we have ever been, and I think we can learn a lot from that drive that is coming from young people today who really are pushing for this. In the end, sports are businesses. They do not want to lose their participants because that is how they keep themselves afloat and I think they will have to grapple with that at some point.
How Do We Reroute the Focus to the Actual, Documented Issues in Women’s Sport (e.g., Media Coverage, Equal Pay, Resource Inequality, Equitable Treatment, Violence, and Abuse)?
Madeleine Pape: Something that is alarming to me is to see the inclusion of trans women being treated as the defining issue for women’s sport right now, in the media and by some lobby groups, as though the many systematic failures to address gendered inequities and harms in sport have become inconsequential. It is much easier to target the rights of a tiny minority of athletes than it is to do the hard work of calling out and finding solutions to gendered and intersectional injustices. At the very least, I think the women’s sport movement would gain a lot from approaching issues of eligibility from a position of humanity, and care, and avoid portraying minority athletes as a “threat” to women’s sport. I think that is another space we need to do to take back the narrative.
Cheryl Cooky: I do not think that is accidental. I think you are spot-on that there was this moment. Dunja Antunovic and I were trying to capture this moment in our book (Cooky & Antunovic, 2022) because it did seem like in the United States, at least discursively, those kinds of conversations were happening. I know some of the narratives are problematic, but the “women’s sport is good business” and the “investment in women’s sports” [narratives] and thinking about equality are in those conversations. There is a visibility for feminism, equality, and empowerment in media narratives that seemed to signal important shifts in the culture around gender equality in women’s sports.
I met a group of people at the bar in the airport, and they asked what I worked on. It is interesting to trace the conversation because, for a while it was when I told people what I worked on, the response was, “well no one’s interested in women’s sports, etc.” And now the response is, “what do you think about the trans issue?” That’s the new conversation that we are having. And I do not think it is accidental that at the moment when women’s sports are making significant advances in establishing itself as “good business,” at a moment when globally women athletes are advocating for pay equity and equitable resources, at a moment when women athletes are advocating for racial justice and for LGBTQIA+ communities, at a moment when journalists and media outlets are writing pieces critical of sexism in women’s sports, that we see a backlash to that emerging feminist activism in women’s sports. And the backlash has taken shape in the form of antitrans policies that rely on very retrograde ideologies around female frailty and “protecting” women. All this is part of a reactionary backlash movement that is happening both within this kind of very sports-specific context, but then as what Ryan [Storr] was saying [in a previous conference session], as part of a broader far-right movement within Global North countries.
Travers: It is a moral panic.
Cheryl Cooky: Exactly. I want to shout-out Anna Baeth, who wrote about moral panics, and Adam Love, who is the editor for Engaging Sport and published that work (Baeth & Goorevich, 2022).
Sarah Teetzel: The amount of attention that trans athlete inclusion receives on conference programs now is astonishing. While dialogue is obviously welcome, the sudden influx of opinions on where, how, and why trans athletes should compete is surprising given the absence of attention many sport scientists and philosophers gave to any issue impacting women and sport prior. The interest in “protecting women’s sport” has exploded in recent years, particularly in Europe, with many academics weighing in on trans athlete eligibility. As Robin Dembroff (2020) demonstrates, trans-exclusive arguments are not new. More than 40 years of feminist literature responds to these arguments, but trans-exclusive philosophers taking an interest in trans inclusion typically do not cite the central works in trans and feminist theory prior to launching themselves into the conversation. I suspect that the interest in where trans athletes should compete will dwindle as the next big ethical dilemma hits the sports world. However, the damage it will do in the meantime is immense.
Anna Posbergh: What struck me in my doctoral research was how some participants seemingly “switched” their stances on protection for female and trans eligibility versus for Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports (REDs) or other health issues. More specifically, when talking about REDs, most participants explicitly noted that the current training regimes and sporting cultures are unsustainable and that athletes should not sacrifice their long-term well-being to participate in elite sport. Yet, when we spoke about female and trans eligibility, the health aspect either disappeared under the “fairness” claims, became secondary to protecting the “integrity of women’s sports,” or was reframed through “we need to provide treatment to those from developing countries,” which ushers in the problematic position of the West as “saviors” (Mwaniki, 2017).
As Academics, Activists, and Advocates, How Do We Build a Feminist Coalition That Promotes Trans Inclusion?
Madeleine Pape: I want to return to the phenomenon of antitrans groups contacting vice chancellors to try to undermine the position, the job, the career of someone with whom they disagree. This is a real issue that could affect any one of us, though I think early career researchers could be particularly vulnerable to being negatively impacted by this. And, not only sociologists, either. I have even seen Ph.D. students in sports science attacked for the research that they are engaged in, simply because it dares to inquire about the possibilities for trans women to compete in the women’s category. I think we need to be better prepared and organized for strategies like that, such as having a guide on best practices for how targeted scholars can engage their department chairs and vice chancellors. Just to be proactively getting ahead of the game instead of being on the defensive if something like this does happen.
I also want to recognize that this is happening in a wider context where “canceling” or “deplatforming” has become a common strategy for all people who disagree with what is being said, whether they be supportive of or opposed to trans rights, and that for me is a tension. The harms of antitrans rhetoric are significant and need to be mitigated. Allies need to step up to do the work of educating the “movable middle” on how and why such rhetoric is harmful. I am just concerned that deplatforming is not an effective strategy for that.
Cheryl Cooky: I wrote an NBC Think op-ed article and was targeted as a result (Cooky, 2022) and I want to acknowledge a couple of spaces of privilege that I occupy. I think it is important to acknowledge that. But I think it is what brings me here to this table. After that piece, I was the target of death threats, online harassment, and an online campaign to have me fired from the university, and so on. I was doxed by the U.K. Daily Mail. They essentially described me, as opposed to saying “Cheryl Cooky, she’s a professor at Purdue,” it was “Cheryl Cooky, she lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, she owns an X-amount valued home.” They did not say my address, but they gave enough information.
I have served as university senate chair and I had very good relationships with my university’s administrative leadership. When I was targeted, part of the strategy was to call the university. The president was fielding calls, the provost was fielding calls. I am so grateful that I had those relationships because what happened was the provost called me on the phone and was genuinely concerned. He asked, “Hey Cheryl, are you okay? What’s going on? We’re getting these calls. They want us to fire you.” It was that institutional privilege that helped my situation. I have reached out to advocacy organizations like Athlete Ally (to find ways I can leverage my privileges to amplify their work) because I am also at an institution that has adopted the Chicago principles1 (Cornell Free Speech Alliance, 2021). The University of Chicago put forward a set of principles around freedom of speech and academic freedom. When people would call for me to be fired, I would be like, “good luck with that” and I would reply with a link to the Chicago principles article.
Travers: You were probably still terrified.
Cheryl Cooky: Oh, I was absolutely terrified. I was calling the police. In terms of the precarity of scholars, when we are doing this work, it [the harassment] is intentional. I started second guessing whether I wanted to do this work. And this is not me crying white women tears, but it is just to recognize the realities. And what I have experienced is nowhere near what other folks experience and certainly the violence that members of the trans community and other marginalized communities face. But from an academic perspective, when we are doing this research, when we are doing this work—and it was just an op-ed—the ripple effects are significant.
Travers: And what about faculty members of color? Calling the police is a really bad idea because they do not have white privilege.
Cheryl Cooky: Exactly. Thank you, Travers, for adding that. And I think those of us who have institutional privilege need to use that privilege. We need to be working to create the kind of infrastructure to support emerging/untenured scholars so it is not the emerging scholar who is then, going back to what Madi was saying, calling the vice chancellor and trying to lay the groundwork. We need to rely on colleagues who have that privilege, who can do that kind of work so that those in the trenches, especially emerging scholars, or graduate students, that they are able to do that work.
Sarah Teetzel: I think we need this to recharge the batteries. I have come close to leaving this issue several times and saying, “I’m going to write on other topics and do research on other topics.” But these conversations remind me why it matters. To see other people who are committed to doing the work that allyship requires makes a big impression.
Madeleine Pape: I echo that too. This landscape is moving, and it is moving fast, and I think that there are key conversations that we need to make sure that we are being a part of. The take-home message for me is: let us get organized, so that we can pool resources and expertise and be more systematic and proactive about our approach.
Establish a global network of feminist scholars, practitioners, and athletes from diverse social, cultural, disciplinary, and geographical positioning to shape new thinking, research agendas, and collaborations for different and expansive sporting futures. This should include a “long game plan” for locally specific sporting models that center those who experience intersectional forms of oppression in order to drive feminist change within the sporting system. (Thorpe et al., 2022, p. 18)
Cheryl Cooky: We have to play the long game. We have to stop getting ourselves in positions where we are reacting, and start being proactive. This is not new. This is a pattern. We need research and academic inquiry that maps out the template because this is a strategy that gets deployed and employed in other spaces.
Travers: Anima Adjepong (see Adjepong, 2018, 2021).
Cheryl Cooky: Great! We still need more scholarship in that area. We need to be mobilized around this issue. What is the template and what are the points of intervention? What are the cracks in that template?
Along Those Lines, How Do We “Take Back the Narrative” From Antitrans Advocates? How Do We Create Simple Effective Messaging That Is Not Reductive, but Also Accessible?
Madeleine Pape: I think we have a real struggle on our hands to insert our narratives into this space in a way that will be accessible to people. On the topic of sex testing, for example, most athletes in this space are not going to read an academic paper. We need to have messages that are, as much as it is never simple, simple enough to travel across organizational spaces, across political spheres, across women in their different locations. As academics, that is not really the territory that we are comfortable in. Therefore, I think there is a question around how to better partner with women’s sports organizations and government partners that want to support trans inclusion to support them with their messaging. There is also a question about what infrastructure we need to have in place to be better coordinated. We are up against groups and individuals that benefit from the fact that their message is reductive and therefore simple to promote. Reality is complex, ideology is simple.
Sarah Teetzel: The gender critical movement and all the save women’s sports groups have been very successful in their public messaging at setting up a bifurcation to say that if you do not believe in excluding trans women from competing in women’s sport, at any level, then you want to get rid of the women’s sport category entirely. They have been very successful at setting that up without presenting options c, d, e, and f.
Anna Posbergh: How do we navigate relationships with people who are in our (academic, personal, and professional) community that advocate against trans inclusion? Or are proponents of sex tests?
Madeleine Pape: I have been trying to learn from the social psychology literature around how to promote respectful dialogue around politicized topics such as gay marriage, abortion, and so on. An insight that might be relevant here is to be clear about which audience is most worth our time. People who are really committed to an extreme ideological standpoint are unlikely to change their own view. Therefore, maybe they are not the right target. Instead of reacting to such people and groups—which is certain to be a case of whac-a-mole—maybe our time is better spent trying to meaningfully engage with people who are undecided or ambivalent or who are at least not so committed to a particular ideological point of view.
Conclusion
In this dialogue, both at NASSS and in this article, we brought together several leading feminist sport and social science scholars who span multiple countries, areas of expertise, and lived experiences. In the feminist tradition of consciousness raising, our aim was to “go around the room and talk” to surface what we view as the most pressing concerns for women’s sports, women and gender expansive athletes, and feminist sports scholarship. In a world in which there is endless pressure to react to both the 24-hr news cycle and the constant onslaught of antitrans rhetoric, legislation, policy, and action, we believe it to be a useful exercise to regroup and take stock of where we are in women’s sport today and where feminist scholarship can and should focus. We have a lot of work to do, far too much to discuss in 90 min and 8,000 words, respectively, but we hope this is a useful work to any scholar grappling with doing the feminist work that is “slow, intensive work, difficult to do well” (Connell, 2020, p. 14).
Along with grounding our work in antioppression struggles, we hope that our curated dialogue contributes to what we see as the need to continue building feminist coalition that helps to reimagine sport as a “radically inclusive space” for all athletes, but especially those who have been and continue to be marginalized (Thorpe et al., 2023). Moreover, in doing so, our aim is for this conversation to help spark a return in the broader women’s sport community to focusing on clearly documented issues in women’s sport, such as the patriarchal structures of sport that lead to the upholding of damaging gender norms, and ultimately toxic sporting and other environments. Turning our attention to addressing these topics, which have been repeatedly shown to cause damage spanning from irreparable physical/mental/sexual harm to girls, women, and gender expansive people, to undesired permanent exits from sport and physical activity, is and should be of the utmost importance to those who desire to continue moving progress forward. Our drive for this especially emerges in recognizing the return of sex testing, particularly for youth sports: a process that has been soundly debunked as unethical, unnecessary, and unscientific (Karkazis et al., 2012). Finally, for those working in trans-inclusive spaces, particularly in sport and physical culture, we diagnose a need for simple, effective messaging. As such, this remains a key space wherein we encourage academics, scholars, and researchers to contribute, through both public and academic dissemination outlets.
Notes
Despite these protections, there has been a recent wave of antidiversity, equity, and inclusion legislation, especially in the United States. For example, in March 2024, Governor Eric Holcomb signed SB 202 into law, which provides mechanisms to fire faculty, tenured or not, from a state university if certain conditions related to “free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity” are not met (State Educational Institution Matters, 2024). Similar laws are in place in Florida (SB 266) and Texas (SB 18), and are in various stages of implementation in North Dakota, Louisiana, Iowa, and North Carolina (Bauer-Wolf, 2023).
Acknowledgments
Posbergh and Bekker organized the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport panel, led the logistics and organization of the paper, wrote the introduction and conclusion, and curated the dialogue. Cooky, Pape, Teetzel, and Travers led their own contributions. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
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