Recently, several key international and national governing bodies of sport changed their publicly available, documented policies to announce the ban or restriction of trans women’s participation alongside cisgender women. For example, the contemporary policy changes made by World Rugby, World Athletics, and the International Olympic Committee (Harper, 2022) and, specifically, the banning of trans women from World Athletics events (March 31, 2023). As a consequence of these alterations in policy, there appears to be sport-by-sport (e.g., World Aquatics) and national (e.g., the U.K. Sport, National Collegiate Athletic Association, and British Rowing) repercussions involving a rethinking and rewriting of transgender policy. It might be that the domino effect is not yet complete and that we witness further policy formation that excludes trans women from sport.
Reaching back 20 years, in 2004 when the International Olympic Committee introduced the Stockholm Consensus on sex reassignment surgery, trans women were accepted within sport, albeit based on a medical model of listed conditions (Cavanagh & Sykes 2006; Sykes, 2006). Even since the update of the Stockholm Consensus in 2015, “the policy direction had been to allow trans and non-binary women to participate as woman athletes” (Burke, 2022, p. 1). It did seem that “[p]olicy changes and an increasing number of publicly out trans athletes in elite sport signal a trend toward inclusion and acceptance of trans people” (Karaçam, 2022, p. 5). However, in 2020 and 2021, social attitude and policy formation began to shift. Given this shift, it is important to consider related processes occurring outside of the sporting arena. For example, specific to the United Kingdom, the 2004 Gender Recognition Act “had been significant in enabling trans people to change their birth certificates to their acquired gender without the requirement of surgical interventions” (Hines, 2020, p. 699). In 2018, the U.K. government published their consultation on the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. The aim of the consultation process was to make “it easier for transgender people to achieve legal recognition” (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9079/); activism and campaigns that called for the right to self-identify, and therefore include nonbinary and gender diverse people, were presented and considered during the consultation. However, it was decided in 2020 that there would be no reform to include self-identification.
What is apparent is that there is a backlash to increasingly visible trans activism and contemporary endeavor for trans equality (Pearce et al., 2020). The debates have caught the lens of the media; mediated, often-hostile coverage of single-sex services and single-sex spaces are now familiar in the United Kingdom and elsewhere with writers referring to transgender moral panics to explain the backlash (Mestre, 2022; Miles, 2022; Pepin-Neff & Cohen, 2021). This sociocultural populist context, including a move to the far right (Butler, 2021), has been viewed as influencing anti-trans policy and practice within sport (Hines, 2020; Itani, 2020). For example, in the United States, there is a view that the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion reflects an ongoing right-wing assault on bodily autonomy: “Republicans consistently put forward extreme anti-abortion bills at the very same time that they have proposed bills to attack, immiserate, and eliminate trans people, particularly trans children” (Lennard, 2022, ¶. 2). Woodward (2023) reports in the United States that “at least 20 states ban trans women and girls from sports that match their gender” (n.p.).
Additionally, Karaçam (2022) demonstrates how “anti-trans voices have become louder” (p. 8) within sport including negative public opinions made by ex-elite White cisgender athletes like Martina Navratilova, Paula Radcliffe, and Sharon Davies, and the setting up of organizations such as Fair Play for Women in the United Kingdom, Save Women’s Sport in the United States, and Save Women’s Sport in Australasia.
In the United Kingdom, there are precursors to how sociocultural and party politics can form a potent nexus to regulate and make abhorrent, nonnormative identities and subjectivities. For example, the amendment to the Local Government Act 1988, Section 28 made legal the “prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.” Section 28 was abolished in Scotland in 2000 and in England in 2003. This serves as one example of who and what is produced as nonexistent and nonlegitimate through policy and law at a given time. It highlights the impact of social, cultural, and political attitude, both negative and positive, on the treatment of the LBGTQ+ community in the United Kingdom. Another example involves what has been tagged as an “historic day”; on December 22, 2022, the Scottish government “approved plans to make it easier and less intrusive for individuals to legally change their gender, extending the new system of self-identification to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time” (Brooks, 2022, ¶. 1). As expected, given negative media coverage of trans rights in the United Kingdom (Mermaids, 2019), responses to trans inclusive legislation include a large amount of speculative and unfounded association between transgender people and criminality (Fisher, 2017).
For the purpose of this paper, it is the recent shift in treatment of trans women in sport by governing bodies, individuals who are in decision-making roles, and policy formulators that encouraged the exploration of past and present sport feminisms. The anti-trans and exclusionary transfeminist caucus is not strong within the social sciences of sport per se, but there is evidence of its influence within sport policy and sport science. Anti-trans and exclusionary transfeminists have worked with conservative groups, both political and religious (Hines, 2020), to shape a conservative sport policy (Burke, 2022) and arguably “a logic of cisgender supremacy” (Sharrow, 2021, p. 1) when it comes to defining womanhood.
In this paper, I track the development of sport feminist theory to evaluate its contribution to challenging dominant notions of womanhood. This mapping demonstrates how sport feminism has avoided an anti-trans and trans exclusionary approach to trans women, and yet more can be achieved, conceptually, to continue the fight for trans women’s access to sport at all levels of participation.
To begin, I discuss how sport feminisms have analyzed the category “woman,” sex, and gender. Making use of earlier (1990s) sport feminist analyses of women footballers in Europe, the discussion demonstrates a reliance on the sex–gender distinction, which is the idea that sex is biological and gender is socially constructed (Oakley, 1972). There is an element of feminist reflexivity in this discussion as I critiqued my contribution to sport feminism during this period. The aim is to illustrate the limits of sport feminist frameworks of womanhood. I move to show how postcolonial feminists, Black feminists, queer feminists, and transfeminists have made significant challenges to traditional Western-centric, colonial, White feminist concepts, namely the category “woman.” Through this focus on postcolonial feminist, Black feminist, and queer of color critique, the discussions engage with de-colonial feminism. However, de-colonial feminism is larger than these three approaches; it comprises several feminisms, including Indigenous feminism (Tlostanova et al., 2019), Palestinian feminism (Ihmoud, 2022), and Islamic feminism (Mincheva, 2023).
(Colonial) Sport Feminist Theory
For Hines (2020, p. 703), the “argument that sex derives from biology has haunted feminist politics around trans issues in the 21st century.” This linking of the sex–gender distinction to transgender is important because Hines points out that “the sex/gender binary model was constructed as part of a colonial project” (p. 705). Colonialism is underpinned by whiteness and White supremacy (BlackDeer, 2023). As such, it is important to track back to see how sport feminist analyses implicate whiteness and how this impacts sport feminist versions of the sex–gender distinction and the category “woman.” For this purpose, I take a feminist reflexivity approach to critique specific work. It is my position as a feminist within football studies that enables this scrutiny. To start, there were few feminists working within football studies; however, early feminist intervention involved two articles, written in the same year.
In 1999, Scraton, Fasting, Pfister, and Bunuel wrote about women playing football in England, Germany, Norway, and Spain—It’s still a man’s game? The experiences of top-level European women footballers. In the same year, Caudwell wrote Women’s football in the United Kingdom: Theorizing gender and unpacking the butch lesbian image. Both articles provide widely acknowledged feminist theoretical analyses of football at a time when “football studies” were dominated by men about men. The feminist approaches taken to explain women’s active involvement in the game in Europe serve to illustrate how sport feminists can be committed to different explanations of the key concepts of sex and gender.
Women’s access to football can be seen as a political outcome of a liberal-feminist discourse that centres on equal opportunities, socialization practices and legal/institutional reform. (p. 99)
They continue by arguing that liberalism has produced a weak conceptualization of equality because it fails to take a full account of the prevailing structures of power. They argue for a critical sport feminism that seeks to interrogate gendered power relations, thus enabling a move outside of the [gender] “oppositional model oppressor/oppresses” (p. 100) to consider agency and resistance as well as different women’s experiences based on heterogeneous positions such as class, disability, ethnicity, and sexuality. The authors acknowledge the emergence of postmodern and poststructuralist feminisms and the shift to nonessentialism through the deconstruction of gender. This links with their view that different women have different experiences of gender and football. However, they do not go so far as to deconstruct the sexed body and whiteness. In their analysis of 40 semistructured interviews with footballers playing the game in England, Germany, Norway, and Spain, they take a feminist position that is not feminist liberalism or feminist postmodernism/poststructuralism, but a feminism that recognizes women’s differences and their shared and nonshared experiences.
A key finding from their study was that: “All of the women talked constantly about themselves as being ‘other’ to female or feminine, particularly when describing their childhood experiences .... The majority defined themselves as ‘tomboys’ (p. 104). The authors argue that by identifying as tomboys, which is viewed as a form of masculinity, the players are supporting “the ‘naturalness’ of the dualities of male sport/female sport and masculinity/femininity thus reducing cultural and social constructs to biological fact” (p. 150). They conclude that “these women have simply crossed gendered boundaries in order to access a sport that is associated with masculine traits” (p. 108).
For the footballers in Scraton et al.’s research (1999), there is indication that “for many of them, their identities as gendered sportswomen became more problematic in adulthood.” Adult female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998) is the focus of Caudwell’s feminist analysis of women’s football in the United Kingdom (1999). In Caudwell’s study, the figure of the butch lesbian emerged as important to the research participants. This finding is analyzed through a focus on the sociocultural construction of gender and sexuality, specifically lesbianism. Claiming a poststructuralist feminist approach and drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Caudwell deconstructs the production of eligible gender and sexuality in Western contexts, specifically in football. Through this deconstruction of the knowledge produced to legitimize heteronormative configurations, and the alignment of gender and sexuality, Caudwell moves to include sex (sexed body) as also socially and culturally constructed; this challenged the feminist notion of the sex–gender distinction evidenced in the work of Scraton et al. (1999).
Caudwell shows how “[t]raditionally the butch is vilified, maligned, and condemned, and within feminist politics” (p. 393). Referring to Feinberg’s (1993) work, Caudwell makes the point that “regardless of the emerging human rights campaigns and shifts toward equal rights, (the butch) continued to receive the most severe instances of discrimination and abuse” (p. 393). Given this degree of marginality, Caudwell seeks to make the butch lesbian footballer legitimate and safe through a critique of normative sex–gender–desire constructions, which dictate the viability of identity/subjectivity vis-à-vis “woman.”
In summary, the viability of “women” footballers for Scraton et al. (1999) exists within the binaries of sex and gender, and the sex–gender distinction. Caudwell (1999) disturbs the binary of gender, seeking to explain it as plural and inclusive of lesbian genders. The recognition of nonbinary gender begins to destabilize the binary of the sexed body. However, the sexed body is not deconstructed; it remained as a stable entity.
The two differing feminist analyses evidence fundamental feminist debate that persists in contemporary research. The examples offer insight into the conflicting feminist views of transgender participation in sport. For instance, for some feminists, sex is a fixed essence that informs the “category woman.” As such, biological birth sex is foundational to some strands of sport feminist endeavor for women’s rights, that is, the right to play football without abuse, discrimination, and prejudice. At the time, the shift toward deconstructing the sex–gender distinction and the category women (Caudwell, 1999) failed to fully engage with key feminist work, for example, how “Delphy (1984) theorized sex as coming from gender: sex differences are read through gender, not the other way round” (Hines, 2020, p. 703).
Adopting feminist reflexivity exposes the shortfalls regarding the potential of early sport feminist theorizing in paving the way for future trans sportswomen’s participation. The 1999 analyses do not provide theory to enable trans women’s participation in football because the category woman remains conceptually intact. At the same time, there is a lack of engagement with the whiteness of the work. This begs the question of White supremacy in the construction of these sport feminist framings. Race did not feature as a category. The feminist focus on sex, gender, and sexuality, especially in the work of Caudwell (1999), ignored and omitted race. Furthermore, there is no interrogation of the ontological and epistemological origins of the conceptual framing. It is this ignorance which gives rise to narrow definitions of womanhood.
Postcolonial and Black Feminist Theory
The comments made by the British Lord Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, regarding trans women, for example: the “future of women’s sport is ‘very fragile’” and “gender cannot trump biology” (Myers, 2022), demand critical analysis through discussion of postcolonial and Black feminism.
Yet we might consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology—of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies. (p. 74)
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization. (p. 102)
It is impossible to pay tribute to the entirety of Spivak’s work in this paper. However, sport feminists concerned about White supremacy and racism have successfully applied her arguments to provide important critique of how colonialism, race, and gender have/have not been theorized/conceptualized in sport. For example, Ratna and Samie (2017) emphasize “Other” girls and women in their work on race, gender, and sport. They show how White supremacy functions in sport and how women of color are othered through “the mechanisms of sport and physical culture, which work to position ‘them’ as marginal, and ‘Other’” (p. 4). Ratna and Samie (2017) make the point that it is: “the largely positivistic, androcentric, assimilationist, ethnocentric and Eurocentric thinking which has colonized much of the scholarship in the sociology of sport” (p. 10), vis-à-vis women of color.
In accordance with Ratna and Samie’s work (2017), Brown (2018) provides an important critique of sport, specifically the representation and treatment of Black female bodies, through discussions of postcolonial and Black feminism. She evidences how “women of colour are Othered, and viewed as existing outside of the realm of emphasised femininity that is tied to whiteness” (p. 490). Moreover, Brown (2018) applies de-colonial feminists theoretical and conceptual frames to sex/gender testing. The ongoing practice of sex testing “functions to reinforce the essentialist female/male binary in which men are viewed as superior athletes, while also illuminating colonial discourses of black and Third-World women’s bodies” (p. 491). For instance, how global governing bodies of athletics (and White cisgender male figure heads such as Coe) treat runners Caster Semenya and Santhi Soundarajan is a reminder of how colonial processes operate through a complex web of Western-legitimized medical/“scientific” and public discourse to define womanhood in sporting contexts (Batelaan & Abdel-Shehid, 2021). Reiterating Spivak’s argument, this process is built upon epistemic violence because it is White hegemonic femininity (Brown, 2018; Wheaton et al., 2020) that is assumed and determined as the exemplar of womanhood (Adjepong & Carrington, 2014; Magubane, 2014; Ratna & Samie, 2017).
For a long time, Black feminists have questioned the White Western feminist construct of the “category woman.” By reasking the question: “Ain’t I a woman,” first spoken in 1851 by Sojourner Truth at a Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio, Black feminists adopt the locution to challenge “all ahistoric or essentialist notions of ‘woman’” (Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 74). Moreover, the boundaries of feminist thinking, theorizing, activism, and praxis (“sisterhood”) are brought to the attention of the White feminist movement through the exclamation: “White women listen” (Carby, 2007). The “problem of Whiteness” in feminist sport studies has been exposed as ignoring the intersections and compounded oppressions of race, sexuality, class, and gender (McDonald & Shelby, 2018). In this way, McDonald and Shelby (2018) “challenge the primacy of gender as always already the most important social relation” (p. 498) in feminist sport studies. This challenge can be aimed at the sport feminist football work discussed above because the sex–gender distinction was assumed within Whiteness.
Through both postcolonial and Black feminisms, de-colonial feminists have effectively intervened to reveal a large proportion of sport feminist theory that ignores Whiteness and its operation as a foundational epistemic violation. Spivak (1988) shows the colonial and postcolonial as deeply and inherently denial and refusal processes, especially when it comes to the women and girls. Black feminists demonstrate racial power and ignorance surrounding the production of dominant White versions of “womanhood.” These de-colonial theoretical interventions have been applied, successfully, to sport studies scholarship by key writers (Adjepong & Carrington, 2014; Brown, 2018; Joseph & Kriger, 2021; McDonald & Shelby, 2018; Ratna & Samie, 2017) to develop and expand our understanding of gender and the sexed body.
... it’s unfeasible to discuss transgender history or issues without bringing up colonialism and race. To be transphobic—to discredit the millennia of gender variance in different cultures, to insist that one’s body defines their mind, to cast transgender people as degenerate—is to be racist. (n.p.)
Sport feminists, writing from a de-colonial position, have identified how epistemic violence, which can be described as “the anonymous codification and structure which determines the knowledge formation of a given epoch” (Bartels et al., 2019, p. 1), underpins early, and arguably contemporary, sport feminisms and sport feminist empirical accounts of women and/in sport. Early sport feminist-produced knowledge of the category “woman” is also disputed and disrupted by queer theory and transfeminism.
Queer Theory and Transfeminism
Queer activism and queer theory have enabled sport feminists (Adjepong, 2023; Caudwell, 2003; Davidson & Shogan, 1998; Eng, 2007; Krane & Waldron, 2021; Lisahunter, 2018; Sykes, 1996) to deconstruct normative versions of sex–gender–sexuality and to open up sport to the nonnormative. Early interventions by sport feminists focused on queer sexualities and called for equality, inclusion, and social justice for all people who identify as belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. For instance, lesbians were mostly viewed with disdain (Griffin, 1992) because of the stereotypes of lesbian (masculine) gender (Caudwell, 1999) and treated as bogeywomen (Cox & Thompson, 2001). The focus on sexuality continues in work about queer athletes: the sports dyke, the sports fag, and a sexuality that is not one (Linghede & Larsson, 2017) with critique of how sporting practices construct heteronormativity, and how these normative constructs are contested. Spatiality and pedagogy are examined through a queer lens (Lisahunter, 2019) to show the actual slippages between the normative and nonnormative, and thus the potential to queer physical education. In sport psychology, Krane and Waldron (2021) renew a call for a queer approach to research and practice to transform the discipline from its widespread “functionalist, masculinist, and positivist infrastructure” (p. 486).
It is the application of queer theory to the body (Sykes, 2011) that illustrates the ways the sexed body is produced through dominant ideas surrounding the binaries that uphold sex–gender–sexuality and its compulsory order (Butler, 1993). The sports’ body must fit the sports’ binary; otherwise, it is open to surveillance, scrutiny, exclusion, and made abject as well as object of “abnormality.” However, queer sport feminists have celebrated bodies that do not fit the binary arrangements. They have achieved this through a focus on “queer bodies,” including “racialized gender, sex, or sexuality ... and also those who felt different due to their physical dis/ability, their body shape and size” (Sykes, 2009, p. 251).
Much of this work [queer], ... focused on the experiences of a narrow stratum of North American and European lesbian and gay athletes whose sexual subjectivities are rendered in isolation from the processes of racialization and capital accumulation through which they are constituted. (King, 2008, pp. 419–420)
“Queer” lately has been the target of harsh criticisms for its multiple perceived failures: internal racism, false promises of intersectionality, class privilege, the still burning issue of feminism. (Espineira & Bourcier, 2016, p. 90)
Muñoz’s work, in his essay in Queer Futures, and elsewhere, presents a profound challenge to the calcifications or entombments of queer theory (I would venture that his death gives us another occasion to ponder the many deaths of queer theory and its many afterlives, its immemorial currents, even its immortal life. (p. 12)
O’Rourke writes about the many significant influences/claims made by Muñoz, including the need for a politics of epistemological humility as set out by Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz (2005). Epistemological humility is a “mode to counter the self-referential logics of US-centricism and queer Eurocentrism” (Chiang & Wong, 2017, p. 121). By applying epistemological humility to queer theory: “[i]t needs to resist itself, fold back on itself, in order to resist itself” (O’Rouke, 2014, p. 27), there is promise of a “queer theory to come, à venir” (p. 28). O’Rouke contemplates the yet-to-come book Muñoz talked about, during their correspondence, on feeling Brown, sensing Browness, and Brown theory. Despite the important existing work on queer of color critique (Ferguson, 2004), more can be achieved in sport feminism because as Chiang and Wong (2017) highlight queer theory still has not sufficiently engaged with racialization and empire.
Returning to queer feminism and sport, in a posthumanist analysis of hyperandrogenism in women’s sport, Linghede (2018) focuses on glitching bodies, specifically intersex bodies that “break, crash and confuse the conventions of pre-programmed and binary gender patterns” (p. 570). Applying existing sport feminist arguments: “Over and again it has been found that some athletic bodies cannot adjust to sporting and scientific sex classifications” (p. 573). Linghede (2018) explores “[b]odies that are witty agents. Bodies that show that people live with a multiplicity of variations and combinations of genitalia, gonads, chromosomes and hormones” (p. 573). These arguments further illustrate the possibilities of nonbinary bodies in exposing the errors and failures within the two-sex model of sport; glitching bodies can be celebrated because they “turn what is taken for granted upside down and inside out” (p. 581). Unfortunately, it remains, as with previous queer feminist work in sport, that there is a shortfall when it comes to [glitching] bodies as already raced and racialized.
The history of intersex(ualized) bodies is structured by racially mediated medicalization, where White intersex bodies or people with DSD have been subjected to normalizing medical interventions, usually in infancy and without consent, while Black ones were seen as “confirming the essential biological difference between whites and blacks.” (Magubane, 2014, p. 781) (p. 80)
Hines (2020), in her brief discussion of sport, reiterates a key point that “there are clearly considerable variations in both the genitalia and the reproductive organs of people placed within the expansive categories of male and female” (p. 708). Feminists and queer feminists in sport studies have known this for some time; however, the application of a queer perspective to transgender athletes is limited (cf. Fischer & McClearen, 2020; Travers, 2006), and work on trans queer athletes of color is scarce. One outstanding contribution is the work of Adjepong (2023) who advocates a queer African feminist approach and its value to trans sports studies. Through a focus on the experiences of African intersex athletes (Annet Negesa, Castor Semenya, Bilguisa Simpore, Salimata Simpore, and Holarli Ativor), Adjepong (2023) offers “an analytical framework that attends to how colonialism, patriarchy, religion, and capitalism structure gender and sexual ideologies” (p. 153). By showing “how indigenous epistemologies that challenge the coloniality of gender can help produce gender justice within sports” (p. 157), Adjepong (2023) develops an invaluable contribution to queer feminist sport studies as well as a pathway for the development of transfeminist sports studies.
Transfeminism is relatively new to sport studies. Jones (2021) advocates for a “transfeminist sports studies [that] makes strange—queers—the very practices, systems, and structures, recreational to professional, that pathologize transness in sports” (p. 60). Furthermore, Caudwell (2022) argues for a “transfeminist ontology as fundamental to the fields of sport, PE and physical activity. That is a belief in, and commitment to, the legitimacy of transgender existence, trans being and being trans” (p. 344). This can translate into the transfeminist proposition that trans women are women. Importantly, emerging sport transfeminist scholars (Barras, 2021; Karaçam, 2022) provide research-informed valuable insights about and from the transgender community. However, more is needed from within sport feminism to develop a transfeminism framework, especially a de-colonial transfeminism approach in order to contest the exclusion and regulation of trans sportswomen.
Transfeminism, according to Hines (2020), can be compared with the developments in feminism when it comes to transwomen’s suffrage, equality, and the recognition of diversity. Referring to the work of Stryker and Bettcher (2016), Hines (2020) argues that “intersectionality motivates transfeminism” and the recognition that there are “different ways of being gender diverse within trans communities” (p. 712). As such, transfeminism challenges White cis feminism “to account for the femininities of women who were not assigned female at birth” (p. 711). However, Koyame (2020) details the ways feminism and elements of transfeminism remain inherently racist through “the unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate” (p. 61). In a reprint of an essay published in 2000 in which Koyame (2020) provides “a critical account of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s trans exclusionary policy” (p. 61), the point is made that: “Even the argument that ‘the presence of a penis would trigger the women’ is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis” (p. 66).
Anti-racist transfeminism is required, and a starting place might be the work of Bey (2022). In an intricate account of Black transfeminism, Bey (2022) expands our understanding of Black trans, Black feminism, and transfeminism with the aim to go beyond intersectionality and “to mine each of these for how they contribute to the culmination of lack trans feminism as a modality of worldly inhabitation, an agential and performative posture in and after this world” (p. 5). Simultaneously, Bey (2022) seeks to abstract: “the corporeal surface as only one node of blackness, transness, and womanness” arguing that “the taking of such theorizations seriously will necessitate radically undoing what we have come to hold very dear” (p. 7). Bey’s desire for a “subjectless critique” and refusal “to posit a or the subject of black trans feminism” means “rejecting a ‘proper’ object of both study and knowledge production” (p. 7). This proposition is challenging, especially for a sport transfeminism that centers the corporeal, and yet the approach holds huge potential for transfeminism.
Conclusions
Contemporary anti-transfeminism and/or trans-exclusionary feminism situate pro-trans perspectives as nonfeminist based on the foundational premise that sex is fixed at birth and remains stable, with the absolute argument that trans women are not women (Jeffreys, 2014; Raymond, 1979). Notably, Simon (2021) provides an extensive and detailed critique to evidence how the gender critical feminist movement relies on “colonial remnants of gender discourse” in order to challenge transgender rights. Within the sociocultural and political arenas of sport, there is evidence that anti-transfeminist discourses have influenced recent policy formation (Ravat, 2022). This contrasts with the abundance of feminist social science research and writing that effectively debunk the traditional sex–gender distinction and category “woman” as fixed, stable, and universal (see Erikainen, 2019).
In sport, it is testosterone that has become the absolute and perfect measure of manhood and womanhood (Erikainen, 2019; Jones, 2021; Schultz, 2021). Schultz (2021) highlights how testosterone is “the latest criterion in a long line of attempts to define femaleness, each of which has ultimately failed” (p. 609). Through a rigorous analysis of how testosterone is presented through sport governing body’s delivered logics of “fairness,” Jones (2021) reveals the social life of testosterone and how talk of testosterone “unjustly targets transgender athletes” (p. 61). Moreover, Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018) make visible the colonialized and racialized “powers of testosterone” in targeting women of color from the global South. They conclude that talk of testosterone and testosterone testing are “ ... yet another version of ‘sex testing’, accomplished by racializing sex and associating ‘failures’ of dichotomous sex with failures of modernity characteristic of countries or regions outside the industrialized West” (p. 6).
Sport studies scholars are working hard to contest the current application of inconclusive science to exclude and regulate transgender women in sport (e.g., E-Alliance, 2021; Ivy, 2021; Ravat, 2022). Many of these scholars are broadly speaking feminists, but perhaps not de-colonial transfeminists. It is the potential of de-colonial transfeminist approaches, which might be what is required to challenge the anti-transfeminist and/or exclusionary trans-feminist claims to “protect” women’s and girls’ and their sport. Their aim is extremely tenuous, but it has gained currency within predominantly male- sport governing bodies and policy formation. To rephrase Spivak (1988), it seems that White cis colonial men (Lord Coe) are saving White cis women from trans women.
In this paper, I have evaluated the developments within sport feminism that are relevant to understanding and challenging the current treatment of trans women in sport. We are facing what can be described as a backlash (Hines, 2020; Itani, 2020; Pearce et al., 2020) against trans women in sport. This backlash has been explained through moral panic (Mestre, 2022; Miles, 2022; Pepin-Neff & Cohen, 2021) as a response to progressing trans rights, inclusion, and equality. The current sport policy shifts reflect yet another phase of control and exclusion of bodies that do not live up to White Western-constructed ontological and epistemological ideas of sporting womanhood. It is crucial that sport feminists continue to produce robust, reflective, and reproving approaches—for example, de-colonial transfeminist approaches—to explain and challenge how and why bodies, identities, and subjectivities are denied inclusion.
Early sport feminist work failed to break away from the axiomatic sex–gender distinction. The women footballers that embodied masculinity presented a dilemma for sport feminist thinking (Scraton et al., 1999) but not necessarily for sport feminists seeking to expand sporting gender (Caudwell, 1999). At the same time, postcolonial and Black feminist thinking and activism successfully challenged White bourgeoisie feminism (Davis, 1982) for its erasure of relations of race, ethnicity, colonialism, and postcolonialism in the construction of sex, gender, and “woman.” This de-colonial challenge struck the core of the definitional category “woman” through an interrogation of the epistemic violence of Whiteness in defining womanhood. Sport feminists have evidenced how women of color face abuse, discrimination, exclusion, and prejudice because of “anti-Black structural racism and sexism” (Razack & Joseph, 2021, p. 299), and through disciplinary philosophies and paradigms (science) that “ignore power relations sustained by White, patriarchal, ableist, capitalist systems” (Joseph & Kriger, 2021, p. 1).
With further critique and deconstruction of traditional feminist knowledge claims regarding sex and gender, queer sport feminists have, over the last two to three decades, opened up sport to queer bodies. Queer sport feminists not only celebrate and champion bodies that do not fit the binary model of sex, which is potent and omnipresent in sport, they also call for new approaches to the study of the sporting body that moves away from the prevailing “functionalist, masculinist, and positivist infrastructure” (Krane & Waldron, 2021, p. 486) of sport science. Crucially, the presence of queer bodies in sport is a constant reminder that the two-sex system in sport is flawed (Adjepong, 2023; Jones, 2021; Linghede, 2018; Schultz, 2021). However, within sport studies, more can be achieved through a queer of color critique of Whiteness. This call can be echoed for sport transfeminist futures. Trans sportswomen are pathologized through inconclusive Western “science” and the scientific objectification of their bodies. The feminist lobby within this movement to exclude trans women relies on the notion that sex is immutable, universal, and essentialist, which is shown to be a colonial project (Magubane, 2014; Simon, 2021).
It is the Western sociocultural and political arena of sport, as one of the main domains within our communities, societies, and global spheres, that has engendered the logics of the sexed body as fixed and stable (Erikainen, 2019). A sport feminist lens demonstrates the continued control of womanhood in order to fit a dominant model, which is cisgender, White, and colonial. This paper tells a story of sport feminists’ past and current challenges to the regulation of human bodies, namely trans sportswomen, by those in power. It is a call for future work that connects de-colonial sport feminism, in this case postcolonial feminism, Black feminism, and queer of color approaches, to expose the power base of decision-makers and policymakers.
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