Who’s Left in Trans Organizing in Sports?

• In Event: Left of Sports

Abstract

This paper examines the efficacy of liberal and progressive calls for inclusion, equality, and “human rights” for trans kids and adults’ in sports. To answer this, I investigate the ways in which demands for gender-inclusive athletic policies are articulated across multiple domains such as social media, nonprofit advocacy, and corporate marketing campaigns. I analyze the political limits of framing sport as a “human right,” extending queer and trans of color critiques of assimilation into dominant social structures, but with a caveat. Queer critiques of campaigns for marriage equality and LGBTQ people in the military largely argue that access to basic rights such as healthcare, employment, and other citizen benefits should not be tied to the nation-state’s racial, hetero- and gender normative, and imperial projects. I propose that sport as not a rights-bearing institution offers possibilities for a more robust critique of such liberal and progressive political strategies, possibilities that impel activists to move beyond state-based and rights-based rhetoric.

I ground my proposition in a case at a public university in California where cis women college athletes, organized by gender critical (trans exclusionary) feminists, filed a lawsuit against their university’s athletic conference over the participation of their own trans teammate. With coaches, teammates, and administrators taking different positions on the matter, the university’s athletic program was embroiled in both a political and legal dispute that made international news. Despite the end of the sport’s competitive season, and news coverage along with it, the controversy left an indelible aftertaste in the university’s academic, athletic, and local communities. How did these circles respond? Under conditions in which the “sport-is-a-human-right” response would be unsuitable and the NCAA already having a trans inclusion policy, on which it doubled-down during this incident, the vitriolic aftermath mobilized many constituents—many expected, some surprising—from around the university and the local community. How might the organizing in response to this incident provide useful tools and insightful lessons for future leftist organizing in sports? This paper focuses on this aftermath and the strategies that campus and community activists utilized in support of trans lives.

Author

• CJ Jones, San Jose State University