Transmisogyny & Cis-Stemic Bans: Logics in Exclusionary Sports Policy & Title IX

• In Event: The Logic and Meaning of Gender

Abstract

In 2020 state legislative season, twenty states saw the introduction of legislation to ban transgender girls (meaning: those assigned-male-at-birth but who live as girls) from competing on girl’s high school sports teams. In Idaho, the proposed bill (H.B. 500) was signed into law on March 30 making Idaho the first state to impose an outright ban on athletic participation for transgender girls (the law is currently being contested in court). Another round of similar state and national-level bills are being proposed in the 2021 legislative session.

The public face of resistance to transgender inclusion in school-sponsored athletics has inordinately focused on the incorporation of transgender girls. Last spring in Connecticut, the conservative religious-rights group, Alliance Defending Freedom, sued on behalf of three cisgender girls to end the permissive state athletic association policy for transgender athletes’ incorporation in girl’s track and field. Their lawsuit targeted the participation of two Black, transgender girls. Each of these challenges suggest the pernicious attitude that spaces reserved for women and girls, and sex non-discrimination policies designed to protect them (i.e., Title IX), have no place for transgender people.

Political scientists have only recently turned attention to the politics of transgender rights. The struggle for rights and dignity of transgender Americans have been elemental within both the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified (LGBTQ+) and women’s movements, and increasingly within its own right. The past two decades have witnessed significant mass mobilization (Taylor et al. 2018), interest group development (Nownes 2020), and litigation (Currah et al. 2006; Yuracko 2016) to secure greater visibility and legal protections for transgender people. Gender non-conformity, gender fluidity, and transgender identities have long histories, as illustrated both by the flourishing of political movements for gender and sexual liberation, as well as the burgeoning historiography of queerness (e.g., Kunzel 2018; Meyerowitz 2004). Although the fight for queer liberation has largely been organized under the broader LGBTQ+ collation (Murib 2015), recent years have widened the gap between nationwide political victories for LGB people, and political targeting of transgender individuals.

The emerging battles over rights for transgender youth to find full inclusion in educational institutions and educational programs, including sports, points to the possibility of backsliding. Opponents to trans inclusion openly resort to transphobic messaging in their proposed legislation, intentionally misgendering trans girls in their attacks, thereby demonstrating the persistence of sexist and sex essentialist ideologies in modern political culture.

These conversations also inordinately focus on the athlete’s bodies, a long-time topic of fascination for policymakers charged with advancing equity in girl’s and women’s sports. This paper will illustrate what is at stake in the evolving resistance to transgender inclusion in sports in light of the policy history that precedes the emerging battle over who counts as a “girl,” and who is eligible for “girls’ sports.” It will problematize the current policy debates in the context of equity concerns inherent to the interpretation of sex-segregated athletics under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal-level policy which bans sex discrimination in educational institutions (see McDonagh & Pappano 2007). It will illustrate how, and with what consequence, policymakers aim to police both transgender and cisgender girl’s/women’s bodies when they discuss barring transgender athletes from sport.

Because the most recent high-profile cases have focused on girls of color, it will highlight the racialized dimensions of resistance to transgender and intersex athletes by placing the domestic policy debate in international elite sport context. This intersectional analysis of current proposed policies will also draw linkages to the politics of disability inherent in political conflict over who “belongs” in sex-segregated sports teams for girls and women.

At its core, intersectional feminist and critical disability studies lenses, applied to reading proposed policy and legal debate in this context, demonstrate that embodied politics of women’s rights in sport remain fraught a half-century after the passage of Title IX. In current political contests over interpreting the contemporary meanings of sex and gender equity, a focus on the question of transgender inclusion in sport illustrates that contemporary debates over women’s rights remain concerned with dubious notions of women’s inherent physical weakness, of essential “male biological advantage” in all athletic pursuits, and are mobilized through intentional misdirection away from the civil rights context of Title IX and toward transphobic discourse.

Author

• Elizabeth A. Sharrow, University of Massachusetts Amherst