Sport, Transgender Athletes, and Nonbinary Experience

Abstract

Transgender and nonbinary athletes experience significant obstacles to sport participation that are primarily related to prevalent sex-segregated and/or sex-differentiated institutions, spaces, and activities. Sport reflects and reinforces a Eurocentric, hetero-patriarchal binary sex system, and this requires the containment of women and nonbinary athletes who threaten to throw this social, economic, and political configuration into disarray, whether as individuals they are interested in doing so or not. This chapter provides an overview of literature relating to the experience of transgender and nonbinary people in sport, situates transgender participation in the broader context of modern sport as an historically specific formation, and provides an overview of scholarly debates about female eligibility policies that target transgender women and women with naturally higher testosterone levels than the so-called female norm.