Trans Athletes and the Limits of Recognition, Visibility and Intelligibility

Abstract

Sport co-produces our notions of sex, gender and sexuality. Sport policies based on inclusion demand trans athletes become visible. This creates a problem within sport's hierarchical gender order, and trans athletes' bodies become comprehensible only through mobility from one sex/gender to the other – literally the embodiment of movement through a static gendered space.

In this chapter, we examine the contradictory expectations placed on trans athletes to be visible within heterosexist, white supremacist ‘regimes of looking’ (Fleetwood, 2011). Our purpose is twofold: (1) to critically examine the construction of transness through white racial frames and (2) to grapple with the inherent harmfulness of sport. We ask why trans people would want to participate in an institution that actively limits opportunities for expansive subjectivity, ultimately concluding that the potential for queer futures lies in the very construction of limits themselves. We forward a belief in what sport could be when intentionally created through queer world building. We highlight teams, leagues and spaces that have developed processes that work against dominant forms of medicolegal recognition and visibility politics.

Citation

Lucas, C.B. and Hodler, M.R. (2023), "Trans Athletes and the Limits of Recognition, Visibility and Intelligibility", Greey, A.D. and Lenskyj, H.J. (Ed.) Trans Athletes’ Resistance (Emerald Studies in Sport and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 15-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-363-820231002