Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary

Travis R. Bell and Anne C. Osborne

Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary Mediating Discourses of Difference against Intersex and Transgender Female Athletes

New York - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bell, Travis R., author. | Osborne, Anne C. (Anne Cunningham),  author.

Title: Gender defenders of the sport binary : mediating discourses of  difference against intersex and transgender female athletes / Travis R.  Bell, Anne C. Osborne.

Description: New York : Peter Lang, [2025] | Series: Communication, sport,  and society, 2576–7232 ; volume 13 | Includes bibliographical references  and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024055713 (print) | LCCN 2024055714 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781433147708 (hardback) | ISBN 9781433147715 (paperback) |  ISBN 9781433147814 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433147821 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex role and sports–United States. | Gender identity in  Sports–United States. | Femininity in sports–United States. | Intersex  Athletes–United States. | Transgender athletes–United States. |  Gender-nonconforming athletes–United States.

Classification: LCC GV706.47 .B45 2025 (print) | LCC GV706.47 (ebook) |  DDC 796.086/70973–dc23/eng/20241223

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024055713

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024055714

DOI 10.3726/b22592

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 2576-7232 (print)

ISBN 9781433147715 (paperback)

ISBN 9781433147708 (hardback)

ISBN 9781433147814 (ebook)

ISBN 9781433147821 (epub)

DOI 10.3726/b22592

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA

info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the authors

Travis R. Bell is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. He teaches visual storytelling, sports media, and media theory. His research spans communication and sport, publishing in Communication & Sport, International Journal of Sport Communication, and Sociology of Sport. He is lead author of CTE, Media, and the NFL (2019).

Anne C. Osborne is Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She teaches and conducts research at the intersections of gender, sport, and media. She has published peer-reviewed articles in International Journal of Sport Communication, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Sport in Society, and she is lead author of Female Fans of the NFL: Taking their Place in the Stands (2016).

About the book

Sex and gender are interconnected, conflated, different, and complex. Arguably, there is no cultural arena more affected by the complexity of sex/gender than sport, where the presumed need for a male/female binary is personalized, medicalized, and politicized. Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary considers how medical, policy, and media discourses shape understanding of nonbinary athletes, and more broadly cultural understandings of gender as chosen and sex as biologically measurable.

Tracing discourse across more than 100 years of media coverage, decades of medical debate, and overlapping sport regulatory policies, this book considers how the force of cisgender ideology creates a singular narrative centered on fairness that dominates transgender and intersex women and erases them from elite sport. This book traces the influence of powerful contexts such as language and masculinity in constructing boundaries around who can and cannot fit in women’s sport.

“In Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary, Bell and Osborne offer a compelling and incisive critique of how sport, medicine, and the media converge to police gender under the guise of fairness. In a time of global debates on gender and athleticism, this thought-provoking book unpacks the exclusionary frameworks that elite sport uses to marginalize transgender and intersex athletes, revealing the deep entanglements between gender ideology and power. Using meticulous research and sharp analysis, the authors challenge us to reconsider the boundaries of inclusion, presenting a vital call to reimagine sport as a space where diversity is not disciplined, but celebrated.”

—Anna Baeth, Ph.D., Director of Research, Athlete Ally

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Sex and gender are interconnected, conflated, different, and complex. Commonsense understanding has historically defined sex as biological, determined by chromosomes, reproductive organs, and hormone levels that place individuals into one of two categories: male or female. Gender is understood as more fluid and based on one’s expression of gender norms, which may or may not align with one’s biological sex. In this way, gender is often construed as something one chooses while sex is a biological fact. As we contend throughout this book, both sex and gender are socially constructed and neither can be easily reduced to a binary, although this is precisely what sport has done and continues to do. Arguably, there is no institution more dependent on the sex binary and therefore more affected by its instability than sport.

Sex has always functioned as a foundational, organizing construct of sport. Since the moment women were allowed to participate, sport, a “very conservative institution” (Kidd, 1983, p. 62) rooted in masculinity and heteronormativity, has retained a two-part system that it voraciously defends in the name of fair play to the “weaker sex.” As a result, sport acts as a political battlefield fought between those who do not easily fit the male-female binary and those who hold desperately to a belief in its necessity. If you have any doubt of sport’s political importance in the sex/gender wars, just look to the policies enacted by sport governing bodies and individual sports leagues that desperately seek a clear medical demarcation between boy’s/men’s and girl’s/women’s sporting events at the international, national, and local levels. In the U.S. for example, examine the 500+ anti-trans bills across 42 of the United States, many of which limit trans-youth participation in sports that align with their gender identity (Trans Legislation, 2024). More importantly, consider the stories of transgender and intersex athletes whose very existence has been critiqued, fetishized, and demonized in media as they are driven out of sport participation.

That is what we have done with this book. We have looked at how the discourses produced by three powerful sports institutions—media, regulators, and medicine—have worked together to construct an understanding of sex as essentialist and of male superiority as undeniable. Specifically, we employ critical discourse analysis to answer the question: how have medical, policy, and media discourses shaped understanding of nonbinary athletes, and thus more broadly shaped cultural understandings of gender?

Within these pages, we examine sports policies, medical definitions, and journalistic reporting to provide a history of intersex and transgender identities in sport. Driven largely by the public legal battles fought, most notably, by runner Caster Semenya, volumes have been written about intersex athletes (e.g., Cooky & Dworkin, 2013; Nyong’o, 2010; Schultz, 2011). Similarly, in more recent years, scholars have written extensively about transgender athletes’ place in sport (e.g., Elling-Machartzki, 2017; Jones et al., 2017; Travers, 2017). Unlike these other works, we chose to consider these two related but distinct identities in tandem because of how the discourses about each interact with and often contradict one another. The conflation of intersex and transgender as nonbinary identities, despite their differences, considers how their shared non-cisness “deliberately, cruelly and often violently excludes from belonging and from becoming” (Lenskyj & Greey, 2023, p. 3) recognized in (and by) sport.

Theoretically it helps to consider how the relevant institutions construct narratives defined by natural (intersex) vs. unnatural (transgender) differences, which are collectively construed as unfairly advantageous against cis-women. Further, it is critical to understand the concerted effort by medicine, media, and policymakers to control women’s sport by positioning female athleticism as lesser than male physical prowess, which in the context of nonbinary athletes provides the rationale for exclusion based on their perceived maleness. It is imperative to acknowledge, examine, and triangulate discourses of transgender participation with the historicized overlapping “co-presence” (Salah, 2017) of intersex athletes in and through medical, legislative, and media narratives that situate transgender and intersex athletes’ experiences as (1) parallel in their usefulness for maintaining the socially-structured gender order, yet (2) different in how and why individuals are policed as a collective. Also important is the acknowledgement that the labeling of athletes as either transgender or intersex is often controlled by individuals with no experience in either identity. Both labels are discursively positioned outside the sex binary and therefore outside of sport, and weaponized to police women’s bodies generally.