Transgender athletes and Canadian sport policy: a story of stigma and precarity

ABSTRACT

Policy can serve as a form of institutionalised stigma, working to create and maintain discrimination against groups of people. Some Canadian National Sport Organizations (NSOs) have developed policies that address transgender inclusion within sport. However, where these policies exist, they vary in their approaches to inclusion of transgender persons. This article examines how Canadian sport policies prohibit and/or police transgender persons’ participation in sport. In 2019, the publicly available policies of 53 NSOs were reviewed to determine the presence and content of so-called transgender inclusion policies, as well as policies related to equity, discrimination and harassment. At the time of the study, only 17 of the 53 NSOs had policies specifically related to transgender inclusion. In this study, we review these policies to understand the varying approaches to transgender inclusion in Canadian NSOs. We classified the NSOs into three broad categories: inclusive (n = 11), problematic (n = 1) and prejudicial (n = 5), in relation to naming, disclosure and medical specifications. Using Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, we demonstrate that participation in sport is a precarious choice for transgender athletes, as most NSO policies lacked clear guidance on inclusion and there were next to no policy statements on gender non-conforming people. The development of inclusive policy within sport should be proactive, actionable, consistent with best practices and must include meaningful conversations with transgender and gender non-conforming athletes, coaches and officials.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport policy
• inclusion
• transgender
• institutional stigma
• precarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We have chosen here and throughout the paper to use the current and more appropriate terminology of ‘gender affirming’ and ‘gender affirmation’, unless specifically referencing to text in a policy and/or the title of documents, where ‘sex reassignment’ or ‘gender reassignment’ are used.

2. The time frame of data collection and analysis is important to note as policies are not fixed; policies may have been implemented or revised since our analysis ended.

3. While we provide specific examples from policies analysed at the time and include the name of the policy document analysed at the time of study (2019), we do not include organisation names in this paper. The authorship team, informed also by our community collaborator, reached this decision as our goal was not to vilify specific NSOs but to demonstrate the many problematic and even dangerous ways that gender has continued to be policed in Canadian sport through policy, reflecting the more general objective of this manuscript to explore policy as a form of institutionalised stigma and the outcomes on transgender participants.

4. Gender non-conforming may include transgender, non-binary, 2-spirit, intersex athletes, as well as those whose biophysiological characteristics, capacities, or behaviours, may not fit those constructed as normal for their identity.

5. See, for example, the work of Dean Spade and Toby Beauchamp as well as scholarship within critical race and critical disability studies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant [430-2017-00180].