‘Cos not everyone wants to talk, they prefer to do, to move’: circuits of trans embodied pleasure and inclusion in sport and physical exercise

ABSTRACT

Participating in sport and physical exercise (SPE) can be challenging for transgender and non-binary people. Previous research has identified some of the barriers trans people face in schools, leisure spaces and competitive sports (e.g. gender segregation, gendered language, sports clothing, and transphobia), and the resultant poor rates of participating in everyday SPE compared to the cisgender population. Yet, despite the ways in which sport, the experience of being trans, and being trans in sport are often framed as intensely focused on the body, less attention has been paid to the embodied experience of trans people as they engage in SPE. This paper draws on selected data examples from a qualitative study examining trans adults’ experiences of engaging in everyday SPE and looks towards Wellard’s [(2012). Body-reflexive pleasures: Exploring bodily experiences within the context of sport and physical activity. Sport, Education and Society, 17(1), 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2011.607910] concept of circuits of body-reflexive pleasure, to explore how participants’ make sense of their embodied selves. Sitting at the intersection of social, physiological and psychological experiences of sport, we explore how circuits of body-reflexive pleasure (and displeasures) in SPE can induce feelings of gender dysphoria as well as feelings of pleasure and gender euphoria.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• non-binary
• sport
• PE
• gender euphoria
• body-reflexivity
• pleasure

Introduction

In the UK, school sport is commonly known as Physical Education (PE) and is a compulsory subject under the National Curriculum for children aged 4–16. One of the National Curriculum’s stated aims is for children and young people to lead healthy, active lives, but findings from Sport England’s 2021 Active Lives Children and Young People Survey (Sport England, 2021) estimated that less than half of the 3.2 million population of children achieved the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines of taking part in sport or physical activity for an average of 60 min or more a day. Participation for transgender children is even lower. When the Sport Wales (2018) School Sport Survey offered pupils the chance to identify their gender as male, female or other for the first time in 2018, 0.7% of students who responded (N = 118,893) and identified as ‘other’ were not only significantly more likely to be inactive than those who did identify as male or female, but were also less likely to enjoy PE or taking part in after school or lunchtime sports clubs. The survey found these students were also less likely to feel comfortable participating in PE, and less likely to feel confident in trying new activities, in contrast to their cisgender classmates. Whilst the categories offered in the survey are a gross oversimplification of gender diversity, it marks a progressive change towards acknowledging and making visible pupils who are not cisgender.

Participation in sport and physical exercise for many transgender and non-binary people (shortened to ‘trans’ hereafter¹) is seldom straightforward, either as adults engaging for leisure or as children participating in compulsory school-based PE. In this paper, we use two key terms to describe the kind(s) of physical activity people do. Physical education (PE), which is a compulsory, school-based sport/activity done by children and young people between the ages of five and sixteen (the age when members of UK population can legally leave full-time, compulsory education). The UK charity The Association for Physical Education (APE, 2019, n.p.) defines PE as

The planned, progressive learning that takes place in school curriculum timetabled time and which is delivered to all pupils. This involves both ‘learning to move’ (i.e. becoming more physically competent) and ‘moving to learn’ (e.g. learning through movement, a range of skills and understandings beyond physical activity, such as co-operating with others).

In contrast, we use ‘sport and physical exercise’ (SPE) as an umbrella term to describe the organised and structured physical movement individuals engage with in their everyday lives (Craig & Beedie, 2008), including ‘traditional’ sports activities such as running, cycling, swimming or playing tennis, but is also extended to include more diverse activities such as yoga, roller derby or circus gymnastics. Poor rates of participation in SPE are concerning given the myriad of associated individual health and social benefits of participation (Jones et al., 2017). Consequently, compulsory PE in schools is seen as a way of embedding habits of SPE in children and young people, with the hope that these are carried through into adulthood (Barras et al., 2021).

Trans young people’s experiences of PE

Inclusion in PE for trans young people has become a prominent issue on the agendas of UK policy makers in education and sport (Drury et al., 2022). Research has revealed a number of barriers to inclusion, including how the ideology of school-based PE reflects cultural cisgenderism (Phipps & Blackall, 2021); how teachers can improve inclusion for trans students (Berg & Kokkonen, 2022; Drury et al., 2022) and how cisnormative practices, such as insistence on participants wearing form-fitting sports clothing rather than gender-neutral garments and inadequate changing facilities all work towards lowering inclusion (McBride & Neary, 2021; Whitehouse et al., 2022). Essentialist understandings of sex and gender, whereby it is perceived ‘there are two standard, biologically-determined gender expressions’ dominate school practices (Phipps & Blackall, 2021, p. 40). Other research (Drury et al., 2022; Ferguson & Russell, 2023; Hargie et al., 2015; Kettley-Linsell et al., 2022; McBride et al., 2020; McBride & Neary, 2021; Whitehouse et al., 2022), has highlighted how for those students who transgress gender boundaries, PE remains an alienating environment. Consequently, some trans young people can find both gendered PE activities and spaces to be polarising, intensely discomforting and deeply distressing (McBride & Neary, 2021). These studies have highlighted how trans youth experience isolation, loneliness, harassment and drop-out due to encounters in PE and school sports, including the way PE ‘puts the physical body centre stage’ (Aartun et al., 2022, p. 1).

Contributions to the field of trans-studies in PE and the negative impact of heteronormative frameworks on trans students are further explored in research situated outside of the UK school context (Devis-Devis et al., 2018; Espinoza et al., 2023; López-Cañada et al., 2021). For instance, Devis-Devis et al. (2018) gathered memories and impressions of a group of trans adults on their experiences in secondary school PE, and their findings reflected on how participants who were not practising some kind of gender performativity, found themselves ‘abjectified’ in PE lessons. Concerns about ‘passing²’ in gendered spaces such as changing rooms led to ‘intimacy struggles’ for some participants, which, the authors note, are important for how ‘the body exposure and corporal control at schools may affect trans students’ self-esteem and their concept of the body’ (Devis-Devis et al., 2018, p. 112). A focus on the importance of body appearance for ‘passing’ and the fear of being unmasked (resulting in reduced participation) is central to research conducted by López-Cañada et al. (2021), and Espinoza et al. (2023) found trans youth participated in school-based sport and physical activity less than their cisgender peers. A recent paper from Landi et al. (2023, p. 5) additionally notes how, ‘physical education practices such as fitness testing racialised, gendered and divided young people’s bodies into ‘risk’ categories (see also Safron & Landi, 2022). These studies all show why centring the perspectives of trans youth is imperative if inclusion rates are to be improved.

One concern about lower rates of school-based participation for trans youth is how it (partly) sets the precedent for adult participation. As Leithäuser and Beneke (2022, p. 1157) write, ‘most transgender adults report experience of gender dysphoria already at the changeover from primary to secondary school’ which coincides with sex-segregation in PE. López-Cañada et al. (2021, p. 81) also found PE experiences ‘influence trans people’s attitudes towards physical activity and sport during and after their schooldays’. Research by Barras (2021) found that for many trans adults reflecting back on their participation in SPE as children, school heralded a decline in their activity rate. Participants frequently attributed this decline to experiencing gender dysphoria.³ Literature which contextualises this experience in PE is currently lacking, and, often dwells on the negative experiences of participating in PE for trans youth.

Trans embodiment, pleasure and inclusion

Physical bodies are central to studies of SPE, yet frequently trans people’s bodies are positioned as troubling, with little attention paid to the embodied joy and euphoria experienced by trans people in SPE (Barras et al., 2021). Rather, there is a focus on how a lack of social awareness about their needs ‘perpetuates inequalities and fosters exclusion’ (López-Cañada et al., 2021, p. 62). Whilst attention to gender identity and gender diversity in SPE research in relation to barriers and gender dysphoria is growing (Berg & Kokkonen, 2022; Ferguson & Russell, 2023; Gilani et al., 2021), there are some notable omissions to which we would like to draw attention.

Firstly, there is surprisingly little focus on the subjective experience of embodiment for trans people as they engage in sport. In studies of PE, research on embodiment variously focuses on Foucauldian-inspired analyses on pedagogies of embodiment, exploring how social norms are reproduced (or challenged) through the pedagogical work performed on students’ bodies by PE teachers, curriculums, policies and practices, including gendered uniforms and changing rooms (see Aartun et al., 2022). Another perspective, informed by phenomenology, focuses more on the embodied experiences of students – the experience of living in and through the body, of being rather than having, a body. In this sense, embodiment incorporates the exploration of sensations, emotions, and bodily movement and how these intertwine with cultural meanings (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2011). It is this focus on embodied experience which forms the focus of this paper – what the action of a leg kicking a ball, or a muscle flexing feels like to the person experiencing it, and how these sensations and emotions are embedded in cultural meanings. Regarding trans embodiment, we define this term as meaning the way in which a trans person experiences and makes sense of their body as it engages in SPE, including as a means through which their gendered identity is affirmed. As Connell notes (1995, p. 51), ‘there is an irreducible bodily dimension in experience and practice: the sweat cannot be excluded’.

In PE, an activity becomes ‘disembodied’ through a focus on health-based outcomes (Evans et al., 2004). Thinking critically about PE, including the positive, embodied experiences of trans students in the PE school curricula (Caudwell, 2014), might assist in reforming PE tradition and culture. For example, similar to findings made by Barras (2021) about the importance of supportive sporting spaces participants in reducing barriers to inclusion, research by Storr and Richards (2022) on assessing the positive impact of playing tennis on LGBT + people in Australia, found how for those who may be disengaged from other social networks within their community, the tennis club became their safe space. Yet despite embodiment being central to participation in PE there is little evidence in the literature that those who teach PE explicitly engage with trans embodied inequalities (Berg & Kokkonen, 2022; Drury et al., 2022). Secondly, research has (understandably) focused on the difficulties, discrimination, dysphoria and transphobia faced by trans adults in public and private sport and leisure spaces, and by trans young people in school settings. There is also inadequate consideration of the needs and experiences of non-binary people (Ferguson & Russell, 2023; Whitehouse et al., 2022).

Little attention, in both sports studies and trans scholarship, has been paid to the pleasure, joy and fun trans people can and do experience in pursuing physical activity. Wellard (2012) has argued that the sensual pleasures of sport are often overlooked in favour of a focus on the performative or health benefits of the activity. Memories of these feelings of the body in movement, he suggests, can persist long after the activity has ceased and can shape anticipation of future pleasure and motivate continued activity. Talking specifically about PE in schools, Wellard argues that children may learn about what adults expect them to experience as pleasurable in SPE (i.e. a sense of achievement, skills, ability, or physical fitness), but that this may not resonate with the child’s lived experience. Thus, limiting ‘what counts’ as pleasure (in the context of the pressures of the National Curriculum), may restrict opportunities to creatively engage with the body and the learning process. Rather, he suggests that pleasures, and specifically bodily pleasures, may be mobilised in PE to engage young people.

Although Wellard (2012) does not talk specifically about trans people, recently trans scholarship has begun to draw attention to gender euphoria as an important, but overlooked, experience for trans people. Gender euphoria is understood as when someone’s gender aligns with their sense of self and causes them to be happy and feel at ease (Ashley & Ells, 2018). Qualitative research has illuminated how gender euphoria can include being exposed to a gender-affirming antecedent, having affirming thoughts or feeling positive emotion, and the joyful feeling of rightness in one’s gender/sex (Austin et al., 2022; Beischel et al., 2022). For example, one study found that being gendered correctly, through the use of names and pronouns, resulted in feelings of joy and affirmation for some non-binary young adults (Cosgrove, 2021), while another found a relationship between increased body hair removal and positive affect in transfeminine individuals (Bradford & Syed, 2019). Existing writing on gender euphoria rarely explicitly addresses embodied pleasures, and trans theorists and community members have criticised the overwhelming focus on dysphoria for its sole attention to the negative, over-medicalized aspects of gender/sex minority experiences (Klein et al., 2018), and have identified a focus on gender euphoria as an important counter to this (Whitehouse et al., 2022). From these two perspectives, a focus on trans embodied pleasure in SPE may offer critical insights for theory and practice.

Thirdly, research on trans people in SPE has been dominated by a narrative of inclusion/exclusion. Research has documented trans exclusion from SPE (e.g. lower participation rates/lower participation rates compared to cisgender peers), and on documenting the challenges trans people face in navigating sex-segregated spaces, sports, and teams. Policy recommendations have focused on removing such barriers, suggesting the provision of gender-neutral toilets and changing rooms and sportswear, and advocating for individual choice regarding which sports teams to join, and/or trans-only spaces and teams (Piggott, 2020). However, McBride and Neary (2021) have argued that looking closely at the ‘modalities of inclusion’ (adjustments, mechanisms and compromises) by which trans young people are included in PE illuminates the limitations of this approach. Talking with parents and young people about inclusion in PE, they draw attention to the work that young people (and sometimes families and teachers) do, including the decisions they have to make about which aspects of identity to privilege and which compromises to make, which gender segregated sports activities and teams to join, or whether to opt out of sport and PE completely. They illustrate how mechanisms of inclusion, such as access to an alternative changing room or disabled toilet to change in, or being permitted to wear tracksuit bottoms /jogger pants as a gender-neutral alternative to skirts for girls and trousers for boys, were rarely satisfactory and often marked the individual as ‘different’. Moreover, these strategies of accommodation offered minimal adjustments without impacting the sex-segregated systems themselves. By urging us to move beyond inclusion, McBride and Neary (2021) encourage us to look past strategies for raising awareness about discrimination against trans people, working to remove barriers to participating in sporting practices which remain fundamentally unchanged, and towards dismantling the ‘architecture of gender’ which shores up the gender binary itself.

Our paper offers new observations to this emergent body of work in three ways: (a) we examine trans peoples’ experiences of embodiment in the context of SPE, a focus identified as absent from previous work, despite the centrality of embodiment to the experience of being trans, and participating in SPE, (b) we focus on trans peoples’ experiences of embodied (and other) pleasures – including gender euphoria – since extant research has typically focused on difficulties, discrimination, dysphoria, and transphobia, (c) we move away from a linear and binary focus on inclusion/exclusion and barriers/facilitators to present a more dynamic, contingent, precarious constellation of moveable parts which coalesce to produce experiences of pleasure/euphoria or experiences of displeasure/dysphoria. To do this conceptual work, we draw on data in which trans adults talk about their everyday experience of SPE. We start by giving a brief overview of the study context to situate this data, before elaborating our dynamic model of trans embodiment in SPE.

The study context and methodology

This paper draws on a sub-set of qualitative interview data from a larger study, conducted by the first author, exploring the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary people’s participation in everyday sport and physical activity in the UK (Barras, 2021). The original study aimed to identify barriers which could be reduced to improve inclusion for members of this community. Participants were asked about their experiences of SPE via semi-structured interview questions (e.g. ‘can you tell me about your experiences of participation in sport and exercise?’; ‘how has your gender identity impacted on your experiences, either negatively or positively?’; ‘have you experienced any barriers to participation’, and ‘do you think any changes could be made to improve inclusivity for trans people in everyday sport and physical exercise?’). After the original interviews had taken place, they were transcribed verbatim by the first author and the dataset manually coded using theoretically-informed, inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Themes included passing, joy and the importance of visible role models in SPE (Barras, 2021). The interviews provided rich, in-depth, contextualised information about how some trans people navigated their engagement with SPE over their lifetimes, and how they made meanings out of being both trans and physically active or sporty. Like others, we recognise that qualitative data are open to multiple interpretations, and that these interpretations and sense-making are influenced by the questions researchers ask of data, and the theoretical concepts and ideas they bring into dialogue with that data (Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2010). With this in mind, we recently returned to the dataset with an eye to shining a theoretical spotlight on embodied pleasures, gender euphoria, and joy, and their relationship to Wellard’s circuits of pleasure/body-reflexivity framework. We describe the process of analysing the data from this new perspective below, but first, provide a brief overview of our participants.

Participants

Participants were recruited via emails to local LGBTQI + sports groups detailing the study and requesting gatekeepers to circulate to members, via posters displayed at the UK-based 2018 Trans, Non-Binary and Intersex Conference, and snowball sampling on social-media (e.g. Twitter). Between May and October 2018, the first author conducted eighteen semi-structured interviews (in person or via telephone, which were audio-recorded) with UK-based adults who self-identified as trans and/or non-binary, and interviews were an average of 90 min long. Participants were aged between 23 and 70, and the sample had limited diversity in relation to ethnicity and education. As such, we make no claims for the representativeness of the sample. All participants were, as adults, actively engaged in some form of SPE, including going to the gym, football and rugby, with some playing competitively. Given that many trans people experience barriers to participation and engage in less SPE compared to their cisgender peers, we recognise that our participants are perhaps not typical, in that they were regularly and happily taking party in an activity of their choosing.

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval was granted in April 2018 (University of Brighton Research Ethics Committee) by the first author’s institution, and data were collected between May and October 2018. As is typical in qualitative research all participants have been anonymised and pseudonymised and any identifying information removed. However, some participants elected to use their real name. Maintaining anonymity is often considered paramount for respecting the privacy and dignity of participants, particularly when working with those considered to be marginalised or vulnerable. Rather less consideration is given to the possibility that people may wish to be acknowledged in published research thereby retaining some ownership of their stories (Grinyer, 2001).

The decision to offer this choice was made to address a particular issue: that the historical erasure of trans identities in research is a concern. As trans people’s voices are overwhelmingly erased in research and in society, and in keeping with the ethics of inclusion encouraged in trans feminist research (Krane, 2019), we felt it was important to offer participants the opportunity to retain their real names and to be both present and represented in their own narratives (Holm, 2015). In order to attend carefully and sensitively to our participant’s comfort and well-being, we made sure that the interviews did not solely only focus on negative experiences (for example, talking positively about facilitators to access, and recruiting people who were actively involved in sports). Recruiting through sports organisations meant that participants had an existing social network, and we consistently checked on well-being throughout each interview, and again at the end, and provided support information. By actively thinking about gender identities, we asked about how people identify, using their pronouns, and mirroring participant’s language. No adverse ethical issues were reported. Both authors acknowledge their cisgender positionality within this research, and have strived to keep in mind the question of who speaks for whom in research (Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2010), and the ways in which trans communities have expressed concern about research fatigue (Vincent, 2018). By re-examining an existing data set we hope to have minimised research fatigue and remain committed trans allies.

Data analysis

This study arises from a larger, pre-existing qualitative dataset, consisting of 18 individual interviews, and collected in 2018 by the first author for her doctoral thesis (Barras, 2021). This means the interviews have already been transcribed. Although the original thematic analysis conducted by the first author on the original dataset had identified inductive codes such as ‘joy’ to describe participants experiences of SPE, this only received attention in relation to barriers to participation in the ensuing publication (Barras, 2021). The authors were therefore drawn to revisit this dataset to explore pleasure and joy in more detail, in the context of gender euphoria and embodiment. In order to analyse the data for this paper, the authors undertook the following steps. (1) Both authors separately re-read the original eighteen transcripts through the lens of Wellard’s concept of circuits of pleasure by attending to: (a) descriptions of pleasure, joy, fun or excitement; (b) embodiment and descriptions of sensory or felt aspects of bodily experiences; and (c) the meanings that participants gave to these experiences and/or the meanings we gave to these experiences as researchers. (2) Using this initial reading of the transcripts, we systematically coded the data to identify extracts of data pertaining to words related to both descriptions of pleasure, joy, fun or excitement and descriptions of sensory or felt aspects of bodily experiences. (3) We then sought to understand the meaning of these experiences by drawing on Wellard’s circuit of pleasure/body-reflexivity to understand (trans) embodiment by engaging in an interpretative dialogue with the data in which we asked:

1. What is the physiological/sensory experience that is being described? (e.g. the experience of grass under foot or the sensation of moving through water),

2. What is the psychological experience being described? (e.g. confidence in ability or shame in letting the team down),

3. What is the social context in which these experienced are made meaningful? (e.g. the norms of the specific sport, team/individual, PE lesson, and wider contextual issues around gender, temporality, age, etc.).

The idea of developing a ‘dialogue’ between the researchers, their coded data and their psychological knowledge, is in order to offer a more interpretative account of data which draws on insight from interpretative and phenomenological methodology and is in keeping with the phenomenological approach adopted by Wellard (Larkin & Thompson, 2012). Through this dialogue, together the authors refined their codes and agreed to focus on five transcripts which best helped shine a theoretical spotlight on the previously under-explored theme of embodied pleasures, gender euphoria, and joy. Refining these codes together helped us as authors maintain rigour and discard codes which did not. (4) From here we were able to organise our data extracts into our themes and subthemes, working together to ensure they made sense in relation to the interview segments used to inform our analysis. These are discussed in the following section.

Circuits of (un)pleasure in trans sport and PE

In the ensuing discussion, we use extracts of data from the wider study as a jumping off point for exploring a dynamic and flexible way of understanding trans peoples’ experiences of sport. We mobilise Wellard’s (2012) articulation of body-reflexive pleasures in sport (extended by Wellard from Connell’s, 1995 concept of body-reflexive practices) to help us to understand trans people’s experiences of pleasures and displeasure in SPE. Wellard made three key points in his discussion of bodily pleasures that we want to explore further: (1) he talked about pleasure as a neglected aspect of sport which has disruptive potential; (2) he argued for ‘the importance of acknowledging pleasure in sport as more than just an intrinsic, subjective, highly individual experience’ (Wellard, 2012, p. 22), and (3) he argued for a dynamic circuit of body-reflexive pleasures in which ‘a circuit of events is constantly being experienced and negotiated’ (Wellard, 2012, p. 26). For this reason, although we want to highlight the neglected issue of trans pleasures, we also tread the more familiar ground of gender dysphoria. Thinking about circuits of pleasure allows for movement in and out of pleasure, or movement between euphoria and dysphoria discussed below, and it is the ability to account for the dynamic complexity of these experiences which we find most productive.

Body-reflexive (trans) pleasures

So, I really enjoyed working out … [and] I’ve got a pull up bar and when I was working out, I could do a couple of fully formed perfect chin ups … it’s something that brings me a lot of joy, the physicality. (Elliot, non-binary, trans masculine, boxer)

Elliot’s description of the pleasures of working out and of perfecting the physically demanding task of a chin up is engaging, and as we write about Elliot’s experience, it makes us smile (even though neither of us have attempted or achieved this task ourselves). We take pleasure in Elliot’s experience of joy. Wellard (2012) argues that sports-based research has often been too quick to dismiss as trivial aspects of pleasure, especially embodied pleasures. Rather, sports studies have interpreted pleasure in narrow ways (such as the thrill-seeking of ‘extreme’ sports or the erotic consumption of sexualised bodies). Our aim, in exploring Elliot’s pleasure in performing a chin up, is to expand how pleasure and SPE might be understood by specifically identifying how trans people’s bodies might find pleasures in sport. We argue that talking about trans embodied pleasure is, in itself, an important counter-narrative to the dominant story of trans bodies as troubling, or as López-Cañada et al. (2021) refers to them in the context of their research, as belonging to a group with controversial body-selves.

First, we want to outline some of the embodied pleasures discussed by our trans interviewees. Recollections of the positivity, pleasure and joy they experienced when doing sport were striking. Wellard (2012) outlines three aspects of pleasurable experience in sport: the sensual experience of the body in motion; the thrill of the body confronting natural elements; and, the excitement of the physical body in contact with other bodies. Each of these was present in our data (to a greater or lesser extent). Jude (who is non-binary) talked about their experience of playing rugby and the pleasures of ‘meeting a great bunch of people’ and how they ‘really liked being outside and running around on the grass!’ Craig (who is non-binary, trans masculine and a runner) described enjoying the simplicity of running and of ‘going out’ and ‘just moving your legs around’. Tom (a trans man and water polo player) talks about how they ‘really, really enjoyed’ water polo and described how they ‘knew that when I was [playing] in the water I was happy and that was it’. Tom described how they experienced pleasure in ‘the physical aspect of it, like the holding people and stuff, the full contact stuff, that's what I want’. These physical or embodied pleasures were sometimes wrapped up in, and inseparable from, other pleasures. In the example from Elliot above, perfecting a chin up is pleasurable in terms of achieving a successful performance and the physicality of experiencing the muscle strength and coordination of the body in motion. We can see this interweaving of pleasures in the following exchange between the first author Abby and Miles (a trans man and circus skills professional):

Abby:

Are you good at what you do?

Miles:

Yes. I said that very quickly!

Abby:

But that’s important. It’s a reason, it’s a good reason to do sport, there’s joy in being good at something.

Miles:

And about trying something and seeing what happens. And having fun too.

For some people, pleasure manifests by enjoying what their body can achieve in sport, such as scoring a goal or climbing faster. For some it was the sensation of their body’s response(s) to exercise, for example, how the water felt against their skin when they swam. Recognition that sport provides an opportunity for trans people (just as for cis people) to experience embodied pleasure and joy is important. However, it is the intersection between these pleasures and gender identity which we specifically want to focus on next.

Wellard (2012) is keen for us to acknowledge ‘pleasure in sport as more than just an intrinsic, subjective, highly individual experience’ (Wellard, 2012, p. 22). He draws on the notion of body-reflexive pleasures as a way to marry a focus on the corporeal (the visceral, material, sweating, moving) aspects of bodily experience, with understandings of the body as socially produced through social and cultural discourses. As he notes,

the potential bodily pleasure experienced through sporting activity have to be managed within social understandings of a range of discourses, such as gender, sexuality, age and ability, which may ultimately, prevent or diminish my ability or willingness to take part. (Wellard, 2012, p. 25)

This, he argues, helps us to understand how social factors interact with individual experience of the body through bodily practice – such as the doing of SPE. For the purposes of our discussion of trans people’s experiences of bodily pleasure, we explore how bodily pleasures, through reflexive interplay with social discourses regarding gender (what ‘counts’ as masculine/feminine sport, clothing, bodily appearance, performance, etc.), are enlivened through bodily practices (the doing of sport). In other words, we want to explore the connections between bodily pleasures and experiences of what we might call gender euphoria in our participants’ accounts of themselves as physically active.

We return first to Elliot’s joy in completing ‘fully formed’ chin ups. As someone who identifies as trans masculine, being physically able to perform ‘fully formed perfect chin ups’ gives Elliot a sense of mastery over the exercise, the pleasure of the embodied sensation of moving their body, and a sense of gender euphoria (or affirmation). Chin ups are culturally coded as a masculine activity. For example, talking about hegemonic masculinity in school physical education classes, Renold (1997) describes how in the absence of opportunities to play football in the winter months, boys dominated equipment ‘as they displayed their strength and stamina doing chin-ups and press ups’ (p. 19). Similarly, Bladh (2022) notes that outdoor gyms are male-dominated spaces which often feature equipment for chin-ups and pull ups which are associated with military-type training and create expectations about what bodies should do and how bodies should move. Bladh discusses how such spaces were seen as places ‘for men’ and aligned with a contextually contingent hegemonic masculinity which excludes those who do not align with this image. Our participants also talked about the ways in which gendered spaces and forms of exercise were perceived as unwelcoming, dangerous places from which they felt excluded. However, for trans masculine participants, embodying activities and spaces coded as masculine offered opportunities for affirming gender identity and, therefore, for pleasure and joy, as found in previous discussions (Barras, 2021, 2022; Berg & Kokkonen, 2022; Ferguson & Russell, 2023).

When considering pleasure in SPE, Wellard (2012) stresses the importance of recognising the range of factors which contribute to experiencing this pleasure (or not experiencing it). Wellard distils these factors down to three which operate in an interconnected circuit: social (e.g. playing sport with friends); physiological (e.g. the sensation of a cold swim after a hot sauna) and psychological (e.g. shame when missing a goal in football). Wellard argues these processes may occur at any level and with varied influence. For example, gendered clothing has often been identified as a source of difficulty for trans people and as something which exacerbates dysphoria and is a barrier to participating in sports (Whitehouse et al., 2022). In contrast, Lynda (a trans woman tennis player) described how her awareness of her body in sport once she had started gender-affirming hormones led to her needing to wear a sports bra because her breasts had grown, and were now ‘actually too big, I wear a sports bra.’ Lynda’s breasts are an affirmation of both her gender identity and gender presentation (female), as something which she now needs to account for in sport by wearing not just a bra, but a sports bra. Craig, who is trans masculine, described how moving made them feel good physically: ‘I think I go to the gym because I enjoy it, but I also go there to try and craft, er, a kind of more masculine physique.’ Being in the (masculine) space of the gym, and building a masculine physique (presumably muscles), is a body-reflexive process through which Craig achieves gender euphoria. We did not specifically ask about experiences of gender euphoria in our research, but these experiences resonate with the way that people describe gender euphoria in other research. For example, a participant in Beischel et al.’s (2022) study recounted experiencing gender euphoria for the first time after trying on a binder (a garment which flattens the chest). They talked about looking in the mirror, seeing their flat chest:

I looked in the mirror and it looked just right. I felt a rush go through my body and I burst into laughter and a huge smile and began running my hands across my chest. (p. 281)

Like the participants in our research, this person describes how seeing, feeling or experiencing the body in particular ways, communicates to the self-information made meaningful in relation to gender which is then experienced as affirming or gender euphoric. Mirroring Wellard’s ideas about circuits of pleasure, Beischel et al. (2022) grouped gender euphoria into three distinct categories (external/physical, internal/psychological, and social) although they note that participants’ experiences often ‘represented a complex entanglement of these three domains’ (p. 282). External/physical refers to changes to their sexed bodies (through hormones or surgery), or body modifications (such as binders, voice training or haircuts). Internal/psychological refers to changes which occurred from thinking about themselves or behaving in a particular way as a form of self-affirmation (such as changing pronouns). Social experiences related to feeling euphoria through interactions with other people and social structures (such as passing and being read as their identified sex/gender).

The entanglement or constantly shifting circuit of events is sometimes experienced as pleasurable and sometimes not. In their paper on fitness for trans men, Farber (2017) notes that participants acknowledged that interacting with others is only comfortable when they are seen and treated as male. By building muscle in a traditionally male (and therefore masculine) shape, trans men were also more likely to be read by others as male and masculine, resulting in feelings of gender euphoria. Thus, the physicality of the exercise is both physically pleasurable and offers a pleasurable affirmation of gender identity. That these pleasures are (sometimes) precarious, was powerfully communicated to us by our participants.

Body-reflexive (trans) displeasures

I did horse riding … [but] there was a point where I did feel really awful horse riding. There’s one bit where the horse trots, and it makes your body go up and down really, really quickly so it made me feel really dysphoric. So that put me off doing horse riding because … yeah … It was bouncy shall we say (laughs). (Miles)

It is worth returning here to the (sadly) more familiar ground of distress, displeasure and discomfort which some trans people experience in relation to SPE. As noted earlier, the extant (limited) literature which examines trans people’s experience of sport, has typically focused on the important issue of structural barriers to sport, such as the framing of particular sports as men’s sports or women’s sports, gender-segregated teams and spaces, and gendered clothing. In this section, we want to focus our attention on the embodied experience of SPE. Our aim here is to illustrate how bodily displeasures are formed in circuits between the physiological, the psychological and the social.

In the extract above, Miles, a trans man in his early 20s, describes his experience of horse-riding during an in-person interview with the first author Abby. Although Miles characterised horse-riding (for him) as ‘very inclusive’, nonetheless he describes feeling ‘really awful’ about the way in which the movement of the horse at a trot, in turn induces a ‘bouncy’ movement in his own body. It is the body-in-movement, the bouncing of his body which makes Miles feel awful or dysphoric. Specifically, it is the movement of the breasts/chest which is problematic. It is breast tissue, gendered as female and culturally recognisable as ‘bouncy’, which triggers the dysphoric misalignment with Miles’s gender identity as male. In other words, it is the constellation of feeling the body in movement (the physiological sensation of bouncing), the movement generated by the sport, and the social context in which the movement of breasts/chests are gendered, which produces the psychological experience of dysphoria. It is worth noting, then, that the sensual experience of the body in motion (one of the three sources of embodied pleasure discussed by Wellard) is not necessarily or inevitably experienced as pleasurable. Displeasure, or in this case dysphoria, is experienced when the sensual movement of the body coalesces with the meaning of these body parts (the breasts) and the movement (bouncing) in what might be considered (for Miles) to be a relatively gender-neutral and inclusive sport.

Yet the recollection of this event from earlier life in the present also evoked laughter, with Miles demonstrating the bouncy movement of breasts with two cupped hands (like weighing fruit). This made both Abby and Miles laugh during the interview, with Miles’s pleasure at retelling of the story shared by Abby, and both of them enjoying the humour evident in the memory of such an absurd yet personal moment. Moreover, as Miles notes, shifting this constellation to alleviate dysphoria is achieved by moving away from the sport (‘it put me off doing horse riding’). In telling this story, Miles was reflecting back on his experience of horse-riding prior to having ‘top surgery’ (surgery to reduce/remove breast tissue) which perhaps freed up the opportunity for pleasure in the retelling since his physical body had been altered (making bouncing in the present not possible) and affirming his gender identity.

Wellard (2012) also talked about the excitement of the physical body in contact with other bodies. Although (as noted above) some of our trans participants spoke about this as a source of pleasure (enjoying the physicality of contact sport), others identified this as a source of displeasure and dysphoria (or both). For example, Miles also spoke about feeling dysphoric during circus skill classes because ‘you have to have a bit of human contact, and also connect to your own body, which can be hard if you have dysphoria, you can get nervous.’ He goes on to explain that ‘you worry someone is looking at your hips, are they too big, do I look too skinny? Is my crotch too close to someone’s face, they might notice … ?’ Sport participation often involves high levels of surveillance, and in spaces which are sex-segregated (like changing rooms), the surveillance of physical appearance as a marker of gender identity is especially salient (Caudwell, 2022). Participants talked about passing (or not) as their preferred gender, about how precarious this is, and their fears of being ‘discovered’ to have a body whose characteristics were read by others as indicating a different gender, and in turn, unwelcome and unwanted in shared sporting spaces (Barras, 2022).

Conclusions

In this paper, we have argued that a focus on embodiment, and specifically on embodied pleasures, and an understanding of pleasures as arising out of dynamic and shifting reflexive circuits of meanings can be useful for sports scholars (and others) interested in supporting trans people’s inclusion in SPE. In so doing, we hope we have drawn attention to the ways in which focusing on pleasures might open up possibilities for trans people to benefit from the multiple social and physical benefits that participation in SPE can bring. Although we have drawn on Wellard’s notion of circuits of pleasure, we are aware this is not the only theoretical tool available for conceptualising pleasure, and future research would benefit from questions and insights prompted by alternative approaches to understanding pleasures. For instance, the example of mirror gazing, and gender euphoria discussed earlier might usefully be understood in relation to specular pleasure – the pleasures of looking, seeing and being seen. Such an approach invites us to consider the relationship between private pleasures and public obligations policed through surveillance, and how participants might move between pleasures and displeasures as they navigate panoptic modes of self-surveillance.⁴

Thus, this paper advances theoretical contributions and work by Wellard, by explicitly building upon his notion of circuits of pleasure, whilst moving us away from a linear and binary focus on inclusion/exclusion and barriers/facilitators to present a more dynamic, contingent, precarious constellation of moveable parts which coalesce to produce experiences of pleasure/euphoria or experiences of displeasure/dysphoria. Although this fluidity was implicit in Wellard’s account of body-reflexive pleasures, by applying this to trans people’s experiences in SPE, we have turned the spotlight towards demonstrating how experiences can rapidly cycle between pleasure and distress. Moreover, by reading our data through the lens of circuits of pleasure, we have opened up different ways of approaching trans inclusion in SPE. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to trans inclusion in SPE. By examining the ‘modalities of inclusion’ through which trans and gender-diverse young people navigate the policing of gendered practices in school-based physical education, McBride and Neary (2021) are urging us to move beyond individualised inclusion practices. Such practices, they argue, have limited impact since they leave intact the architecture of gendered classification and ordering practices. We agree but would advocate for a both/and approach, suggesting how trans inclusion in SPE would be supported by both a loosening of the gendered architecture of sport and a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of individualised inclusion practices. Such practices, we argue, are not intrinsically inclusive but rather become so in relation to a constellation of other practices, events and meanings. Practices labelled as inclusive are complicated by the ambivalences that characterise trans people’s involvement in gendered physical education and school sport. For example, most students in Berg and Kokkonen’s study (2021) reported liking mixed groups in PE, but also described being included on the boys/girls’ team positively when this aligned with their gender identity. It is important, then, that future research attends to contextually situated modalities of inclusion and how these are experienced in diverse ways by trans people.

Our research builds on the nascent understanding of gender euphoria in the academic literature and speaks to its applicability to sports and physical exercise. By reading our data through the lens of embodied pleasure, we have made an important observation into the typically problem-saturated narrative surrounding trans people and sport. We did not specifically ask about experiences of gender euphoria in our research. Yet, the pleasures and joys that our participants talked about could certainly be read as examples of this, as well as their awareness of the social capital participation provides, as noted by Storr et al. (2022), whose own research participants found both community and comradery in sport. We hope that highlighting trans people’s pleasurable experiences of SPE has made an important contribution to this emerging work and provides a spur to further research and inclusive practice. Our findings have important implications for educational practice in schools and other sports facilities, and experiences of embodied pleasure and joy can form powerful memories and motivators for engaging in physical activity. As Beischel et al. (2022) found, people described experiences of gender euphoria as being ‘life-saving’, emphasising the importance and urgency of understanding and facilitating gender euphoria to counter and help build resilience against poor mental health associated with discrimination, stigma and dysphoria. Teachers and trainers working with trans clients and young people might benefit from exploring with them what brings them joy, contentment, and validation and encourage opportunities. By overlooking encounters of gender euphoria, we may also be overlooking ways to rethink the value of PE and new ways to engage trans young people in sport at an early age. This is worth considering, because early and positive engagement in PE sets a precedent for continuing into adulthood or re-engaging after periods of not exercising (Barras et al., 2021). This is a really important, and often missed, part of trans people’s experiences which could be leveraged to enhance participation in physical activity, and an important motivator to return to physical activity after this has lapsed. Attending to what trans people find pleasurable and exploring with them how pleasure might be found in sport, and queering pleasure to focus on pleasures beyond performance (or what adults/straight institutions think should be pleasurable) would be useful. We would also like to reflect on the predominance of trans men referring to circuits of pleasure and gender identity affirmation in this paper. Trans men and trans masculine individuals are often rendered invisible in discussions concerning trans people’s participation in sport (Abelson, 2019; Barras, 2023), and are often eclipsed by a focus on trans women. We hope by shifting this focus a little, we have demonstrated that inclusion for trans men and trans masculine people warrants attention.

At a time when the current climate in the UK towards trans people participating in sport and in public life more generally, for example in relation to gender-affirming health care (Horton, 2023) is particularly hostile, it is more important than ever to ensure that sport is inclusive and welcoming for all trans people. Third-sector organisations and those responsible for policy-formation all have an important part to play in encouraging trans people to experience multiple avenues for taking up sport in a way which feels fun and pleasurable, including within school-based settings and beyond (Barras, 2023). Moving away from a linear and binary focus on inclusion/exclusion and barriers/facilitators towards a more dynamic, contingent, precarious constellation of moveable parts which coalesce to produce experiences of pleasure/euphoria or experiences of displeasure/dysphoria may open up more opportunities for trans people to take up sport and physical exercise and to benefit from the many advantages this can bring.

Acknowledgements

We both thank Dr Nigel Jarvis and Dr Rodrigo Lucena De Mello for their exceptional supervisory support during Abby’s PhD. Enormous gratitude is expressed as always to the people who generously participated in the research and whose experiences continue to grow and strengthen our own thinking.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Abby thanks the University of Brighton Doctoral College for kindly funding her PhD research, which this paper draws its data from.

Notes

1 The authors use the term trans as an umbrella term in this paper but respect that this is not a catch-all for the diversities of genders an individual may use to describe themselves, or an intentional flattening of gender expression (e.g., gender fluid, gender queer). . No participants identified as intersex in this study. We use the shorthand ‘cis’ to refer to cisgender people. Cisgender is the term for people whose gender and assigned sex at birth align. Our paper maintains the position that the last word on an individual’s sex/gender is always self-defined (Anderson & Travers, 2017).

2 ‘Passing’ is the commonly used term for when a trans person is correctly gendered by strangers (see Barras, 2022, pp. 236–237).

3 Gender dysphoria is a medical term for the experience of discomfort or distress in a person’s body, due to having a gender identity that does not align with their gender assigned at birth. Tannehill (2018, p. 13) notes ‘many transgender individuals have experienced some degree of gender dysphoria, which is an intense and persistent sense or distress or discomfort with their birth sex.’ Gender dysphoria is not to be confused with body dysmorphia, which is a mental health condition where people perceive flaws in their appearance.

4 We are indebted to one of the peer reviewers for highlighting the benefits of tis alternative theorising, although we did not have space to fully explore this here, we hope that this will inspire others to consider gender euphoria through this lens.