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ABSTRACT
An unprecedented number of anti-transgender youth sports bills have been introduced in various state legislatures across the United States since 2020. These bills seek to bar trans youth from playing and competing in sports that align with their gender identity. Scrutinizing the rise in these bills and the fearmongering that accompanies them, this article untangles how the deployment of a white feminist rhetoric of “protecting women’s sports” by a coalition of anti-LGBTQ Christian conservative forces and trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) women’s sports advocates shields these bills and their proponents from accusations of transphobia and bigotry while obscuring their white supremacist underpinnings.
Acknowledgments
Much gratitude to K. Mohrman, Jennifer McClearen, and the anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful suggestions and critiques were crucial for sharpening my arguments. I dedicate this article to my mother whose Alzheimer journey is reminding all of us to find and treasure moments of joy and laughter even in despair.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Mia Fischer and Jennifer McClearen, “Transgender Athletes and the Queer Art of Athletic Failure,” Communication & Sport 8, no. 2 (2020): 147–67; Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, “The Powers of Testosterone: Obscuring Race and Regional Bias in the Regulation of Women Athletes,” Feminist Formations 30, no. 2 (2018): 1–39; Lindsey P. Pieper, Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Sarah Teetzel, “On Transgendered Athletes, Fairness and Doping: An International Challenge,” Sport in Society 9 (2006): 227–51; Steven Petrow, “Do transgender Athletes have an Unfair Advantage at the Olympics?” Washington Post, August 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/do-transgender-athletes-have-an-unfair-advantage-at-the-olympics/2016/08/05/08169676-5b50-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.html?utm_term..fed174b8ee3b
2 In particular, testosterone is frequently invoked as the key marker for conferring athletic advantage. There currently is, however, no consensus in the scientific literature that elevated levels of testosterone do, indeed, provide transgender or intersex athletes with a significant competitive advantage over cisgender athletes. For a basic overview of studies on the impact of testosterone on athletic performance see Will Hobson, “The Fight for the Future of Transgender Athletes,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/04/15/transgender-athletes-womens-sports-title-ix/
3 Julie Kliegman, “Idaho Banned Trans Athletes From Women’s Sports. She’s Fighting Back,” Sports Illustrated, June 30, 2020, https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/2020/06/30/idaho-transgender-ban-fighting-back
4 Melissa Block, “Idaho’s Transgender Sports Ban Faces A Major Legal Hurdle,” NPR, May 3, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/991987280/idahos-transgender-sports-ban-faces-a-major-legal-hurdle
5 Freedom for all Americans, “Legislative Tracker: Anti-transgender Legislation,” 2021, https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/anti-transgender-legislation/ (accessed July 15, 2021).
6 Reddy explains that while the two standpoints may appear to be in conflict they both, albeit in different ways, “reaffirm the nation-state as either the unsignified or exclusive frame within which” freedom, rights, and power should properly be distributed. See Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
7 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Cheryl L. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (London, England: Pluto Press, 2000); C.W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
8 C. Richard King, David J. Leonard and Kyle W. Kusz, “White Power and Sport: An Introduction,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 31, no. 1 (2007): 3–10; Ben Carrington, “‘Football’s Coming Home’ but whose Home? And Do We Want It?: Nation, Football and the Politics of Exclusion,” in Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football, ed. Adam Brown (London: Routledge, 1998), 101–23; Mary Jo Kane, “The Better Sportswomen Get, the More the Media Ignore Them,” Communication and Sport 1, no. 3 (2013): 231–6; Michael Messner, “Reflections on Communication and Sport: On Men and Masculinities,” Communication & Sport 1, nos. 1–2 (2013): 113–24; Cheryl Cooky, LaToya Council, Maria Mears and Michael Messner, “One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019,” Communication & Sport, 9, no. 3 (2021): 347–71. doi:10.1177/21674795211003524; Jennifer McClearen, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2021).
9 Elizabeth A. Sharrow, “Sports, Transgender Rights and the Bodily Politics of Cisgender Supremacy,” Laws 10, no. 63 (2021), 1–29.
10 There is a long and documented history of intentional conservative political strategies, most prominently the Southern strategy, which use racially coded language that exploit and reinforce white supremacy in mainstream US politics. The most infamous example is Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s admission that there was a move away in the Republican Party from explicitly racist language to the use of more “abstract” language with phrases such as “forced busing,” “state’s rights,” and “the welfare queen” to appeal to certain voters. For more on this specific history see, for example, Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2021); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). More recently, scholars have come to acknowledge that much of this racially coded language was specifically about gender and sexuality and that a turn toward political activism around issues of gender and sexuality, especially abortion, was a way for conservative Christian political activists to (still) support white supremacist politics without explicitly acknowledging that they were doing so. See Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans Publishing Company, 2021); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017); or Seth Dowland, Family Values and Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Both of these strategies, and their effects continue to shape contemporary US politics.
11 News sources included a range of national publications across the political spectrum, such as Mother Jones, the New Republic, Politico, Democracy Now, Guardian, NPR, PBS, NBC News, CBS News, New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News to local outlets such as Connecticut Mirror, KSL-TV in Utah, and sports media such asSports Illustrated and Bleacher Report.
12 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 2nd ed. (New York, Routledge, 2010), 4.
13 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8.
14 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 3.
15 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2007), 50.
16 Mia Fischer, Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
17 Joanna Wuest, “The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics: Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases,” Politics & Gender 15 (2019): 336–60.
18 Lisa Lowe (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2 and 7.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 See, for example, Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence. Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection of Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 66–76; Fischer, Terrorizing Gender.
21 Reddy, Freedom, 8–9.
22 Lowe, The Intimacies; Ferguson, Aberrations.
23 See, for example, Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization. A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Ferguson, Aberrations; Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in America Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Melissa N. Stein, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
24 Ferguson, Aberrations, 6.
25 Cathy Cohen, “Bunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 453.
26 In 2016, North Carolina became the first state to enact anti-trans bathroom legislation. However, amid fierce backlash from corporations, entertainers, and sports leagues, especially the NBA’s decision to move the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte to New Orleans, the bill was eventually repealed in April 2017.
27 See Bederman, Manliness & Civilization; Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880 -1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Somerville, Queering the Color Line; Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling.
28 Mia Fischer, “Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom,” Communication, Culture & Critique 12 (2019): 403.
29 Sheila L. Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 7.
30 Madison Feller, “‘We All Have a Role to Play’: The Fight Against Anti-Transgender Legislation,’” Elle, June 2, 2021, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a36423383/anti-transgender-legislation-2021-roundtable/?utm_medium=social-media&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflowTWELM
31 E. Cram, “‘Angie Was Our Sister’: Witnessing the Trans-Formation of Disgust in the Citizenry of Photography,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 411–38; GLAAD (2022), “Victims or Villains: Examining Ten Years of Transgender Images on Television,” glad.org. https://www.glaad.org/publications/victims-or-villains-examining-ten-years-transgender-images-television; Gordene MacKenzie and Mary Marcel, “Media Coverage of the Murder of US Transwomen of Color” in Local Violence, Global Media: Feminist Analyses of Gendered Representations, ed. Lisa M. Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 79–106; Fischer, Terrorizing Gender; Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017).
32 The Equality Act has been discussed and introduced in various forms since the 1970s and would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. At the time of this writing, the Equality Act’s passage remains uncertain.
33 Promise to America’s Children (PAC), “About.” https://promisetoamericaschildren.org/about-us/ (accessed November 1, 2021).
34 In Bad Faith, Balmer, for example, illustrates that the original catalyst for the Religious Right was not abortion and the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision, as is commonly believed, but rather mobilization in defense of maintaining racial segregation in evangelical schools and colleges over their tax-exempt status in Green v. Connally (1971).
35 PAC.
36 Danielle Kurtzleben, “House Passes The Equality Act: Here's What It Would Do,” NPR, February 24, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/969591569/house-to-vote-on-equality-act-heres-what-the-law-would-do
37 PAC.
38 Sharrow, “Sports, Transgender Rights.”
39 Coined by political theorist Cedric J. Robinson, racial capitalism is a theoretical framework that explores the history of capitalism and explains its emergence in terms of its antecedent, racialism. Robinson posits that capitalism was preceded by, came about under, and was therefore thoroughly determined by racialism, the belief that race determines human traits and capacities. In other words, capitalism is always already a racial capitalism. See Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1983).
40 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 77.
41 See, for example, Democracy Now, “Trans Day of Visibility: Activists Chase Strangio & Raquel Willis Demand Action on Anti-Trans Laws,” Democracy Now, March 31, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3/31/trans_day_of_visibility
42 Briana January, “Fox News manufactured outrage about trans athletes. Right-wing media repeated it and earned high engagement on Facebook,” Media Matters, February 12, 2021, https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-manufactured-outrage-about-trans-athletes-right-wing-media-repeated-it-and-earned
43 Both cited in Abigail Weinberg, “The Real Threat to Women’s Sports Isn’t Trans Athletes. It’s Sexually Predatory Coaches,” Mother Jones, February 26, 2021, https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2021/02/the-real-threat-to-womens-sports-isnt-trans-athletes-its-sexually-predatory-coaches/
44 PAC.
45 Block, “Idaho’s Transgender Sports.”
46 It is important to mention that binary “biological sex” classifications, however, are socially constructed as well. Fausto-Sterling and other scientists have demonstrated that “there is no single biological measure that unassailably places each and every human into one of two categories – male or female.” Instead, sexual development is multi-layered from chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, to reproductive and brain sex to name a few – none of which always become strictly binary. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Why Sex is not Binary,” op-ed, New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/sex-biology-binary.html
47 Sharrow, “Sports, Transgender Rights.”
48 Heritage Foundation, “VIRTUAL EVENT: The Promise to America’s Children: Protecting Kids from Extreme Gender Ideology and Laws,” YouTube Video, February 23, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/gender/event/virtual-event-the-promise-americas-children-protecting-kids-extreme-gender-ideology
49 Bederman, Manliness & Civilization; Somerville, Queering the Color Line.
50 Carter, The Heart of Whiteness.
51 Kathleen Megan, “Transgender Sports Debate Polarizes Women’s Advocates,” The Connecticut Mirror, July 22, 2019, https://ctmirror.org/2019/07/22/transgender-issues-polarizes-womens-advocates-a-conundrum/
52 Associated Press, “On The First Day Of Pride Month, Florida Signed A Transgender Athlete Bill Into Law,” NPR, June 2, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002405412/on-the-first-day-of-pride-month-florida-signed-a-transgender-athlete-bill-into-l
53 Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women. A Counterhistory of Feminism (New York: Bold Type Books), 3.
54 Ibid., 198.
55 Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (10th Anniversary Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2006).
56 Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 104.
57 Schuller, The Trouble, 197.
58 Martina Navratilova, “The Rules on Trans Athletes Reward Cheats and Punish the Innocent,” Sunday Times, February 17, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rules-on-trans-athletes-reward-cheats-and-punish-the-innocent-klsrq6h3x?region=global&--xx-mea=denied_for_visit%3D0%26visit_number%3D0%26visit_remaining%3D0%26visit_used%3D0&--xx-mvt-opted-out=false&--xx-uuid=f8f4bdd7d1f7827b6778c9f224f4dbb0&ni-statuscode=acsaz-307
59 Pieper, Sex Testing; Sarah Teetzel, “Allyship in Elite Women’s Sport,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2020): 432–48.
60 Joanna Wuest, “A Conservative Right to Privacy: Legal, Ideological, and Coalitional Transformations in US Social Conservatism,” Law & Social Inquiry 46, no. 4 (2021): 968–9.
61 See hooks, Feminist Theory, xiv.
62 Melissa Gira Grant, “The Mothers Leading the Battle Against Trans Student Athletes,” New Republic, February 19, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161425/trans-student-athletes-white-supremacy-mothers
63 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018), 10.
64 Balmer, Bad Faith; Cooper, Family Values; Lassiter, The Silent Majority.
65 Cited in Yvonne Lindgren, “Trump’s Angry White Women: Motherhood, Nationalism, and Abortion,” Hofstra Law Review 48, no. 1 (2019): 29.
66 Grant, “The Mothers Leading.”
67 Mirin Fader, “Andraya Yearwood Knows She Has the Right to Compete,” Bleacher Report, December 17, 2018, https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2810857-andraya-yearwood-knows-she-has-the-right-to-compete; emphasis in original.
68 Grant, “The Mothers Leading.”
69 Fischer and McClearen, “Transgender Athletes,” 160.
70 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jessica Love and Lindsey Conlin Maxwell, “Serena Williams: From Catsuit to Controversy,” International Journal of Sport Communication 13, no. 1 (2020): 28–54.
71 Grant, “The Mothers Leading.”
72 Changing the Game, directed by Michael Barnett (2019, Hulu).
73 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
74 Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, Testosterone. An Unauthorized Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 197.
75 Associated Press, “Judge Tosses Suit that Sought to Block Transgender Athletes,” NBC News, April 26, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/judge-tosses-suit-sought-block-transgender-athletes-rcna758
76 Democracy Now, “Trans Day of Visibility.”
77 See, for example, James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet and Ma’ayan Anafi. Executive Summary of the Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (Washington DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016).
78 The Trevor Project, “2023 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People,” https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2023/assets/static/05_TREVOR05_2023survey.pdf
79 Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal funding and was originally passed because women faced significant barriers and inequalities in education. See Department of Justice, “Title IX Of The Education Amendments Of 1972,” https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ix-education-amendments-1972 (accessed November 1, 2021). Because terms such as “gender identity” and “transgender” did not exist in the 1970s, the inclusion of transgender athletes under Title IX has elicited widely differing government policies and directives, shifting with each administration: “While the Obama administration released guidance focusing upon transgender inclusion, the Trump administration’s guidance focuse[d] upon states’ rights and biological determinism.” See Julie Tamerler, “Transgender Athletes and Title IX: An Uncertain Future,” Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal 27, no. 1 (2020): 157.
80 Carol Curry, Edniesha Hutchins and Meredith Flaherty, “Where are All the Women Coaches?,” New York Times, December 31, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/opinion/Women-coaching-sports-title-ix.html; Gabriella Levine, “NCAA March Madness Drops the Ball for Women's Basketball with Sexism Outrage,” NBCNews, March 23, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ncaa-march-madness-drops-ball-women-s-basketball-sexism-outrage-ncna1261775
81 Sharrow, “Sports, Transgender Rights.”
82 Megan Rapinoe, “Bills to Ban Transgender Kids from Sports Try to Solve a Problem that doesn’t Exist,” op-ed, Washington Post, March 28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/28/megan-rapinoe-transgender-kids-sports-ban/
83 Greg Abbott, Letter to Jamie Masters, Commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, February 22, 2022, https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-dfps-to-investigate-gender-transitioning-procedures-as-child-abuse