Both the approach taken by World Rugby to address the question of trans women participation in women’s rugby and the paper by Jon Pike that explains the ethical justification for the exclusion of trans women players from world rugby are compelling when understood within the dominant rugby/sport narrative. However, in this article, I suggest that what is absent is a radical feminist understanding that engages with the political purposes of separate sport spaces for women in producing feminist counternarratives that challenge (...) men’s power in/over sport. Decisions about the inclusion of trans women in women’s sporting competitions should be made on a sport context-by-sport context basis oriented by broader feminist political goals. (shrink)

In this paper, I link philosophical discussion of policies for trans inclusion or exclusion, to a method of policy making. I address the relationship between concerns about safety, fairness, and inclusion in policy making about the inclusion of transwomen athletes into women’s sport. I argue for an approach based on lexical priority rather than simple ‘balancing’, considering the different values in a specific order. I present justifying reasons for this approach and this lexical order, based on the special obligations of (...) International Federations such as World Rugby. As a result, I provide a justificatory framework for the WR Guidelines that exclude transwomen from the women’s game in WR competitions. Finally, I give an account of a maximally safe, maximally fair and maximally inclusive form of sex categorisation in sport. (shrink)

Sporting communities remain entangled in debate over whether and how to include transgender and intersex athletes in competition with cisgender athletes. Of particular concern is that transgender and intersex athletes may have unfair physiological advantages over their cisgender opponents. Arguments for inclusion of transgender and intersex athletes in sport attempt to demonstrate that such inclusion does not threaten the presumed physiological equivalence among competitors and is therefore fair to all. This article argues that the physiological equivalency rationale has significant limitations, (...) including an inordinate emphasis on sport as a comparative test. Instead, this article contends that arguments for narrativity rather than physiological equivalency show that exclusion is not only misguided but also undesirable: it is detrimental not only to the excluded athletes but to sport itself. The article yields several important consequences including calls for revisions to policies on transgender... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to expand the usefulness of equal opportunities legislation for females in sport by providing a philosophically based opposition toward the long history of gender stereotypes, embodied in the AEC, that currently limit its effects.

World Rugby (WR) announced in 2020 that transwomen should not be competing at the elite level because of safety and fairness concerns. WR and Jon Pike, a philosopher of sport advising them, adopted a lexical approach to get a grip on the three values in play: safety, fairness, and inclusion. Previously, governing bodies tried to balance these competing values. Michael Burke recently published a paper taking aim at Pike’s lexical approach. This is a reply to Burke.

This paper offers a discussion of the rationale for the creation of sports categorization criteria based on sporting genealogy and the gendered body, as proposed by Torres et al. in their article ‘Beyond Physiology: Embodied Experience, Embodied Advantage, and the Inclusion of Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sport’. The strength of their ‘phenomenological’ account lies in its complex account of human experience; but this is also what makes it impractical and difficult to operationalize. Categorization rather requires simplicity and practicability, if it (...) is to be applied to all athletes (and not exceptionally to transgender athletes). This discussion helps us to formulate three general principles for the process of categorization of athletes, relating to fairness, verifiability and practicability. (shrink)

David Fairchild explains that sport is an evocative symbolic system that demonstrates the apparently ‘natural’ division of humans into two separate and dichotomous genders, and also demonstrates the apparently ‘genetically based’ hierarchy between the genders in terms of sporting results. Additionally, this hierarchy of performance translates into a hierarchy of authority, such that men occupy the most powerful positions in coaching, administration and the sports media. The initial section of this paper will follow on from Fairchild to suggest some changes (...) that are necessary before women will gain semantic authority over their participation in sport. The paper will then suggest that the expansion of the discursive space in sport to include alternate standpoints produced by women [and other marginalised groups] can follow tactics employed by feminist standpoint theorists to expand discursive space in other fields. The final section of the paper will look at how a feminist politics in discursive sport will need to challenge what William Morgan has suggested is the recently acquired dominant position of ‘interpretative broad internalism’ in sport philosophy as one of the foundational underpinnings of internalism explains sport as a perfect practice. This underpinning has been used in substantive practice to undermine the knowledges of women athletes and commentators. This final section will look at some examples of translating private authorship into political authority for women in sport. (shrink)

The work of Bernard Suits continues to be discussed in the sports philosophy field, over forty years after the publication of his brilliant book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Much of t...