Why ban trans athletes?

In order to understand why authorities are trying to ban transgender athletes from sports, it’s important to explore the role and importance of sport to our communities.

Sports act as a smaller mirror to society, reflecting different cultural values and messages. These ideologies are how people interpret ideas surrounding concepts such as gender, race, social class, and ability. Additionally, sports have a coveted influence on an individual’s family life and a nation’s economy, media, politics, education, and religion. Because of this, sports are uniquely situated to affirm different social ideologies and beliefs. 

For instance, when athletes and their roles are idolized by society, they consequently begin to represent their country. They become figureheads for their country’s values and ideologies. Furthermore, in American society, sports have been commercialized and privatized; they have a heavy influence on the economy. Due to that combination of cultural and economic value, governments often exert influence on athletics and sports in order to control their image and prestige. One of the most effective ways in doing so is the creation and enforcement of rules, laws, and legislations by the government. Historically, the creation and enforcement of legislation on the social sphere has been rooted in a concept known as state-sanctioned violence. In this case, the violence is the oppression of those who threaten the government’s ‘ideal’ nation by transcending gender boundaries..

Gender is frequently both valued and oppressed in society and consequently in sports as well. Science has repeatedly shown that gender identity, roles, and expression develop in alignment with cultural values, similar to the relationship between sports and culture. Additionally, how a society thinks about gender influences how they think about and identify themselves and those around them, how they develop relationships and expectations for themselves and others, and how people are rewarded. Most societies, particularly Western ones, have adapted a two-sex approach to gender that implies anything outside of that binary is abnormal or deviant. This not only includes those who identify as gender-diverse or transgender, but also those who present or go beyond their gendered role in society. 

For many years, the government has been invested in maintaining legal barriers between the genders that uphold the image of the ‘ideal’ patriarchal society. Through prohibiting women to vote, own property, make their own medical decisions, and more, the government has repeatedly intervened to affirm the idea that men are superior and hold a greater value to society. Sex-based participation rules and laws reaffirm the concept that women, both cisgender and transgender, are meant to be controlled and monitored by the state. 

Transgender identities, particularly transgender identities in sports, ultimately challenge these rigid boundaries of gender that are used to divide and categorize people, in sports and in society, to create the ‘ideal’ nation. When politicians and the media feed into this moral panic, it further reaffirms the idea that those who go beyond the orthodox, two-sex binary idea of gender, are wrong, deviant and unwelcome in society. 

Written by JD Dumbrowsky