“Stepping Up” for Trans Inclusion in Sport

Abstract

Backlash against transgender (trans) people has notably extended into sport. Over the past two years, an unprecedented number of sport organizations have banned trans girls and women from competitions. Scholars from across disciplines have highlighted the problems with these prohibitions; yet, a look through the pages of our journals and our conference proceedings shows the invisibility of trans people in our field, as both actors and authors. As Sport History Review Editor Carly Adams points out in her 2022 editorial “‘Home’ to Some, But Not to Others: It’s Time to ‘Step Up,’”much of the work published in our field “continues to value and privilege certain bodies, voices, and analytic foci.” We have largely ignored the experiences and perspectives of trans people. I am responding to Adams’s call for sport historians to “step up” by encouraging us to be more encompassing and inclusive of trans voices. In doing so, I echo sport historian CB Lucas’s call for us to “bring trans and queer perspectives into our work” to recognize “the ways that queerness (in its myriad forms) pushes against, cracks open, and flat out refuses the binary logics of gender.” Political fear mongering and reductive understandings of sex have cleaved the rights of trans individuals. Our ability to provide historical context to inform contemporary conversations is, therefore, more imperative than ever. As scholars Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici poignantly argue, “History often lends legitimacy to a community’s claim that it belongs in the here and now.” We have work to do to ensure that sport history is a space for trans people. In writing this response, I acknowledge my positionality affords me power. Transfeminist methodologies encourage scholars to interrogate their identities and motivations when studying topics related to trans figures to recognize “unequal power dynamicswithin the research process.”As aWhite, United States, able-bodied,middleclass, heterosexual, cisgender (cis) scholar, I have navigated both higher education and sports with relative ease. It is unlikely that I will face backlash—personal or professional—for writing this response. I, therefore, hope to use this privilege to offer some thoughts on howwe can “step up” for trans inclusion in sport history. First, I offer responses to some of the obstacles historians encounter in studying trans history, then I use my own scholarship to provide examples of “cissexist pitfalls” to avoid. Some sport historians may suggest that the invisibility of trans figures in our scholarship stems from the contemporaneous nature of the term “transgender.” It is