Trans women participation in sport: A feminist alternative to Pike’s position

ABSTRACT 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.