Geopolitics at Play: Trans and Intersex Athletes in Elite Sports

Abstract

At the foundation of many iterations of the conversation around trans and intersex athletes in competitive sports, there is a common foundational understanding that there ‘must be a male winner and a female winner,’ thus justifying the exclusion of trans women from competing. In attempting to combat this kind of exclusion, I was struck by the question, ‘Why is that? What is at stake?’ In this project, I work to investigate the gendered, racialized, and geopolitical implications of winning, especially considering competitive sports’ position on an international scale and its connections to what Earl Smith defines as the Athletic Industrial Complex (AIC). The AIC is an institution with immense influence to produce/reinforce imperial hegemony due to its location in the global economy and its entanglements with other institutions of power (Smith, 2014, p. 72). I conduct a discourse analysis on the sensationalized stories of elite athlete Caster Semenya and high school student-athletes Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. In this process, I engage with Black Feminist, Marxist, Critical Trans and Critical Sports theorizers to frame the continuums and congruences connecting capital and imperial interests of transmisogynoir-istic legislation across time and space.

The first chapter historicizes the social construction of biological sex dimorphism to disrupt the notion that dimorphic sex is based in an unbiased, objective truth. Black Feminist and Marxist analyses of sex and gender help frame sex and gender as inextricably racialized and classed with serious material consequences that allows for exploited gendered labor to persist as well as (re)inforces pathologization of Black people’s bodies. The second chapter begins our discussion about Semenya, Miller and Yearwood and point out the ways that their treatment is connected to/occuring in the afterlife of slavery, thus informing the basis for their subjugation. Reading the discourse of these athletes together contours the boundaries between liberal conceptualizations of human and non-human subjectivities and their relation to the state. The third chapter explores the ways in which winning is embroiled in accumulation of capital and alienates the production of labor from athletes – particularly racialized athletes. In this chapter, I also investigate the connections of winning, nationalism, knowledge production, and imperialist hegemony. Finally, in framing the question of what is to be done, I problematize inclusionary-based politics within our current neoliberal capitalist context, particularly as it is positioned as liberatory.