There’s no doubt we’re living through some of the most intense and widespread scapegoating of trans people history has ever seen. Ongoing legislative attacks have targeted trans youth and adults, and both groups have been deeply impacted by trans exclusionary sports policies, which are being implemented at the youth level, the recreational level, and the elite competitive sports level, with the International Olympic Committee recently deciding to bring back sex testing for everyone competing in the women’s category.
History shows that increased representation and visibility often brings this kind of backlash for marginalized groups of people, but that doesn’t mean it’s new or entirely without precedent. Sports — particularly elite athletics — have almost always been one of the most prominent battlegrounds for gender equity, and the supposed concern over “fair competition” in women’s sports goes back to the very beginning of women’s inclusion in elite athletics. As I always try to emphasize, one of our most important tools in fighting against systemic oppression is understanding why we’re here, how we got here, and what we can do about it. This list features some of the most recently published books on trans exclusion in sports, and of course, it is just a starting point in arming ourselves with the knowledge we need to challenge and dismantle the system.
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters
The Other Olympians is one of my favorite nonfiction books of the last few years. Through it, Waters traces the history of our current system of gender surveillance and sex testing back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where these systems were first created. Along the way, Waters introduces us to some of the first trans and intersex Olympic athletes whose identities were sensationalized by the press and sports governing bodies determined to make these systems permanent. Aside from the compelling content, Waters’s writing style will have you hooked from the start of the book.
Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes by Harrison Browne and Rachel Browne
So many of the arguments thrown out by the people who want to limit trans people’s ability to compete are allegedly based in scientific fact and what they think are “obvious” understandings of biology. Let Us Play carefully and meticulously blows these arguments apart by examining the actual research that currently exists. But the Browne siblings don’t stop there. They also make an impassioned case for changing the ways think about sex segregation in competitive sports altogether.
Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports by Ellie Roscher and Dr. Anna Baeth
Through an exploration of the importance of sports to the trans athletes who participate in them, Roscher and Baeth document both the large- and small-scale impacts that trans exclusionary policies have on the people and communities forced to contend with them.
Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes
In Fair Play, Barnes casts a wide net covering the entire history of women’s sports — from their inception to the passing of Title IX to the current exclusion of trans people in sports today. Barnes’s interrogation of this history continually brings to light one issue: If the basis of the argument for trans exclusion is “fairness,” who decides what is actually “fair”? And why are we so focused on the issue of “fairness” when it comes to trans inclusion, but not when it comes to the myriad inequities women athletes face every day?
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
While this book isn’t specifically focused on trans inclusion and exclusion in sports, it does offer a broad history of transness that is inclusive of gender-variant expressions that, historically, have not always been thought of as explicitly trans. The history presented here is written with exceptional brevity and clarity, making it accessible to almost anyone who’s beginning to try to gather the knowledge they need to fight for trans rights and trans bodily autonomy.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson
Gill-Peterson’s book is, similarly, not directly about trans inclusion and exclusion in sports, but digs even deeper into the history of the marginalization of trans women and how that history has been the root of so much gender-based violence over the course of the last two centuries. In it, Gill-Peterson makes it clear that the recent actions against trans women, in particular, are nothing new and are actually a fixture in the larger systems of oppression in the West.
