Gender Policing in Girls’ and Women’s Sports

Abstract

This paper will show that sporting institutions that police the boundaries of women’s sports do so to keep sportswomen constrained in ways that men’s sports and male athletes are not. This paper explores three methods that sporting establishments have used to police and constrain women’s sports and sportswomen: the exclusion of women and the creation of different rules for men’s and women’s sports, the policing of international sporting administrations of which women can compete in women’s sports by invoking the specter of “gender fraud”, and the exclusion of trans women from sports by relying on conservative Christian notions of a gender binary motivated by a similar strain of homophobia that animated previous efforts to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage. Taken together, these three threads reveal that gender policing in women’s sports is not and has never been about “fairness” but about preserving heteropatriarchal systems of power that position women as weak and inherently less athletic than men.