It’s not fair! Constructing gendered legal subjects via trans-exclusionary sport legislation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ongoing efforts to exclude trans people from the public sphere in the United States include the proposal – and, often, passing – of Bills seeking to exclude trans people from sport. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyse four such Bills. We argue that, in seeking to regulate the participation of trans students in school athletics, legislatures are producing essentialist gendered subjects. Sporting spaces are amenable to such legislation because they are strongholds for simplistic, binary conceptualisations of sex and gender. Further, by operationalising an instrumental view of sport – wherein winning and thus achieving material reward motivates participation – legislatures can construct trans girls as threats to cisgender girls’ future success and mobilise affect and emotion to both produce subjects and to justify transphobic discrimination. This paper contributes to literature on the outcomes of trans-exclusionary regulations by exploring the rhetorical work done by such regulations and what regulation and discipline these strategies make possible.