Sport has never been binary: fragments of a provocation

Abstract

Over the last two centuries, sports have become one of the most powerful sites for the public imposition, regulation, and maintenance of the rigid colonial binaries of men and women, as well as boys and girls. As part of this, sports have become a site of increasingly hostile debate and intervention regarding the participation of trans women and trans girls. Nonbinary athletes have received far less attention. Yet a focus on those people who are neither women nor men has the potential to radically disrupt and transform those popular sporting empires that play such a vital role in sustaining the colonial gender binary. This paper draws on history, sports studies, Indigenous studies, and autoethnography to explore: The unnatural chronology that placed the gender binary at the centre of modern sports; How nonbinary subjectivities and experiences unsettle the binary world of sports; The radical futures that are possible when sports are untethered to binary categories of gender. Our aim is not to cover every aspect nor to propose simple solutions. Instead, we offer disobedient fragments of provocation that unsettle the powerful common non-sense modern sports teach children about gender and the associated ideologies of ongoing colonialism, inevitably including those of race.