Category: gender expression

June 2026: Precarity, ‘protection,’ and the power of collective care

“For you as a woman, why will you be tested to prove that you fit?… You know, it’s like now we need to prove that we are worthy as women to take part in sports.”

(Caster Semenya, 2026)

Marcia

I appreciate Dr. Douglas’s thoughtful reflections this Pride month on gender and sport. As I read through it, I was constantly thinking about both the physical and mental health of folks who are or will be impacted by these policies. I wonder who will avoid sports entirely because of concerns about assessment and policing of their bodies and gender identities. I wonder who will participate but with constant fear and anxiety about policing of their bodies and gender identities. I wonder how gender dysphoria will change or possibly increase if people avoid gender affirming health care so that they can participate in sports according to rules that don’t fit them.

Undoubtedly we are seeing a roll back on the human rights of trans and gender diverse individuals. Pride started as a riot. Perhaps it is time to riot again in support of the full health and human rights of our trans and gender diverse relatives, patients and community members. Happy Pride!

Delia

The UN has identified sport as a human right.

Nevertheless, in March 2026 Kristi Coventry, President of the International Olympic Committee, introduced a policy on the Protection of the female (women’s) category in Olympic sport, banning transgender women and athletes with differences of sex development (DSD) from competing in the female category at the Olympic Games. DSD refers to a range of congenital conditions where an individual’s chromosomes, hormones, and/or reproductive anatomy does not fit into the male/female binary.

It is important to note that since 2020 there has only been one openly transgender woman athlete who has competed at the Olympics, New Zealand weightlifter Laura Hubbard (she didn’t medal). So, contrary to the stated rationales behind creation of these policies, namely the protection of the female category, trans women are not invading women’s sport.

In September 2025 Alberta introduced, Bill 29, a piece of legislation which includes the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act which mandates that female-only divisions are strictly for biologically female athletes and demands athletes aged 12 and over prove their biological sex to participate.

These moves raise many ethical questions some of which include consent, the intrusive nature and cost of testing, and data storage. And why the focus on women’s sports? Why are they the only ones who have to prove their eligibility to compete?

Beyond the realm of sport, some provinces – Alberta, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick – have introduced policies that limit schools from teaching youth about gender and sexuality, or use of their preferred pronouns without parental consent, and there have been nationwide protests against inclusive education about sex and gender in schools such as the 1 Million March 4 Children movement. There have been efforts to ban books dealing with 2SLGBTQIA+ representation and sexual health.

Alongside formal policies and practices that seek to erase dehumanize and criminalize 2SLGBTQIA+ folx are assertions that these initiatives involve securing protection, fairness, and safety, for girls and women. But which girls and women are these policies referring to? History makes clear that not all girls and women have been deemed worthy of protection. Keep in mind that the prominence of one category of identity doesn’t mean that others are not involved. Gender is always linked to race. For example, Blackness has historically (and currently) been a category where female identity, womanhood, and humanness are refused. Caster Semenya knows this all too well. She is not alone – Black and brown athletes have been the main targets: Imane Khelif, Serena Williams, Brittney Griner, Dutee Chand, Asha Roy….

The specific focus on women’s sport is linked to a past which saw the emergence of organized sport in North America as an integral validating space for cis heterosexual masculinity. Because of the racialized, patriarchal, and heterocentric attitudes and structures that govern sport, all female athletes continue to navigate the belief that athletic competence masculinizes girls and women. While gender features prominently, race matters. Notions about gender normativity are always racialized. For instance, these beliefs have a specifically restrictive impact on Black women owing to the legacies of enslavement and colonialism which located Black women outside the dominant ideals of womanhood and the status of the human. So, if you don’t fit the policy’s definition of female, then you will be excluded. The diversity in sex and gender identity that exists is not only being denied but also demonized. Thus, these initiatives will undoubtedly prompt further accusations and attacks and the impact will be catastrophic.

Difference is everywhere, at issue are the various meanings that are ascribed to our differences. The imposition of gender and sexual binaries distorts and excludes. This way of thinking also encourages us to view systems of domination as operating separately – rather than in concert. A person’s physical appearance, chromosomes, or individual traits alone do not determine athletic performance or their gender identity. In a racially inequitable world, this so-called gender panic and the surveillance and policing of gender, all girls and women will not be targeted in the same way. So, what may seem isolated should be considered a coordinated assault, one that involves white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism operating simultaneously. The declarations of erasure and disposability – are local/national/global – as are the stakes and the impact. 

Audre Lorde’s insights serve as a critical reminder:

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion (p. 115).

Part of dismantling structures and systems of domination means understanding how they are organized and how they function. Refusing the gender binary is a form of resistance. This moment demands the courage to care – to “ask the other question” as Mari Matusuda suggests. In the context of the homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, we should also ask where is the white supremacy in this? As part of a practice of collective care we should ask who benefits?

Returning to Audre Lorde, we need to recognize difference as a creative influence and cultivate a vocabulary for identifying and speaking to each other across our differences and not use them to compare ourselves to each other to construct hierarchies of worth.

Resources

Just Women’s Sports staff. (March 30, 2026) Olympic champion Caster Semenya speaks out against IOC transgender ban. Just Women’s Sports.

Audre Lorde. (1984). Sister outsider. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

Mari J. Matsuda (1991). Beside my sister, facing the enemy: Legal theory out of coalition. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1183-1192.

Note: The blog will return in September.

June 2024: Bodies in motion, bodies at play: What’s race got to do with it?

“Everyone I see playing basketball is black. Everyone playing basketball must be black. If I am not black, I can’t play basketball; if you are black, you must be a basketball player”

Patricia J. Williams, 1997, p. 51. (Seeing a Color Blind Future. New York, NY: Noonday Press).

Marcia

I love to watch the Olympics, and I’m looking forward to the Summer Games this year. As I watch events this year, I’ll be holding questions from the blog Dr. Douglas has written below. Sport- like in some arenas of medicine- has some deeply engrained biologic assumptions about race. I wonder how these seep into my consciousness when I think about who is on the podium at what events, what this means about my assumptions about muscle mass and how this might infiltrate my thinking then when I’m in clinical spaces. This year, and with the very helpful critical reflections below, I’ll be challenging myself to see where I still carry assumptions about “natural ability” and push myself to see the hard work, persistence, and discipline of the athletes.  I’ll ask myself the challenging questions about how income and opportunity gaps that do occur by race are impacting who we see represented in what events, in the results, and in the media coverage.

Delia

Continuing the conversation about sport matters, this month’s blog takes up the question of race, sex, gender, and embodiment….

The WNBA (Coming to Toronto in 2026!), NBA, PWHL, NHL, soccer, tennis, pickleball, track and field… oh yeah, and golf …

Although sport is a key part of North American culture, we tend to underestimate its cultural and political significance: it is a place where different histories, traditions, and myths meet and intersect, creating cultural meanings and identities which travel across different mediums, national borders and commercial markets. It is a place where major cultural and political debates about identity, community and politics are staged and performed.

Sport is a visual and a visible field. It is a place where social dramas play out between different groups – historically and in the present.  Recall Jesse Owen’s victories at the Berlin Olympics, Althea Gibson breaking the colour bar at Wimbledon, Jackie Robinson’s trailblazing in MLB, Taffy Abel and Willie O’Ree’s groundbreaking presence in the NHL, Evonne Goolagong’s victory at the French Open, Cathy Freeman’s run to gold at the Sydney Olympic Games, and South Carolina vs Iowa in the NCAA women’s basketball final (I gotta give Coach Staley and co their flowers).

Because sport (and physical activity) are bodily practices, they enable the continued observation and discussion of sex, gender identity and expression, and racial difference in analyses of performance. In this context, the preponderance of certain groups in particular physical activities, coupled with their absence in others, has been readily interpreted as evidence of the natural differences in the ability and potential of different social groups. These patterns of participation are significant precisely because their visibility/visual logic conveys power and privilege; over time what we see becomes what we recognize and believe. potent cultural narratives about different groups are produced and normalized. In turn, because we have been socialized to be unaware of the ways in which power and privilege work in these settings, customary patterns of perception regarding sex, gender, racial, and sexual differences are perpetuated.

Sport studies scholars CL Cole and Susan Birrell explore how sport is a difference and power producing system” (1990, p. 18): it “works to differentiate winners from losers, the men from the boys, and the men from the women” (p. 18). I would add that sport also works to differentiate different racialized, engendered (gender identity and expression) and embodied groups. Simply put sport constructs and normalizes a binary logic of separation – this either/or framing does not allow for nuance, diversity, or complexity.

Think of it like this – putting a basketball in a hoop and explosive speed are actions that are seen, rather than interpreted. This is one of the key elements of the power of sport; namely, it is an area of life that seems to exist in the realm of the natural and is therefore not seen as requiring interpretation (Willis, 1982).

However, things are not so simple. We are socialized to be unaware of how the “seeing” of race and other social differences are in fact an interpretation rather than an objective account of what is ‘there.’ For example, the hypervisibility of some groups and the exclusion of others tends to bolster prevailing beliefs about racial difference that rely on biology to explain performance and participation rates.

For example, the fact that the times for the men’s 100 metres, the distance thrown for the shot put, etc. are different from those for women have been used as a way of reinforcing prevailing gender ideologies about a clear binary, one that confirms the so-called superiority of “men” over “women” (Willis, 1982). In the same way the success of Black athletes in basketball and sprint events, reinforces longstanding beliefs about the presumed natural athleticism of Black athletes. FYI – in the 1970s and 80s the sprint events were dominated by athletes from central and eastern Europe; in the 1960s 20% of the NBA consisted of Black players, currently over 70%, and the NHL is 97% white). Correspondingly, this presumed athletic superiority is believed to indicate bodily prowess over powers of the mind.

But ask yourself this: why isn’t the visibility and success of white Europeans in winter sports not read as evidence of innate athletic superiority and the absence of intellectual ability, but instead as confirmation of discipline and mental application? This typical “reading” of difference in athletic performance between different groups illustrates how the meaning and import of athletic performance and sporting events hold a cultural and political significance that extends well beyond the fields of play.

Sport is a complex and contradictory space, for it is a place where the presence and success of 1 or 2 Black, Indigenous, or racialized minority athletes is seen as evidence of equality – or of the absence of racism – rather than exceptions to systemic racial exclusion and racial tension.

Sport is a crucial locus of social justice struggles. It not only teaches us to “see” difference, sport teaches us to regard some differences as more important than others, amplifies them, and then uses them to support beliefs about sex, race, and gender inferiority and superiority – beliefs which uphold social inequality (Willis, 1982).

We will be going on summer hiatus: the blog will return in September.

Resources

Birrell, S., & Cole, CL. (1990).Double fault: Renee Richards, and the construction and naturalization of difference, Sociology of Sport Journal, 7(1), 1-21.

Douglas, D. D. (2018). Disqualified! Serena Williams and Brittney Griner: Black female athletes and the politics of the im/possible. In K. Farquharson, K. Pillay, P. Essed, and E. White (Eds.), Relating worlds, of racism: Dehumanization, belonging and the normativity of whiteness (pp. 329-355). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hartmann, D. (2002). Sport as Contested Terrain. In D. T. Goldberg & J. Solomos (Eds.), A companion to race and ethnic studies (pp. 405-415). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

King, C.R. (2007). Staging the Winter white Olympics: Or, why sport matters to white power. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31(1), 89-94.

Willis, P. (1982). Women in sport in ideology. In J. Hargreaves (Ed.), Sport, culture and ideology (pp. 117-135). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

April 2024: In/tolerable violences and the damage done

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name. My name is my own my own my own”

(June Jordan, 2005, pp. 309-311).

Marcia:

As a parent when I hear the dogma around parental rights in schools as it relates to gender identity and sexual health teaching, I shudder. Maybe it’s because I’m also a physician who is familiar with the evidence of how important affirming gender identity is, how it improves mental and physical health in ways that are life-saving. Over and over I have thought, please, if it is needed to protect my child, put their rights ahead of mine. I love them. I want them to be safe and wholly them. As it happens we are in community and kinship with queer and gender diverse/ expansive folks. My kids have experienced a lot of safety and freedom to explore their fluid gender identities, and they will continue to. But I need all of us to be working together to make it safer in every setting for children and youth to have the safety to do so. We must not under-estimate how important this is to their and to our community’s wellbeing. 

Delia:

We find ourselves in challenging times with multiple local/regional/inter/national events colliding. In his book Disposable youth, critical pedagogy scholar Henry A. Giroux talks about how the culture of cruelty and punishment has become normalized. In his words, “legitimate forms of organized violence against human beings increasingly considered
disposable, . . . Such practices are increasingly accompanied by forms of humiliation in which the character, dignity, and bodies of targeted individuals and groups are under attack. (p. 36)

One of the challenges we face involve the increasing attacks on 2SLGBTQQIA+ folx. These attacks are local…national…global.

In June 2023, in a gender studies class, a University of Waterloo professor and two of her students were stabbed by a recent graduate due to his hatred regarding gender identity and gender expression.

Also, in 2023 New Brunswick and Saskatchewan passed legislation targeting gender affirming care, and requiring schools to seek parental consent if a student wants to use a different pronoun or name in the classroom.

In the fall of this year Alberta’s provincial government intends to introduce legislation that will affect transgender and non-binary youth and adults. Some of these changes include requiring parental notification and consent before a school can change the name or pronouns of any child under the age of 15. In addition, parents will have the option of opting-in their children whenever a teacher plans to teach about gender identity, sexual orientation, or sexuality.

Last month Manitoba’s interim leader of the Opposition for the Progressive Conservatives voiced a desire for similar practices in the province’s schools.

These legislative moves and proposed practices are part of the widespread targeting of trans and gender diverse peoples, and sexual minorities. In February Canadian Security Intelligence Services issued a warning regarding the continued and heightened threats of violence against 2SLGBTQQIA+ communities by individuals and/or groups who adhere to violent extremism some of which is religiously motivated. They noted that the violent discourse is expressed by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Freedom Movement.

This is another example of the interconnectedness of different systems of domination: white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonial projects.

In a society organized around racial, sexual, gender, and class hierarchies folx will experience their racialized gender identity and expression and sexual orientation in different ways.

On February 8 Nex Benedict, a non-binary Indigenous youth died – one day after being assaulted in the bathroom in their high school. Shortly after the altercation, they described how the continued bullying and harassment prompted the fight. They died the following day.

Let’s be clear – attempts to regulate gender identity and expression and the opposition to teaching 2SLGBTQQIA+ content is not only exclusionary, it constitutes acts of violence. These organizational efforts to deny the existence and autonomy of 2SLGBTQQIA+ youth will certainly not make members of these communities feel safe, nor will it change their gender and sexual identities. What it will do is maintain the culture of domination and render anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ hostility and aggression permissible. They will be further isolated, and leave them even more fearful, more anxious, and more vulnerable.

These strategies and proposed legislative and policy changes make clear who matters, and those who are deserving of care and consideration. The identification of these youth as disposable will legitimize harassment, bullying, and other forms of harm.

Efforts to contain, deny, erase, marginalize, mislead, silence, and exclude are discriminatory. These actions are part of dehumanizing cultural mechanisms that protect and sustain hierarchies of value and worth.

Rather than being encouraged and taught to see each other as equals, strategies of distortion and omission are being employed to bolster fear and deny the mental, physical, and emotional experiences and needs of 2SLGBTQQIA+ youth.

We are being told that the way forward is to discipline and punish trans and gender diverse folx.

Questions about which differences do and do not matter are important because they involve power.

Health care is already challenging for 2SLGBTQQIA+ folx, who are Black, Indigenous, or racialized minorities. Imposing additional restrictions on gender affirming care heightens their vulnerability and undermines their mental and physical health and well-being which could result in life altering and potentially fatal consequences.

The professed focus on parental rights is also a coded message that seeks to suppress the organization and operation of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

The struggle against dehumanization is relentless. The costs are many. The impacts will be immediate and long term.

Let’s recognize that the differences between us hold space and support the autonomy of the diverse members of 2SLGBTQQIA+ communities.

The struggle to be Free to be is unceasing…. Let y/our motto be resistance…Our collective futures depend on it

Resources

Giroux, Henry, A. (2012). Disposable youth: Racialized memories and the culture of cruelty. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hayes, Kelly. (23 February, 2024). Our mourning for Nex Benedict calls us to action against transphobia and fascism. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/our-mourning-for-nex-benedict-calls-us-to-action-against-transphobia-and-fascism/.

Jordan, June. (2005). Directed by desire. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.

Rummler, Orion. (19 March 2024). States’ anti-LGBTQ moves may have disastrous health impacts experts say. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/states-anti-lgbtq-moves-may-have-disastrous-health-impacts-experts-say/.

Staff. (13 March, 2024). MB Tories parental consent should be required for student pronoun changes. Canadian Press. https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/parental-consent-should-be-required-for-student-pronoun-changes-manitoba-tories-1.6805365.

Tunney, Catharine. (15 February, 2024). CSIS warns that ‘anti-gender movement’ poses a threat of ‘extreme violence.’ CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-lgbtq-warning-violence-1.7114801