Introduction

Transgender communities have gained increasing media, political and social attention and visibility internationally in recent years due to a range of political and social factors. In England and Wales, one of the most significant contemporary factors was the government public consultation launched in respect of reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which generated substantial online discussions. In those discussions, transgender people are regularly interrogated and delegitimized (Colliver et al, 2019; Colliver and Coyle, 2020). While there is a growing body of literature that explores violence against trans people (Jamel, 2018; Colliver, 2021), less attention has been given to discrimination against trans people experienced within sport. Sport is an important area for discussion, as professional sports are predominantly sex segregated. This is maintained through the perpetuation of two primary assumptions: first, human sex is dichotomous – humans can be discretely categorized as either male or female; and, second, one of these sexes has biological advantages over the other and this affects performance in sport (Heggie, 2014).

Sport became a central feature of discussion around the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act (2004), and conversation centred on issues such as perceived unfairness and issues of safety and risk. It is important to note that while trans inclusion within football is the focus in this chapter, public dialogue has primarily been concerned with trans women’s participation in sport more broadly. This dialogue has focused on two central ideas. The first is that trans women hold an immutable biological advantage over cisgender women that creates an unfair playing field. Resultantly, it is only when trans women’s participation is average, or unremarkable, that they are accepted into participation (Semerjian, 2019). Second, concerns have been raised that cisgender men may falsely claim to be trans in order to compete with cisgender women and girls (Carroll, 2014). These concerns are problematic for a number of reasons and result in policy development that leads to the exclusion of trans people as well as cisgender people who may fall outside of social expectations of the ‘sexed’ body.