ABSTRACT
The coverage of sporting events, actors and debates should not be taken at face value. Instead, critical researchers need to examine what stories, and what shared beliefs, are represented in, and through, sports media. In this chapter we examine the discursive representations of trans, intersex and non-binary athletes in the UK national press. Using a discursive reflexive thematic analysis, we explore the three themes generated: un/natural athletic bodies, contested rights, and deviation signals deviancy. These three themes broadly map onto scientific, political and ethical discourses. In the analysis of these themes, we unpack how the sports media system is produced as cisgendered through the marginalisation and exclusion of trans, intersex and non-binary athletes. In particular, we examine how trans and intersex athletes are contested identities in sports media, and how that contestation serves to constitute the absence of non-binary athletes as the invisible outside to a rigidly cisgendered, binary sex/gender system. Insofar as this is the case, the contestation around trans, intersex and non-binary athletes is a site in which the cisgender system is continuously secured with cisgender men and women as its subjects. However, this contestation hints at the inherent instability of the cisgender sports media system.
