ABSTRACT
Current debates over who should be allowed to compete in women’s and girl’s sport range from high school to professional levels, with new lawsuits and advocacy groups forming to “protect” women’s sports from the “threat” of transgender women and women with high testosterone. While specific positions on this issue vary, one common refrain among stakeholder who consider themselves “protectors of women’s sport” is the idea that women have fought too hard to be included in athletic institutions for this progress to be infringed upon, which continues to portray certain women as outsiders to the gender category. This chapter will critique this nominally feminist line of argument by highlighting more radical aspects of women’s sport that are overlooked in this rhetoric. I argue that initially, the very fact of women participating in sport destabilized the category of “woman” altogether, particularly in the sport of track and field, which remains at the center of controversy today. This chapter analyzes current rhetoric around the gender nonconforming “threats” to women’s sport, while looking back at the history of track and field in the twentieth century to critique the exclusionary activist rhetoric.
