Extraordinary body-self narratives: sport and physical activity in the lives of transgender people

Abstract

Physical activity and sports can be regarded as particularly challenging social practices for transgender people, regarding the centrality of the body, gendered structures like changing rooms and competitions, and normative gender ideologies. In the emerging body of literature on transgender people and sport, the main focus has been on mainstream, competitive sports as non-inclusive. In this article, I present body-self narratives in physical activity and sports (PA/S) during different stages of their gender transition, based on interviews with 12 transgender people in the Netherlands. The results confirm that mainstream sports and physical activity spaces like swimming pools are often experienced as relatively unsafe by transgender people, both pre- and post-transition and especially during the ‘liminal’ transition phase. However, apart from places of shame for or control of the ‘wrong’ body-object and places of felt/enacted stigma, the body-self narratives also indicated that PA/S had been important enabling and empowering activities at different times in the lives of transgender people. For example, regarding gender (dis)identification or as coping strategy in de pre-transition phase and for ultimately gaining body-subject awareness, gender recognition and pride of the ‘right’ body-self.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• sport/physical activity
• gender negotiations
• body/self management
• narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This group of transgender people is better known as transsexual people or in medical terms as people with ‘gender dysphoria’ or Gender Identity Disorder (Cohen-Kettenis & Gooren, 1999). Transgender people is also used as an umbrella term for different groups of people that challenge the traditional dichotomous gender system in various ways, including transsexual people, transvestites, cross-dressers, gender-queer people and – partly – intersex people (see for example Balzar & Hutta, 2012; Lewis & Johnson, 2011; Namaste, 2000).

2. Findings among the Dutch population from 15 to 70 years show that 0.6 percent of men and 0.2 percent of women experience an incongruent gender identity, combined with unease about their body and the wish to (partially) change their gender of birth through hormone treatment and/or surgery (Kuyper, 2012). Every year, some 150 new people come to the Centre of Expertise for Gender Dysphoria at the Free University Medical Centre in Amsterdam for medical and social support in the process of gender transition. Two-thirds of them are biologically male with a wish to become female (personal contact with coordinator). As in several other (European) countries (Whittle, Turner, Combs, & Rhodes, 2008), since 1985 it is possible for transgender people in the Netherlands to legally change gender and receive official documents with their ‘new’ gender identity. Until 2014, however, such a change required a ‘complete’ transition including hormonal and surgical treatment and sterilisation to prevent transgender people from producing/conceiving children after transition.

3. Women with intersex conditions were excluded on the basis of ‘sex tests’ of their day. Such as Foekje Dillema – a rival of the famous Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers Koen who won four Olympic gold medals in 1948 –, who was suspended from competition in 1950 after refusing a sex-test (Dohle, 2008).

4. The victory of Dutch trans woman Nathalie van Gogh at the national track cycling championships in 2009 led to public discussion. According to an online poll in a national newspaper, 70 per cent considered her victory to be unfair (Algemeen Dagblad, 11 October, 2009).

5. Only transgender women who live for a minimum of two years as a woman, who received complete gender reassignment surgery (including genital correction), long enough hormone therapy to minimise advantage of their former male bodies (about four years), and can display legal recognition of their new gender identity in their country of citizenship are allowed to participate.