“If you let me play”: girls’ empowerment and transgender exclusion in sports

ABSTRACT

This article examines discourses of (cisgender) girls’ empowerment in American sports and the concurrent legislative debates in U.S. politics to exclude trans girls from gender affirming teams. I deploy discourse analysis of Nike advertising featuring sportswomen and girl athletes and the political debates in state governments about transgender inclusion in sports. One discourse relies on affective circulation of hope and positivity generated from the image of the cis white girl while the other draws upon fear and hyperbole to disenfranchise trans athletes. These transmisogynistic legal measures exclude trans girls under the auspice of protecting cis white girl athletes from “biological men” who may hurt them or steal their confidence and opportunities. I argue that there is a strategic connection, or discursive formation, made between cis girls’ empowerment and trans exclusion that is fueled by patriarchal notions of protecting cis girls. This formation works primarily by infantilizing cis white women and adultifying trans girls and cis Black girls. As a result, feel-good representations of cis white girls serve as justification for the persistent subjugation of all women and girls by deflecting the cause of gender inequality away from the cis-white supremacist-patriarchy and onto trans girls—especially those who are Black.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender athletes
• empowerment
• women’s sports
• Nike
• infantilization

Biographical note

Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar who examines the cultural production of difference in popular media with a focus on sports and brand culture. She is an assistant professor of media studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McClearen published her first monograph, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, in 2021.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Kate Osmond for giving incisive feedback on multiple versions of this paper and Brett Siegel for copyediting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a thorough analysis of anti-trans surveillance practices see Mia Fischer 2019.

2. For examples, see Alex Cooper 2021, Brian C. Bell 2021, and Summer Lin 2017. Trans women in theses are not explicitly linked to girls’ empowerment as in the ads I analyze in this piece. Nike has yet to make a commercial that advocates for trans girls inclusion to my knowledge.