Trans Relational Ambivalences: A Critical Analysis of Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Relational (Un)Belonging in Sports Contexts

Abstract

This study explores ways trans and gender-nonconforming athletes navigate a sense of relational (un)belonging in sport contexts. Our research reveals dialectic movements between feelings of inclusion/exclusion juxtaposed with the structural being of inclusion/exclusion. More specifically, the feeling of inclusion/exclusion gestures to individual sensed experiences of (un)belonging, while the being of inclusion/exclusion anchors a participant’s individual affective experience navigating binarism vis-à-vis administrative constraints. Taken together, two dialectics—feeling included ↔ being excluded and its dialectic reversal feeling excluded ↔ being included—communicatively constitute what we theorize as “trans relational ambivalences,” which mediate a sense of relational (un)belonging in sport contexts. Our findings implicate settler modes of relating across gender difference, revealing a problem of modernity. Specifically, we reveal a problem in which settler coloniality’s ontological foreclosure on multiplicities produce the communicative effect of individuation. In this regard, our analysis holds inclusion in dialectic tension with exclusion such that the affective experience of one cannot be understood without the structural enactment of the other.

Keywords:

• Binary and binarism
• relational communication
• settler colonialism
• sport communication
• transgender communication

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Global Sport Institute (Arizona State University) for support throughout this research project, including forthcoming works. We additionally thank our anonymous reviewers whose careful and thoughtful reviews helped improve our collaborative work. We extend our fullest thanks to Dr. Marissa Doshi for her editorial leadership as well as her support and guidance throughout the publication process. And finally, the lead author thanks the research team for its committed labor throughout the research process: This work is stronger because of each of you.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.