Reply to Imbrišević: Moving Outside the Bubble of Gender Critical Feminism

ABSTRACT

Despite the claim in Miroslav Imbrišević’s paper about differences between the positions of Jon Pike and myself, there are also significant overlaps. I endorsed the WR consultative process that Jon was part of, agreed that Jon had produced a compelling argument, and agreed with the lexical framework of the argument. Miroslav’s major contentions with my argument appears to be that it dresses up patriarchal outcomes in feminist clothes, and that it ignores the voices of women [athletes] in coming to its conclusions. In this paper, I address the charges by suggesting that both emanate from Miroslav’s attempts to see gender critical feminism as the gauge against which all positions need to be judged. My position is that this school of feminism will lead to largely conservative outcomes in the discursive and organizational hierarchies in sport, so that any individual benefits that accrue to female athletes will be less substantial than the loss of transformational potential in women’s sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• sport
• feminism
• transformation
• power

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewer and the journal editor for both providing a number of helpful comments. These comments led to an improved focus on what was being suggested in this paper. The responsibility for the success or otherwise of achieving this goal rests with the author.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. My recent paper explained these two positions using a Suitsean perspective (2022c). The two positions are, of course, not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can consider sport as a futile practice and still be driven by the motivation to try to perfect its craft. However, the brilliant Kaag (2014), outlined the problem that exists in this debate in the following way.

For most pragmatists, athletes, and philosophers of sport, it is the pursuit of excellence (rather than the achievement of any particular excellent outcome) that is truly worth talking about (209).

This current debate reduces the idea of excellence to winning. I take this up in a later section of this paper.

2. I am going to use the shorthand annotation of ‘gender critical feminists’ to gather those who support a biological basis to the exclusion of trans women from women’s sport, whilst recognizing that not all supporters of this justification would consider themselves gender critical or feminist.

3. An interesting piece of research would be to see whether the initial ‘respect for trans women’ changed in step with the growing support that the exclusion side of the debate received. World Rugby’s position was largely opposed by all national rugby federations and by many other sports when it first came out. During this period, it was important to demonstrate that the decision was a sporting one, and not any general opposition to trans* people. But as more and bigger sporting organizations came on board, this fundamental respect was replaced with something much more in line with the older group of gender critical radical feminists.

4. Miroslav countered this suggestion by invoking twitter straw man arguments that I view women as ‘support workers’ for men/trans women, and that my solution asks nothing of men’s sport in dealing with the ‘male toxicity and intolerance’ that I have suggested (2022, 4). Miroslav makes the error of confusing a description of ‘what is’ with a normative position of ‘what should be’. My statement was simply a prediction of the result of opening up men’s competition, based on sociological and historical research of the men’s rugby space, research that was ignored in proposing an open competition.

5. I found Miroslav’s description of Jon’s role at the Transgender Conference that WR ran in 2020 revelatory. Miroslav (2022, 1) admits that Jon acted in an advisory role. That goes well beyond the role that I thought Jon was assuming, but it also explains a great deal. As I had congratulated both WR and Jon [at least twice] in my earlier paper, I will not go back over this ground. However, I will return to what is crucial to understand about the conference organization because of the snowballing effect that this conference has subsequently had in the world of sport.

My understanding about this conference came from the literature that WR, and especially Tucker (2021a, 2021b) as the conference organizer, had distributed through various media. Tucker explained that the purpose of the conference was to ‘stress test’ the arguments put forward by supporters and opponents of trans woman inclusion in woman’s rugby from various subdiscipline areas. Given this, I was surprised that Jon’s presentation had no disputant; that is, that no one from philosophy of sport was present to ‘stress test’ Jon’s arguments. However, Miroslav has revealed why not- the ethical debate was not to be stress-tested. Jon’s advisory position was there to produce an ethical position that would support the change to exclusion if that was what the Transgender Participation Working Group subsequently decided on.

But why Jon? Certainly, he justly held an esteemed position in the world of philosophy of sport- he was, at the time, the current Chair of the British Philosophy of Sport Association. His research output had been, and continues to be, brilliant. However, he had, prior to his participation in the conference, not appeared to have produced any academic publications that were about women’s sport, women in sport, or trans women in sport. Now again recall that I have endorsed Jon’s subsequent work at the WR conference as brilliant. Nevertheless, the importance of the presentation that Jon made to the WR transgender conference should not be underestimated. This was the last speech delivered before the Transgender Participation Working Group got down to their business of coming to a recommendation for the International Federation [IF]. If Jon made his presentation without a ‘stress test’ provided by the opposing side of the debate, and it was presented as the position from philosophy/ethics in sport, then it probably had some impact on the final position that the WR working group came to.

6. Parry and Martínková have explained this very specific notion of arbitrariness and discrimination that informs category rules (2021, 1486).

7. It is difficult to summarize Fairchild’s paper whilst doing justice to its brilliance. It starts with the position that sport is the most evocative display of the naturalness of hierarchies of sex/gender that remains in contemporary society. The author then describes a constant and dynamic interplay between resistance and incorporation of resistance by sports organizations in ways that maintain this hierarchy and places men’s knowledge about sport as authoritative. The stages of incorporation begin with an initial exclusion of women from the practice and concept of sport often supported by biological justifications, through inclusion of a small number of women in men’s sports as exceptions to the norms of womanhood, to inclusion of women as inferior athletes in protected and separated competitions. All these shifts maintain men and men’s sports as the benchmark of excellence. In contrast, the fourth and fifth stages recognize women athletes and sports as different but not inferior, and that women tell stories of difference that are worthy of epistemic authority (see Burke 2014 for a further explanation).

Before gender critical feminists argue that this demonstrates why trans women should not be included in separated women’s sports, the progressive goal of the five stages is to reconstitute sport in ways that are similar to English’s (1978) position of developing new sports and new ways of understanding sport that challenge the sex/gender hierarchy. Fairchild also argued that this five stage process is a model for expanding worthwhile narratives in sport to include those that are on the margins or, in Fairchild’s terms, ‘existing below the public, pinnacle-theory world of winning and losing’ (1994, 375), such as both women and trans women.

The obvious response from gender critical feminists is that it is ridiculously idealistic to suggest a phase four or five orientation to sex/gender would emanate from the professionalized world of sport. I’d sadly agree, such is the force of dominant discourses in the professional sports world, although would suggest that there are some examples such as the recent history of Indigenous players in the Australian Football League seeing opponents as colleagues rather than rivals, where marginal views have changed mainstream professional discourses and behaviours. However I would also suggest that considerations about the worthiness of these professional discourses are entirely appropriate in all sub-elite sport, and new understandings about sport developed from the foothills could eventually be considered for incorporation even into the professional sports world.

8. This descriptor of ‘subexcellence’ is a shorthand method of detailing Fairchild’s position that stage 3 organization of sports retains the men’s version of many sports as the standard of excellence. It does not reflect my view that women’s sports are every bit as excellent as men’s sports. My bias as a women’s basketball coach stands out when I have no hesitation in publicly stating my preference for the brilliant play of women’s professional and collegiate teams over the basketball performances of men’s teams. Moreover, this bias flows over to other sports and other levels of basketball.

9. The UK Equality Act [2010] allows for the reasonable exclusion of transsexual persons as competitors in a sex/gender-affected sport based on securing fair competition and the safety of other competitors. The potential is available for sports to use this legislation to exclude trans women from women’s sports, as explained by Miroslav. Yet the potential, according to case law in Australia is that the governing bodies for any sport can also ignore these differences. The presiding officer in the Australian football case, Justice Stuart Morris, ruled that.

Whether the three complainants can play in the coming season rests with the football associations. It is lawful for the football associations to exclude them from the under 15 and under 16 competitions. It is equally lawful for the associations to allow them to play (s. 91, Taylor v MSJFL and FV 2003).

10. It is interesting how little impact this part of the regulated conditions has on the debate. The suggestion that prior to inclusion, a trans women would need to live as a woman for an extended period of time would seem to be a pretty good defense against the idea that average ‘non-trans’ men would change into trans women just to win at sport.

11. The regulation of NCAA athletes like Lia Thomas brings in other considerations that I don’t think were considered. The current NCAA regulation of three years of hormonal therapy and reduced testosterone levels, effectively means that a college athlete/scholarship athlete will be unlikely to be recruited if their gender dysphoria is evident before entry to college, and will unlikely to be retained as a scholarship athlete if they choose to transition during college.

12. I don’t normally reference newspaper articles, but when the seventh ranked Australian women’s rugby union team must accept per diems and use annual leave to attend the rugby union world cup, then I’d suggest that there are much bigger issues for women in world rugby. See: https://www.smh.com.au/sport/rugby-union/ra-targets-full-time-wallaroos-by-2025-amid-super-w-overhaul-20221006-p5bns9.html.

13. Jennifer McClearan broadens this notion of patriarchy and benevolent sexism in the transgender exclusion arguments of gender critical feminists. In contrast to Miroslav’s characterization of my claims as gaslighting, McClearan argues that.

The discursive formation between cis girls’ empowerment and trans exclusion is fueled by the time-honored patriarchal strategy of infantilizing cis white women and positioning them as needing protection while adultifying trans girls—as well as cis Black girls- as menacing. These discourses work in tandem to ensure the continued subjugation of all women and girls by deflecting the cause for gender inequality onto trans people and other marginalized girls instead of the cis-white supremacist-patriarchy (2022, 2)

14. This ties Dworkin’s radical feminist position to the positions of authors like Fairchild’s (1994) and English (1978) that were explained in endnote 7.

15. Coming from the standpoint feminism of Code, Lloyd, Grosz and others (Burke 2004, 2010, 2014, 2019, 2022a, 2022b), I am much less concerned with finding accurate meanings of words like ‘woman’; in fact, it could be said that this feminist tradition tries to change the familiar usages of words for political benefit, as exemplified by the idea of ‘feminist sisterhood’.

16. In my later paper, I included the breakdown of all the major committees of World Rugby. I stated (2022b, 2): ‘In 2018, WR surveyed the gender breakdown of the Boards and Executive Committees of the six regional associations and 13 national unions. Only two of the nineteen examined organizations achieved 33% representation by women’. You can find a similar breakdown of positions for FINA, the IF for swimming (FINA 2022).