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Sport and transgender people: a systematic review of the literature relating to sport participation and competitive sport policies
journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-20, 11:35 authored by Beth Jones, Jon Arcelus, Walter P. Bouman, Emma HaycraftEmma HaycraftBackground: Whether transgender people should be able to compete in sport in accordance with their gender identity is a widely contested question within the literature and among sport organisations, fellow competitors, and spectators. Due to concerns surrounding transgender people (especially transgender females) having an athletic advantage, several sport organisations place restrictions on transgender competitors (e.g., must have undergone gender confirming surgery). In addition, some transgender people who engage in sport, both competitively and for leisure, report discrimination and victimisation.
Objective: To the authors’ knowledge, there has been no systematic review of the literature pertaining to sport participation and competitive sport policies in transgender people. Therefore, this review aimed to address this gap in the literature.
Method: Eight research articles and 31 sport policies were reviewed.
Results: In relation to sport-related physical activity, this review found the lack of inclusive and comfortable environments to be the primary barrier to participation for transgender people. This review also found transgender people had a mostly negative experience in competitive sport due to the restrictions sport policy placed on them. The majority of transgender competitive sport policies that were reviewed were not evidence-based.
Conclusion: Currently there is no direct or consistent research that suggests transgender females (or males) have an athletic advantage at any stage of their transition (e.g., cross-sex hormones, gender confirming surgery) and, therefore, competitive sport policies that place restrictions on transgender people needs to be considered and potentially revised.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Sports MedicineCitation
JONES, B. ... et al, 2016. Sport and transgender people: a systematic review of the literature relating to sport participation and competitive sport policies. Sports Medicine, 47 (4), pp. 701–716.Publisher
Springer Verlag © The Author(s)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-08-26Publication date
2016Notes
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.ISSN
0112-1642eISSN
1179-2035Publisher version
Language
- en