Embodied Experience, Embodied Advantage, and the Inclusion of Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sport: Expanded Framework, Criticisms, and Policy Recommendations

One of the most pressing and debated issues in contemporary sport is the inclusion of 10 transgender athletes in competition. This is especially the case of transgender women who seek to compete in the women’s category because it best aligns with their gender. Scholars, within and outside sport philosophy, have eagerly entered the debate. In a recent paper, we join the fray (Torres, López Frías, and Patiño 2022). After examining ‘views that justify exclusionary policies based mostly on physiological criteria’ (Torres, 15 López Frías, and Patiño 2022, 45), we argue that the current reliance on these criteria should be complemented with two largely overlooked phenomenological dimensions, namely embodied experience and embodied advantage. We contend that our approach offers ‘an alternative and complementary perspective (to the physiological one) to more fruitfully assess normative issues on the inclusion of transgender athletes in competitive 20 sport’ (Torres, López Frías, and Patiño 2022, 45). While we explicitly state that we would not operationalize our analysis into a specific policy, we also claim that it simultaneously offers a fertile avenue ‘to elaborate policies that consider the complexity and nuances of athletic competition, fairness, as well as the character of transgender athletes’ embodied journey and condition’ (Torres, López Frías, and Patiño 2022, 45).

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy on 2023-09-22, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17511321.2023.2260112.