A history of transgender women in Australian Sports, 1976–2017

Although debates about transgender women in sport have been prominent in recent years, there is a much longer history of transgender participation in sport. This article uses oral history interviews and media to examine Australia’s history of transgender women’s participation in sport since the late 1970s. It explores the public debates around gender, sex, the body, and ‘fair play discourse’ as expressed around specific transgender athletes. It also examines the lived experience of those transgender sportswomen and analyses how they used gender presentation to affirm their femininity. Indeed, gender presentation and transgender (in)visibility heavily influenced whether teammates, opponents, sporting associations, and the media accepted transgender athletes in their affirmed gender. The presence of transgender women in sport consistently exposed anxieties around gender, sex, and the body because they exposed rigid understandings of gender binarism. Examining the long history of transgender women in Australian sport reveals how longstanding debates have played out in a variety of settings, with transgender athletes regularly searching for ways to affirm their gender and navigate sporting communities.