ABSTRACT

In this article, we scrutinize views that justify exclusionary policies regarding transgender athletes based primarily on physiological criteria. We introduce and examine some elements that deserve more in-depth investigation in the discussion on how to assess the inclusion of transgender athletes in competitive sport, namely lived body and embodied experience. These phenomenological notions have played, especially since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality,’ a key role in the philosophical literature on the inclusion of women in sport. However, they have not yet been fully incorporated into the debate on transgender athletes. Subsequently, we explore interrelated aspects of transgender athletes’ embodied experience that must be taken into account when assessing issues related to their participation in competitive sport, for they might confer some transgender athletes an embodied advantage or, possibly, disadvantage when compared to their cisgender counterparts. We contend that analyses of the inclusion or exclusion of transgender athletes must go beyond their current reliance on physiological criteria and incorporate the phenomenological notion of embodied advantage.

摘要

在本文中，我们仔细审查了主要基于生理标准的针对跨性别运动员的排斥性政策的观点。在讨论如何评估跨性别运动员参与竞技体育的讨论中，我们介绍并检查了一些值得更深入研究的要素，即活体和具身体验。这些现象学概念已经发挥了作用，尤其是在 Iris Marion Young 的文章“像女孩一样投掷：女性身体行为、运动和空间性的现象学”发表后，该文章在关于女性参与运动的哲学文献中发挥了关键作用。然而，它们还没有被完全纳入关于跨性别运动员的辩论中。随后，我们探讨了跨性别运动员的具体体验的相互关联方面，在评估与他们参与竞技体育相关的问题时必须考虑这些方面，因为与顺性别运动员相比，它们可能赋予一些跨性别运动员一个具体的优势，或者可能是劣势。我们认为，对纳入或排除跨性别运动员的分析必须超越他们目前对生理标准的依赖，并纳入体现优势的现象学概念。