gender essentialism
Despite increased visibility and representation of gender diversity over the past decade, it is evident that transgender and other gender-diverse people still face everyday discrimination. Transgender and gender-diverse people lack basic protections that cisgender people take for granted, resulting in discrepancies in domains including but not limited to employment, legal documentation and healthcare.The increase in U.S. state-level anti-trans laws has been dramatic in recent years. With over 583 bills introduced and counting, last year legislative session has seen more than triple the number of anti-trans bills in comparison to any prior year. Even more worryingly, many of these bills are now passing. So far, 85 of these bills have passed in 2023, which is over triple the number that passed in any previous year.
rhetoric around anti-trans sports legislation
One current form of anti-trans legislation is laws that restrict transgender athletes’ participation in organized sports. This topic has been the focus of at least 60 bills in this legislative period alone with a primary goal of excluding trans people from participating in sports aligned with their current gender identity. Many of these bills focus specifically on restricting trans women and girls as well as nonbinary individuals assigned male at birth from competing in women's sports. These bills are often framed as advocating for “sex-segregated” sports. As a result, trans people who want to participate in sports and live in places where these bills are passed will be forced to engage in sports on the basis of their assigned sex or will be excluded from organized sports and any benefits/opportunities that may come with those experiences.
Essentialism and anti-trans rhetoric
Psychological essentialism refers to a cluster of beliefs about categories, including the belief that those categories are “fixed”, “inductively potent”, “natural”, and “discrete”. People reason in essentialist ways about nonhuman kinds as well as a range of social categories and identities including (but not limited to) race, religion, personality traits, ethnicity and social class.
Applied to the context of gender, there are three key elements of essentialism that are reflected in some of the discourse supporting anti-trans legislation. The first is the idea that gender is a “natural” category, that is biologically determined based on a person's sex assigned at birth. According to this argument, a person's gender is based on biology.
A second element of essentialism that is applied to gender is immutability, which is the belief that gender is fixed from birth and cannot be changed. By this logic, it is not valid to change gender over time or for one's gender identity to shift from one that coincides with one's sex assignment at birth. A third component of essentialism that is applied to gender is termed discreteness. This idea is that membership in one gender group is mutually exclusive of membership in another gender. Further, discreteness implies that there are inherent differences between people of different genders and that there are no “in-between” identities
Despite the use of gender essentialist language to supposedly support cisgender women in sports, gender essentialist beliefs are actually associated with less overall support for women in the scientific literature, including more negative views of women, greater stereotyping of women, and greater willingness to accept inequality that disfavors women.
These people aren’t ‘protecting women’s sports,’ they are enforcing rigid gender norms and anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into those norms is targeted and vilified.
Paris Olympics 2024
For the past week, anti-trans advocates have waged a ruthless war of disinformation against Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. The Algerian woman, who is neither a man nor transgender, has been dragged by right-wing politicians and cultural commentators, who have called her a man and a biological male.
As Khelif has advanced in her weight class, these voices have gotten louder, arguing that the 25-year-old athlete should be disqualified and that airing her fights against female competitors is glorifying gender-based violence. Their lie has spread so quickly and penetrated the mainstream discourse so deeply that even the Boston Globe ran with it, publishing a print headline identifying Khelif as a “transgender boxer.” (The Globe later apologized but the damage was done.)
This is where the anti-trans movement’s disingenuous calls to “protect women” have brought us: a woman in tears, having been ridiculed for her appearance and humiliated on an international stage.