Abstract

Trans inclusion policies remain one of the major issues facing contemporary trans rights movements in the United States. In sports, where sex segregation has rarely been challenged, trans inclusionary policies have emerged as a public debate in which key values of liberal individualism such as fairness, meritocracy, and safety collide with trans athletes' rights to belong in a public arena. While queer feminists' scholarship on sports has criticized the notion that trans inclusion policies do not necessarily problematize a binary gender ideology and sports institutions' authority in policing athletes' bodies, few studies have investigated alternative sports spaces and policies to challenge the sexist culture and binary sex-based structure of mainstream sports. This article introduces the Queer Women Games, a non–gender binary sports competition in Korea, as an experimental site to imagine and implement gender justice in sports through organizational actions and collective involvement. First, the author compares the QWG's nonbinary policies with transgender inclusion policies in recreational sports in terms of their approaches to sex segregation, sports authorities governing athletes' genders, and transgender exclusion. Then the author argues that the nonbinary policy opened a dialogue, which seems to be foreclosed in inclusion-based approaches, by undoing sex segregation and building a consensus on rejecting gender policing.

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