"What about our mental health?" Cis (white) women and feminist mobilization in the struggle for trans-inclusive sport.

Cisgender women athletes have emerged in recent years as key voices impacting the policy decisions being taken by international sports governing bodies with respect to the eligibility of transgender women and women with intersex variations. In contrast with feminist arguments that defining the biological limits of the “female” category harms all women––particularly those who are deemed to have “failed” eligibility rules––and undermines the pursuit of gender equality in sport by reinforcing binary and essentialist notions of difference (Karkazis & Jordan-Young 2019; Bekker et al. 2023), many cisgender women have embraced the notion that protecting the category from women in all of their diversity is necessary to guarantee their place in sport settings. To investigate this phenomenon, I compare two cases that render visible how feminist actors can be considered epistemic actors, drawing on forms of expertise and scientific research to shape how biological claims about womanhood––and her place in sport––come to figure in policy and legislation. The first is a historical case, centering on a three-year period in the 1990s when certain women criticized the decision of World Athletics to abandon gender verification procedures in the 1990s. The second is a contemporary case, from 2017-2020, when newly formed lobby groups in the UK rallied cisgender women and leveraged an exclusive vision of women’s sport to prevent changes to the country’s Gender Recognition Act, which would have made it easier for transgender citizens to obtain legal recognition of their true gender. I contrast these two cases, showing similarities but also differences in how the two groups of cisgender women wielded expertise and contested scientific claims as part of their mobilization efforts, with consequences for how policy and legislation defined the limits of the “female” category and “sex-based rights.” I conclude by considering opportunities to move women’s sport towards a “gender just” and inclusive future (Travers 2008).