In the Contest Over Sports as a Human Right, Will Inclusion or Exclusion Prevail?

Sports has always been a human rights issue. Competitive sports exist in a contested space, the access to which has been regulated by power, inequalities, and exclusion. Recognizing histories of exclusion in sports, the International Olympic Committee edited the Olympic Charter, a living document, in 1996 to declare in its fundamental principles: “The practice of sport is a human right.” The committee amended the charter once again in 2023 to add, “Every individual must have access to the practice of sport, without discrimination of any kind in respect of internationally recognised human rights within the remit of the Olympic Movement.”

The United Nations, too, has taken up sports as a human rights issue. In 2019, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution recognizing “the potential value of sport as a universal language that contributes to educating people on the values of respect, dignity, diversity, equality, tolerance and fairness and as a means to combat all forms of discrimination and to promote social inclusion for all.”

And yet, if sport is a universal language rooted in dignity and respect, the world remains far from fluent in that language. International human rights law, as expounded through treaties and international jurisprudence, guarantees the right to be free from discrimination – including based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity – but women and sexual and gender minorities continue to face flagrant discrimination, exclusion, and even violence in access to sports. The international sporting world is marked, too, by an insidious history of racial exclusion, elements of which endure, including in the gender and racial makeup of many global sporting bodies.

In light of these ongoing areas of contestation, this October witnessed the unprecedented publication of two reports on sports by UN Special Procedures mandate holders within the same month. One report, by the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, issued a clarion call for inclusion, defining sport as a form of cultural expression that should be accessible to all. It highlighted governments’ obligations to address a broad range of barriers to equitable access: poverty; discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, indigeneity, disability, and other factors; mandatory sex testing; sexual abuse in sports; and labor rights violations impacting athletes as workers, among others. 

The other report, by the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, drew on the politics of fear. It clouded the very real problems confronting women in sports, such as inequitable funding and predatory coaches, with incessant evocations of trans and intersex bogeymen as a primary obstacle to access to sports for cisgender, endosex women. 

We’ve seen this politics of fear in action – and we know that it harms women in all their diversity.

Outright’s decades of work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people around the globe make clear that all our communities routinely face exclusion from sports in many contexts. This exclusion is linked to broader societal and political dynamics: the criminalization of same-sex intimacy and gender diversity, nonexistent protections against workplace discrimination, inadequate access to legal gender recognition, and politico-medical models that attempt to “fix” the healthy bodies of intersex children through genital mutilation, aimed at forcing them into a rigid sex binary.

We also recognize that violence against all women and girls is pervasive in sports. UN Women has found that over one in five professional women athletes has experienced sexual abuse as a child in sports. And as adults, women athletes face routine violence online: “In a study of online abuse directed toward athletes on Twitter during the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, female athletes were the targets of 87% of abuse.”

Violence and discrimination against women in sports, and violence and discrimination against LGBTIQ people, are not two distinct phenomena. They are both casualties of global patriarchy, a system that polices women’s bodies and relationships and attempts to limit their access to power, including by violently enforcing rigid gender binaries and roles. Recognizing these connections, Outright was among the initiating signatories of a statement issued on 8 October that brought together human rights groups and sporting associations to declare, in response to the two UN reports, that:

The violence experienced by trans, gender diverse and intersex athletes can be considered the extreme manifestation of a general pervasive and systemic violence and discrimination against women and girls in sports that require our attention, including both sexual and non-sexual violence and abuse perpetrated by coaches, trainers, sponsors, and others. Ensuring the health, safety, privacy, bodily autonomy and integrity of all women and girls in sports is crucial, including trans, gender diverse and intersex athletes. The misrepresentation of trans, gender diverse and intersex women as a threat to women’s rights and safety carries the high risk of diverting attention from these critical issues and hinders women who experience this kind of violence from access to justice.

This misrepresentation of diverse women as a threat not only diverts from real concerns: it also contributes to violence. Intersex women in sports are subjected to direct harm to their bodies as a condition to compete: in 2013, French doctors reported that they had subjected four young women athletes with intersex characteristics from “rural and developing countries” to “partial clitoridectomy with a bilateral gonadectomy, followed by a deferred feminizing vaginoplasty and estrogen replacement therapy” – all medically unnecessary procedures that can result in lifelong pain, loss of sexual pleasure, and other serious consequences – so that they could compete in women’s athletics. 

And as Outright wrote in a submission to the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, her mandate’s insistence on characterizing trans women as “male athletes… who identify as women and girls” itself “perpetuates stereotypes that create a very real risk of violence against transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex women and girls both within and outside of sports.” Such claims fuel moral panic, hatred, and hostility, which manifest in physical, emotional, or psychological violence against trans women in particular. This standpoint contradicts the feminist and scientific understanding of sex as socially constructed and contravenes international human rights standards that recognize gender as a social construct.

Trans women worldwide are murdered at alarming rates; the claim that they are “men” posing as women, and that they are therefore a threat, undoubtedly feeds into a logic that they should be forcibly “corrected” or eliminated.