Community as the Concession: The Construction and Maintenance of Trans Exclusionary Binaries in Australian Sport

Following the publishing of Sport Australia’s trans inclusion guidelines in June 2019, the Australian Football League and Cricket Australia published their own trans inclusion policies. Therefore, this article displays the results of a policy analysis of these policies and analyzes news media coverage, and respective fan responses, using an online survey. Approached from a poststructural and Queer theoretical lens, binaries, such as inclusion versus exclusion, and elite versus community sport were deconstructed. These binaries were demonstrated to often uphold not only dominant sport discourse, but the gender/sex binary thus, restricting advances for full inclusion. Overall, this research lays the groundwork for future exploration of trans inclusion in the policy, news media, and fandom landscape in the Australian context.