‘Passing’ the baton of trauma: Queer failure of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group’s anti-trans ‘position’

Engaging in critical rhetorical theory and methodology, we interrogate the contemporary landscape of anti-trans backlash in women’s sport. Specifically, we read the ‘TERF wars’ (Pearce et al.) across critiques of biofeminism (Pape) and whiteness (Fischer) while drawing upon critical social science research into trauma-bonding, bullying, and the structural impacts of gender verification policies. Our analysis focuses on the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG), offering a trauma-informed reading of the WSPWG’s ‘Position’ statement to illuminate how lesbian female athletes who were previously slandered for failing to meet femininity norms in sport are unable to overcome that trauma to recognize and create competitive space for trans-feminine or intersex/DSD athletes today. Ultimately, we argue that organizations like the WSPWG, like other actors in this current transgender sport panic, manifest a queer failure: rather than recognize that their experiences as ‘mannish’ lesbians index a set of deeply queer paradoxes in sport, these survivors of the gender-binary trauma that impacts nearly all women in sport reveal a blindness that prevents them from extending the recognition they once demanded. By remaining captive to the trauma of ‘passing’ as women, the WSPWG passes this trauma along to the next generation of women–be they cis, queer, trans, or just fast, strong, successful, and thus threatening in sport today.