28/02/2026
[GUEST LECTURE]
Trans Athletes, Media Power, and the Politics of Fairness: How Sports Became a Global Culture War
Elite sport has become a central arena in contemporary culture wars, particularly around the participation of transgender athletes. Drawing on more than 10,000 UK and US news articles (2014â2025), this lecture analyses how media narratives have shiftedâfrom earlier emphases on identity and inclusion to later dominance of legal, biomedical, and âfairnessâ discourses aligned with gender critical and anti-gender movements.
Using transfeminist poststructuralist and q***r perspectives, alongside computational methods (BERT topic modelling and RoBERTa sentiment analysis), the study situates these shifts within the longer history of s*x testing in elite sport. It argues that sport operates as a regulatory apparatus policing the boundaries of s*x and gender, revealing how debates over trans participation have become symbolic battlegrounds for broader struggles over embodiment, normativity, and institutional power.
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