Between the rhetoric of care and sports bureaucracy: trans childhoods at stake

Abstract

Here we use a case reported in the media to discuss the participation of trans people in high performance sport. The psychobiomedical discourse, based on the assumption of unity of the subject and organized in a binary cis-heteronormative matrix, contributes to producing and operating the notion of coherence in the classification of bodies. In sport, one of its effects is presented in the objection to the participation of trans athletes in sports arenas, resorting to biophysiological criteria that consider androgen hormones to be determinant for increased performance. This argument can be questioned when we look at cases of trans children who are unable or difficult to participate in sports. Here, hormones give way to the legal-institutional apparatus to make the sports bureaucracy and its control over bodies work. By exposing the limits of this argument, we find the biopolitical reasons that cross the management of bodies.