Rhetorics of Fairness and the Politics of Trans Exclusion

Rhetorical examination of the contemporary panic surrounding transgender women in sport reveals that fairness is not a rhetorical value that promotes equality or justice but one that further subjugates the most vulnerable in service of privilege.

This book addresses how the rhetorical subjugation and repression enacted by weaponizing fairness against trans women athletes contributes to material, psychological, and physical violence against trans people, against all women, against other gender minorities, against men, against anyone that then must squeeze themselves into the narrow grids of competition and gender proscribed by advocates for fairness. The authors bring a critical rhetorical eye to the use of a specific value, fairness, meant to achieve a political end in an arena (sport) that serves both as a political testing ground and as a potential source of immense public good.

The authors provide an inductive close reading of a legal brief to establish the rhetorical framework and broader ontology of those seeking to push trans women out of sport (and through it, public life) followed by a computerized, inductive analysis of mainstream news texts to form a ground-up understanding of hegemonic discourses surrounding the supposed (un)fairness of having trans women participate in womenâs athletics. Using the induction of the first two studies as the basis for deductive approaches in the next two. A human-coded, quantitative content analysis looking at TikToks related to womenâs sports for those rhetorical features identified in prior chapters to assess how they are accepted, rejected, or altered by everyday participants in public discourses of trans participation in athletic competitions. The inductive findings are then used in the fourth study by returning to a close reading approach and critically interrogating the rhetorics and ontologies of a piece of transphobic cultural production centered on sport: the film Lady Ballers. The move from induction to deduction across the arch of the book, as well as the move from a single text to large corpuses back to a single text are also rare in humanist inquiry. The authors trace the uses, influences, and implications of the rhetorical weaponization of the value of fairness across discursive arenas. Mapping fairness as a rhetorical value in the context of trans women in womenâs sports also sheds light on the ways fairness may be used to rationalize exclusion in other areas of public life like elections and affirmative action.