Troubling dualisms: Understanding the creation and implementation of protective policies in elite women's sport

Abstract

In today's political environment, questions of “fairness,” “protection,” and “woman” remain contentious topics, particularly in sport, and draw from different types of knowledges to support corresponding regulatory documents. Considering the heterogeneity of knowledge informing protection for (women) athletes, there remain questions around how to create (policy) guidelines, which ostensibly convey consensus on complex topics (e.g. female eligibility, trans eligibility, and athlete health). In this article, we draw from Anne Fausto-Sterling's “dueling dualisms” and Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality to examine what, how, and why specific ways of knowing make their way into written policies whereas others are left out or re-interpreted. To do so, we examine three International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Athletics (WA) policy texts (i.e. the IOC's consensus statement on relative energy deficiency in sport [REDs] and WA's female and transgender eligibility policies) and interviews with IOC and WA experts. We find disconnects between expert knowledge, written texts, and anticipated policy implementations, despite the perception of consensus in written documents. These discrepancies especially manifest in the ideas of policies as both a scientific process and a felt experience, and controlled unfairness.