Performing fairness,enacting violence: antiblackness and coloniality of gender in gender-based eligibility regulations

Abstract

In this article, I analyse how ‘competitive fairness’ is mobilised in the contemporary governance of women's elite sports through sex and gender eligibility regimes. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory and critical race scholarship, I examine regulatory texts and public statements from World Athletics, the International Olympic Committee, the International Boxing Association, and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, alongside the experiences of athletes such as Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, Genoveva Anonma, and Barbra Banda. I argue that ‘competitive fairness’ functions as a performative promise of protection and affective fiction, legitimising surveillance and exclusion as safeguarding by mobilising fear and outrage to render certain bodies as threats to women and women's sports. Across shifting techniques – from visual inspection and medical panels to testosterone thresholds and renewed genetic testing – these regimes do not merely adjudicate eligibility; they actively produce the category of ‘women’ and the boundaries of the human. Situating this within the coloniality of gender and antiblackness, I show how suspicion disproportionately targets Black and Brown sportswomen, while ‘fairness’ is invoked to stabilise sex-essentialist binaries as common sense. I conclude by highlighting grassroots and community-led responses that decentre sex as the organising principle in sport, proposing that their lived experiences can foster alternative imaginaries of fairness beyond binary frameworks.