BOOKS
Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports
by Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth, Ph.D. with Chris Mosier
The New Press
January 2025
Fair Game explores the role of sports in the lives of transgender youth and adults, offering a comprehensive, nuanced, and multivoiced picture of the transgender athletic experience. Through a woven collection of the narratives from a marginalized population, Fair Game examines the patterns of fear and gender stereotypes that undergird anti-trans legislation and offers helpful historical and political context about sex segregation in sports and how bodies (including trans bodies) work in sports.
Timely, accessible, and rigorous, Fair Game presents a sports landscape beyond our current conceptions, a world changed by unrestricted and joyful movement in sports.
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Queering Sport, Populism, and Isolationism: What is Happening with Transgender Athletes and What it Says about Us
by Anna Baeth, Ph.D., and Ellie Roscher
Rutgers University Press
Spring 2026
When I tell people I direct research for a nonprofit focused on LGBTQI+ issues in sport, the response is often a whispered: What do you think about trans women athletes?. This question is one I have grappled with over the last five years as an advocate, scholar, and collegiate coach. Queering Populism, Sport, and Isolationism is about those conversations: what I have learned by having access to some of the most (and least) competitive trans athletes in the country, what matters based on my conversations with 42 endocrinologists and reading of every article written about testosterone and athletic performance published, and my interpretation of what is most relevant to conversations about trans athletes in the United States currently. It is also a turn toward the conversations not had about trans athletes – mostly those centered on Donald Trump, populism, and the current emotional-political moment in the United States.
Bringing forward an interdisciplinary understanding of trans athletes, this book centers the questions: Why is so much attention been given to transgender athletes? Who is benefitting from that attention? What does our focus on trans athletes within the geopolitical landscape of the United States in 2024 say about our society? Outlining, historicizing, and answering the myriad questions that have come up around trans athletes in my journey as a critical feminist scholar thrown into trans advocacy, this book begins by outlining what has happened with trans athletes in recent years, what is happening with trans athletes right now, how conversations about trans athletes are part of trending populist discourses and isolationist political tactics, the ways our geopolitical and economic climate have contributed to those issues, the impact of this focus on trans athletes, and where sport scholars and practitioners might go from here.