BOOKS
Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports
by Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth, Ph.D. with Chris Mosier
The New Press
Spring 2025
Transgender athletes are news, and for good reason. Trans people inherently raise questions about the gender binary, and this issue feels new and big, especially in sport. We are a sporting nation, and athletes, parents, coaches, administrators, policy makers and fans are confused, curious, and concerned. They have serious questions about genetics, hormones, ability, and fairness. Women who benefited from Title IX are scared that transgender athletes will take away what they fought so hard for. Fair Game speaks calmly, clearly, and confidently with practical language to present a gender expansive sports landscape we have not begun to imagine. We can save Title IX by protecting trans kids.
Fair Game is for people who care deeply about gender equality in sports. It lays out how to talk to each other and what we need to know before Title IX is ripped from our clutches. Most people cannot name a transgender athlete, and this book will give readers a meaningful introduction to over twenty of them while offering helpful context and the newest research to empower readers as they navigate the quickly changing landscape of this charged national conversation. Timely, accessible, dignifying, inspiring and rigorous, it explores what constitutes the gold standard of bodies and how the world will change with more unrestricted, simple, joyful, movement in sport.
Fair Game is about bodies – our physical bodies and sports governing bodies. Sport today is heartily white, cis, male, and violent. Yet, it remains one of the primary systems by which all of us uphold values like fairness and effort. It is where girls learn to be strong and boys learn to be men. Sport, then, is precisely the space where revolution can occur. When black trans bodies can be and move, revolution is not only possible, but sustainable and, in fact, inevitable. Revolution happens through joyful movement, which is why sport and joyful bodily movement is tamped down. And, this is why we need joyful movement more than ever.
We are athletes. We are queer. We believe we can make a world in which everyone can play. If that's a world you have questions about, we have some answers for you. We also have new questions, too. Let’s think it all through together. And then, we'll work it out on the field.
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.
Queering Populism, Sport, and Isolationism, is about bodies – physical bodies, sport governing bodies, and bodies of people mobilizing sport for a host of political reasons. Sport in the United States remains one of the primary sites for the naturalization of, and systemic teaching of, values like fairness and gendered behaviors. We posit, the nullification of trans bodies, particularly within the realm of sport, offers insight into larger shifts within our political and social structures. We call then for a paradigm shift in asking not, what do we think about trans athletes, but what does the political circus around trans athletes tell us about the state of sport in the United States, the state of politics, and about ourselves?
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.
The book draws heavily upon readings of the academic literature on trans athletes from a cultural studies and sociological lens as well as my research on the demographics of trans and nonbinary athletes in the United States, on media representations of trans and nonbinary athletes, and on the lived experiences of trans and nonbinary athletes at all levels of sport. I draw upon my experiences consulting with sport governing bodies, being a collegiate coach of trans athletes, meeting and working with trans athletes’ families, and supporting lawmakers on these issues. This book presents not only an intersectional understanding of trans athletes, but a geo-political and sport-informed approach to the topic.