Basic benefits, scarce benefits, and the ethics of transgender inclusion in sports

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Jane English’s contributions to sport ethics, clarifies her approach, defends its appropriateness, and then applys it the question of transgender inclusion in sports. The normative standards that English uses to justify girls’ and women’s categories in sports are not base on notions of competitive fairness. And if we accept her reasoning, it should reorient discourses on the transgender issue. There are, however, genuine critiques of English’s theory that have gone unaddressed. I hope to dispel those concerns. Having done so, I then attempt to show how English’s guidance enables us to reach nuanced, provisional, and yet reliable conclusions responsive to shifting social and political circumstances. Along such lines, I argue for transgender inclusion in most youth sports, lean strongly toward inclusion in many high school sports, and offer tempered and flexible support for inclusion in certain elite sports.