Who Gets to Be A Woman In Sport?

When Donald Trump declared last week that the United States would move to “keep men out of women’s sports,” it was framed as a moment of clarity, a hard line drawn in an increasingly blurred debate.

The statement, formalised through executive action, positioned sport as a site where gender must be strictly policed in the name of fairness. It also did something else: it collapsed a complex, decades-long conversation into a single, politically charged binary.

But the idea that sport has ever been able to clearly separate “men” from “women” is, at best, a convenient fiction.

In elite sport, the line between male and female has never been as clear as the categories on a scoreboard suggest. Yet sport depends on that clarity. It needs categories—men and women, weight classes, age groups—to function at all. Without them, competition collapses. But with them comes a quieter, more complicated question: who gets to decide where those lines are drawn?

Today, that question is back in the spotlight. From policy decisions by bodies like the International Olympic Committee to national-level directives, gender in sport has become a flashpoint – often pitched as a clash between fairness and inclusion.

But the idea that this is a new crisis is misleading. Women’s sport has always been shaped by suspicion. For decades, female athletes were subjected to gender verification tests—first through invasive physical examinations, later through chromosomal screening. The premise was simple: to ensure that no man could “pose” as a woman. The effect, however, was something else entirely. It created a system in which women—especially those who excelled—were constantly required to prove that they belonged.

That suspicion has never quite disappeared. It has simply changed form.

“People have a certain idea of what a female sportsperson should look like,” says Nishanth Puzhunkara, Curriculum and Content Lead at Enabling Leadership, an organisation that works in Sports for Development.

He points to the career of Serena Williams - arguably one of the greatest athletes of all time, as an example. For years, Williams’s dominance was accompanied by relentless commentary on her body, her strength, her perceived deviation from traditional femininity. In contrast, players like Maria Sharapova or Martina Hingis were more easily embraced.

The difference, Nishanth suggests, says as much about society as it does about sport.

“Women are expected to display so-called feminine qualities,” he says. “Any woman who is an outlier immediately comes under scrutiny.”

Sport, in other words, mirrors the world that produces it. Even its rules are not immune. “Almost all of them are designed by and catered towards men,” he adds, pointing to seemingly neutral standards - the height of a basketball hoop, the dimensions of a football goal -that were never recalibrated with women’s bodies in mind.

The category of “women’s sport,” then, is not just biological. It is historical, cultural, and deeply political.

This is precisely what scholars like Meena Gopal have long argued. Sporting institutions, she notes, do not merely reflect natural differences between men and women—they actively define and regulate them, often reinforcing dominant ideas of gender rather than questioning them.

The Indian context reflects these tensions in particularly sharp ways. In cricket, long before debates on gender identity entered the mainstream, women’s players had to fight simply to be seen - operating outside the ambit of the Board of Control for Cricket in India until 2006, and only recently gaining visibility through tournaments like the Women's Premier League. In hockey, the success of the national team led by players such as Rani Rampal has challenged long-standing ideas about femininity and physicality, even as women athletes continue to face scrutiny over appearance and behaviour. Football, meanwhile, has already encountered the question more directly: the participation of Anjali Lama in the Indian Women's League marked a rare moment of visibility for transgender athletes in Indian sport, but also exposed the absence of clear, consistent policy frameworks.

Across disciplines, the pattern is similar; women’s sport is still consolidating its place, even as it is asked to adjudicate some of the most complex questions around gender even as governing bodies are tightening eligibility rules around gender identity. In England, the England and Wales Cricket Board has barred transgender women from elite women’s cricket. In football, FIFA continues to review its policies amid growing pressure from both inclusion advocates and those arguing for stricter categories.

The stated aim, almost always, is fairness. But fairness for whom? And defined by whom, remains contested.

At the elite level, these debates often centre on physiology: testosterone levels, muscle mass, performance advantage. But for most athletes, sport does not unfold on Olympic tracks or World Cup fields. It happens in school grounds, district tournaments, and local leagues: spaces where policy is far less clear, and far more inconsistently applied.

“The first step is to have open discussions involving gender experts,” says Nishanth. “But we also need more women and gender-diverse voices in decision-making.”

Even where rules exist, implementation is uneven. “We already have strict guidelines in areas like age categories, yet age fraud is rampant,” he points out. “So it’s not just about having rules, it’s about enforcing them.”

More fundamentally, grassroots sport often fails at a more basic level: inclusion. “Safe spaces are a huge issue,” he says. “Even something as basic as access to proper washrooms is not ensured.”

If elite sport is grappling with the science of gender, grassroots sport is still struggling with its infrastructure.

For Varsha Yeswant Kumar, co-founder of One-all, a non-profit that works  with young people to provide value education through mixed-gender sport, the debate looks different from the ground.

The fears that dominate public discourse—about safety, about unfair advantage—are not entirely imaginary, she says. But they are often overstated, and rarely backed by conclusive evidence.

“I’ve heard concerns about ‘safety’ and ‘unfair physiological advantage,’” she says. “But there is no concrete scientific evidence at this time to support these claims. It may be too simplistic to extrapolate data from binary athletes to gender-diverse athletes.”

What is far more visible, she adds, is exclusion.

Gender-diverse athletes face disproportionate bullying, teasing and isolation, often without the protection of clear policies or institutional support. In many cases, they are pushed out of sport altogether.

At the community level, the question shifts.

“Community sports programmes can help dissipate these misconceptions,” Varsha says. “If young people are given space to reflect without judgement, they begin to see each other as people rather than just competitors.”

Inclusion, in this context, is not about erasing difference. It is about building environments where difference does not automatically translate into exclusion. “I have heard concerns about the perceived “safety” of binary athletes and the argument of "unfair physiological advantages" that transitioning athletes would have. There is no concrete scientific evidence at this time to support either of these claims. It might be too simplistic to extrapolate binary athlete data into the gender diverse athlete pool,” Kumar says.

Building spaces that are inclusive and diverse also offers a larger data set that we can then research to dis-/prove our assumptions based on biases, she says. “We need to understand where people’s fears come from,” she says, “and address them—rather than dismissing them outright.”

Because beneath the policy debates and political rhetoric lies something more fundamental. That sport has always been about categories. But it has also always been about aspiration—about who gets to enter the field, who gets to stay, and who is pushed out.

The history of women’s sport is, in many ways, a history of expanding that field - of challenging the idea that certain bodies do not belong. The current debate does not mark a departure from that history. It is a continuation of it.

Only this time, the question is not just whether women belong in sport. It is about which women do.

And who gets to decide.