Equality DanceSport doing transgender inclusivity in the United Kingdom: Cultural cisgenderism and transgender experiences

Abstract

In this article, cultural cisgenderism is adopted to investigate Equality DanceSport, a sporting context emerging out of an LGBT+ community. 1 The study questions the extent to which Equality DanceSport enforces regulations and practices which promote trans-inclusivity. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory approach, I conducted autoethnography and 35 semi-structured interviews with LGBT+ dancers representing diverse genders and sexualities. I examined the discourses shaping the recent revision of Equality DanceSport competition rules in the United Kingdom and the experiences of transgender dancers in the competitive arena. Findings suggest that despite challenging some cis and heteronormative practices in mainstream DanceSport spaces, essentialist notions of sex and gender continue to feed into the shaping of Equality DanceSport's competition rules. These notions are hinged on debates around fairness and inclusivity and inform the constitution of a binary sex category in the competition rules. Transgender dancers face several challenges within the binary sex system, tending to cope through identity compromise. Such a strategy contributes to transgender erasure and invisibility. Overall, this paper provides a critical understanding of trans-inclusivity in an LGBT+ sporting space in the United Kingdom. It highlights the complexity of achieving inclusivity and calls for a critical interrogation which does not conflate LGB with the T when investigating the inclusivity of LGBT+ sporting contexts. The paper concludes with a proposal for radical regulatory and policy changes that question the epistemological understandings of sex and gender and celebrate other values in competitive sports which de-emphasise the focus on winning.