Ableist Ungendering: Anti-Blackness, Coloniality, and Disability in Women’s Sports

Abstract: This article examines how ableism reinforces racialized ideals of sexual difference, focusing on elite sport regulations that condition eligibility for women’s competition on intersex athletes’ testosterone levels. These regulations disqualify cisgender women athletes, overwhelmingly African runners like Caster Semenya, by rendering their athleticism a symptom of disease. In doing so, this practice of sex testing reinscribes anti-Black and colonial frames of sexual dimorphism through the vector of ability. Analysis of statements from athletes and sport governing bodies demonstrates how sex operates as a racialized measure of ability within these regulations. Ableism shapes the anti-Blackness of these regulations in multiple ways: delimiting the racialized boundaries between exceptional and excessive ability, pathologizing intersex variations as illness, and coercing athletes into cures that both normalize and disable. Bringing together Hortense Spillers’s concept of “ungendering” with disability analytics, the article develops the concept of ableist ungendering to characterize how such appeals to disability define the anti-Black bounds of womanhood. In turn, this withholding of gendered recognition becomes a key site where Blackness and disability meet. The article concludes by addressing how resistance to these regulations unsettles the existing contours of anti-ableist imaginaries.