Congealing Binary Sex/Gender Inequalities Through News Stories About Intersex and Transgender Athletes

Through the lens of Feminist STS, we explore Danish newspaper stories about sex hormones, and how these stories are used to congeal a binary sex/gender narrative which enforce inequalities. We use Donna Haraway’s (2018) concept of the material-semiotic and natureculture to critically explore how the borders of binary sex/gender is policed in stories about intersex and transgender athletes. We use Celia Roberts’ (2007) understanding of sex hormones as bio-social messengers of sex to capture how hormones get expressed in gender stereotypical narratives. And finally, we use Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis’ (2019) concept of T (testosterone) talk to capture that stories about sex hormones carry a cultural understanding of sex/gender as “binary, dichotomous and exclusive” (p. 10). With these Feminist STS concepts in our toolbox, we investigate stories about the regulation of the category of women in elite sports. We show that stories about sex hormones often are narrated as protecting-ciswomen-stories. We show that the argument for hormonal interventions often is entangled in a form of benevolent sexism which imply that ciswomen need protection. However, the people who ciswomen are narrated as needing protection from, are not; (a) cismen, (b) the ‘hard sciences’ definition of a woman, or (c) the cultural norms in organizations dominated by men, but rather intersex and transgender people who challenge - or embody a challenge - to the binary sex/gender hierarchy. That is, the danger posed is narrated as being the unclear cuts between cismen and ciswomen, which challenge the cultural narrative of the binary sex/gender categories as dichotomous and exclusive. In these sports stories, science about sex hormones is used to reproduce a benevolent sexist narrative that reiterates ciswomen’s inferiority and their need for paternalistic care in a patriarchal society.