Gender Identity In Sports

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Recommended: Review of literature on queer identity

In the last decades, the number of young people identified as transgender is increasing. As other young people, they also want to participate in sport at schools, and they should be able to be part of sport teams as well. The report mentioned before, highlighted that many schools athletic programs don´t have specific policies about transgender issues. In addition, coaches, educators, teachers and the educational community in general are not prepared. Many examples of that have been identified: it is not clear what bathrooms or changing rooms should transgender people use, or even the society in general don´t know what pronouns should they use. Parents, educators, and society in general need to rethink about the possibility of choosing gender identification (Griffin and …show more content…

This theory support that identity and sexual orientation are a social construction, reformulating new processes of identification and differentiation around sexuality. Thus, following the queer theory, there is not a constant gender identity or a static sexuality (Mosquera González, 2013). This seems to be a step beyond the two-gender models of society.
Many scholars have shown that experiences for children and youth people in relation to sport are crucial (Alfaro, 2008); sport, as a socio-cultural institution, emphasizes processes of social construction of gender, gender identity, sexuality, sex, etc. (Eng, 2008).
Schools, therefore, have a crucial role at this respect (Griffin and Carroll, 2010), as sport and physical exercise are a central part of the school setting. As a social and educational institution, values as inclusion, equal opportunities, participation, respect, fairness etc. must be promoted and it should be assured that every child have the same rights and

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