To unpack SCOTUS’s recent ruling on cis and trans people in sports, Johanna Mellis is joined by Dr. Jess Goldberg and repeat guest Reo Eveleth. Jess and Reo’s conversation provides an incredible deep dive on the problematic language of the ruling and the “gymnastics” that Kavanaugh especially attempts in the Opinion of the Court and contextualize the ruling within U.S. and international white colonial histories. They discuss the inherent limits of U.S. law to protect transgender and other non-gender confirming people due to our white, cishetero-patriarchal structure. Reo and Jess critique the various ways that cisgender white men claim to be “protecting” various marginalized groups—cisgender white women, Black and Brown people, disabled people, and more—from their own communities and one another, in order to allege that they are the ultimate protectors as colonizers and ultimately as predators. Reo traces for us international sport’s various failed attempts to ascertain and “protect” “femininity” and womanhood,” while Jess explains how the sport context fits within white cisgender people’s broader fantasies about “monstrous” people (i.e. Black, Brown, and trans people) allegedly sexually assaulting cis white women. Reo and Jess’s back-and-forth discussion highlights how the white colonial nature of the U.S. legal system and Western-organized international sport have both purposefully fabricated these fantasies to substantiate their control and power. The conversation illustrates the importance of cisgender locked-arm solidarity amongst and with the queer, trans, intersex, and non-binary communities, Black and Brown people, disabled people, and more. As Jess keenly notes, we must pay particular attention to the specific ways that the U.S. government is using these sport bans as a tool to attempt a genocide against transgender people, and also to enact sexual violence via chromosome exams (and, at some point, genital inspections) against cisgender white girls and women.

Dr. Jess Goldberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Gender & Women's Studies at New Mexico Highland University. She specializes in abolitionist thought, Black Studies, Carceral Studies, the legal humanities, queer and feminist theory, and more. She is a transfemme martial artist and published their first book in 2024 titled, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice. Reo Eveleth is a writer, producer, and artist exploring the relationship between humans and science and technology. They created the Testedpodcast which we discussed with Reo in an April EoS episode, which has received numerous prestigious awards.

For cohost Anna Posbergh’s article in Common Dreams on the SCOTUS ruling, see here. 

Chapters

02:02 Initial reactions to the Supreme Court ruling

04:07 Legal language and the myth of biological sex

06:35 Misconceptions about science and performance advantage

11:14 Gender, law, and the colonial gender binary

17:15 Gender identity vs. biological sex in law

23:15 Sports as a social and political space

27:33 The rhetoric of violation and protection in gender discourse

34:04 The role of science and the court as producers of knowledge

41:04 The history of eugenics and scientific racism

47:20 The importance of solidarity and activism

01:00:09 Science, performance, and the law

Keywords: Supreme Court, trans athletes, gender, sports policy, science and gender, disability, racialization, abolition, queer theory, TERF

Hosts in this episode: Johanna

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