Sex and Sports: Transgender Rights and the Culture War Over Girls Sports

This book addresses one of the most controversial and polarizing topics of recent years: transgender girls' inclusion in girls' sports. The book explores legal precedent and medical science and explains why neither can answer the question of how eligibility rules should be drawn for girls' sports. The decision is, at core, a political one necessarily reflecting social values and priorities. The book examines positions from the right and left that have dominated the public debate revealing their ideological commitments and logical weak points. With the goal of helping readers clarify their own positions, rather than advocacy, the book provides a framework for thinking about this issue that focuses on the discrete benefits organized sports provides to participants and society more broadly and considers how such benefits can be most fairly and justly allocated to girls and boys – both transgender and cisgender.

Kimberly A. Yuracko is Judd and Mary Morris Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. She has written extensively about sex discrimination in sports, education, employment and tort law. In 2022, Yuracko received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to write this book. Her prior book, Gender Nonconformity and the Law was published in 2016.