Publications
Journal Article
Feminist Media Studies
January 2025
Epistemologies of ignorance in constructions of fairness and biology: the online swimming community responds to Lia Thomas’ inclusion in women’s swimming events
Organized sport has largely been, and remains, segregated by sex. A long history of cultural norms and gender socialization discouraged women from participating and competing in sport. The conflation of sex and gender is produced by and further reinforces notions of biological essentialism that denies the full inclusion of trans people. Anchoring our analysis in epistemologies of ignorance, this paper critically examines the online discourses surrounding Lia Thomas’ participation in NCAA women’s swimming events to understand how the swimming community constructs notions of sex, gender, and fairness. We reviewed 1696 online comments on articles about Thomas’ participation in women’s events on a globally renowned swimming website, SwimSwam. We argue that biological essentialism functions as an epistemology of ignorance, where the dominant group actively reject or misrecognize scientific, historical, and sociological knowledges to justify the exclusion of trans women swimmers. In turn, biological essentialism erases equity issues within sport and, thus, effectively works to reproduce the privilege position of particular groups—in this case cisgender women and men—by protecting their opportunities to swimming success.
Journal Article
International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics
December 2023
Transgender athletes and Canadian sport policy: a story of stigma and precarity
In this article, we examine the publicly available transgender inclusion policies of 53 Canadian National Sport Organizations (NSOs) in 2019. At the time of the study, only 17 of the 53 NSOs had policies specifically related to transgender inclusion. However, where these policies exist, they vary in their approaches to inclusion of transgender persons. This article examines how Canadian sport policies prohibit and/or police transgender persons’ participation in sport.
Using Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, we demonstrate that participation in sport is a precarious choice for transgender athletes, as most NSO policies lacked clear guidance on inclusion and there were next to no policy statements on gender non-conforming people. The development of inclusive policy within sport should be proactive, actionable, consistent with best practices and must include meaningful conversations with transgender and gender non-conforming athletes, coaches and officials.
Journal Article
Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association
Fall 2021
Pokémon Go as Palimpsest: Creating a layer of meaning at the University of Guelph
In this article, I employ the concept of the palimpsest of meaning (Bailey, 2007) to illustrate how Pokémon Go shapes and produces relations to place. Using ethnographic data from student players at the University of Guelph, I demonstrate how augmented reality (AR) gaming constructs a curated layer of place meaning that influences players’ knowledge of, relationships to, and movement through space.
I argue that we should not ignore the potential of AR technology to influence how we come to know place, emphasizing the impacts that biases, which are coded into this technology, might have on alternative narratives of place and for marginalized communities.
MA Thesis
Solving for the Value of X: The Impacts of X Markers on Government-Issued Identity Documents in Ontario
This thesis explores the impacts of X gender markers on government-issued IDs for nonbinary people in Ontario, Canada. Little research has examined the impacts of X gender markers on nonbinary people. This research addresses this gap through qualitative research with eleven nonbinary Ontarians. While X markers play a crucial role in creating space for nonbinary people, the current approach taken in Ontario is insufficient to create equity for nonbinary people. I explore how nonbinary people adopt, contest, and define the term “nonbinary” and how they relate to X markers, as well as the labour that nonbinary people must perform in order to challenge how the binary is embedded in various public and private contexts. I conclude by arguing that gender marker change should be made more accessible, and that systems must be made more inclusive of nonbinary possibilities.