The exclusion of trans women from women's hockey has roots in the same devaluation of women and policing of women's bodies that once kept women out of sport altogether.

Transgender women in hockey. 

It's a topic being used by politicians to pass harmful legislation removing rights from transgender people. Meanwhile the presence of transgender women in women's sport is being defended by human rights advocates, allies, sports governing bodies, and the LGBTQ+ community. 

At the roots however, research and scholarly analysis has shown that the exclusion of transgender women from women's sport is based on the same discriminatory premise that historically has excluded cisgender women from sport, and founded gender categorization in the first place. The current push to exclude trans women from women's sport is founded in the policing of women's bodies, and the devaluation of women and women's sport as lesser than men's.

"Policies that impact trans women’s participation in elite sport are the continuation of a long history of exclusion of women from competitive sport," wrote the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport in a report titled Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review. "The women's sports category is the result of the historical exclusion of women from competitive sport, which was underpinned by pathologizing discourses about their bodies and the harms of their participation in physical activities. Policies that impact the practice of trans women in competitive sport emanate from the parallel history of efforts to define the female category in ways that excluded those women whose bodies were deemed to not conform to normative standards of femininity."

Sports were traditionally a place defined by men showing aggression, physical dominance, and strength. While society valued these traits in men, these same traits were devalued and discouraged in women and gender non-conforming individuals. Any woman who did not fit a traditional definition as being gentle, graceful, fragile, subservient and physically weaker, was immediately deemed a threat.

"The pressure to maintain a culturally approved mode of femininity while participating in a masculine institution places female athletes in the classic “double bind," wrote Deborah Brake in The Struggle for Sex Equality in Sport and the Theory Behind Title IX. "Participation in sports requires strength, competitiveness, aggression, and drive—qualities culturally defined as masculine—and maintaining traditional femininity requires passivity, vulnerability, softness, and physical weakness— qualities defined by sport culture as unathletic."

In 1915-1916 in the Eastern Ladies Hockey League, Albertine Lapensée, a member of the Cornwall Victorias, was dubbed the "star of stars." She was a dominant player who most viewed as competitively able to play professional men's hockey. That same ability, her strength, which should have been celebrated in sport, was immediately targeted as deviant from femininity and womanhood. It's a premise, placing women as lesser, used today in "defence" of women's sport toward transgender women.

Given Lapensée's spectacular play at the time, people judged that she must be a man. The Montreal Star wrote that the idea Lapensée was a man in disguise was “gaining currency on account of her being so superior to any other lady player and her agility on the steel blades.”

As Lapensée continued to score and dominate, other women, similar to what we see today, took up the call as well as players from Montreal and Ottawa made accusations claiming “she really was a boy in girls clothing.” In a game against the Montreal Westerns, an opponent pulled Lapensée's toque from her head attempting to show the presumed shortness of her hair. Instead, the action “caused (her hair) to fall in long braids down over her shoulders.” Similarly, in a game against the Ottawa Alerts, looking to “settle the matter,” the Ottawa team brought Lapensée to their dressing room to ascertain her womanhood. It’s perhaps the first in-competition example of an athlete being subjected to the gender policing of a “sex check,” an action Human Rights Watch called discrimination in a 2020 report, stating the practices of sex testing “violate fundamental rights to privacy and dignity.”

The saga played out publicly in newspapers until the culmination of the 1915-1916 season when an investigation by The Montreal Star found that although Lapensée’s “style resembles that of the average male professional to such an extent that it is little wonder that people unacquainted with the girl are led to believe from her play that she is a boy,” the claims were false. Moreover, the paper stated, Lapensée’s ability “only goes to show what degree of perfection young ladies can acquire in athletics if they are inclined that way and practice diligently.”

Sadly, Lapensée disappeared from the hockey world shortly after. A legendary career ended.

In the early 1900s, spectators were often banned from watching women's hockey, as the activity was deemed "unladylike." Women were also taught, in some cases until the 1970s, that participating in physical sports like hockey could damage their reproductive organs or cause breast cancer. 

These ideas resulted in women being banned from sport altogether, or an absence of competition for women in sports including exclusion from marathon running, boxing, hockey, and ski jumping at the Olympics. 

When Kathrine Switzer used only her initials to sign up for the Boston Marathon in 1967, men chased her on the course trying to pull her from the race. She was the first woman ever to enter the field, and it was against the will of men who had used threats to her reproductive organs and gender as deterrents.

"Your uterus was going to fall out. You were going to turn into a man, you know, that it was inappropriate to sweat or do anything arduous," Kathrine Switzer said, explaining commonly held beliefs about marathon running and women at the time.

Presenting women in a singular way, defined by patriarchal systems, has almost always been the case in women's sport. During World War II when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded, league president and Baseball Hall of Famer Max Carey stated, “Femininity is the keynote of our league; no pants-wearing, tough-talking female softballer will play on any of our four teams.” Women in the league were forced to wear skirts, and were sent to charm school to learn manners, how to behave in social settings, and the proper methods for applying makeup.

The league rules and marketing were designed to keep women as objects for men. As the league rules stated, "boyish bobs are not permissible," and at charm school, booklets distributed read "Women can be athletes, and still be feminine and charming, and therefore a double attraction. Men do not want to come to see women in athletic competition who look like men."

Socially, as M. Ann Hall wrote in Immodest & Sensational: 150 Years of Canadian Women in Sport, opposition to women in sport was not only "the supposed danger to a woman’s reproductive system, the real threat posed by sport was that it gave the middle-class woman the freedom to leave the home."

These attempts to define women as fitting a single definition of femininity and fragility aim to maintain traditional gender roles, keeping women out of the workplace, and in the case of a sport like hockey, keeping women without professional leagues and in secondary facilities without pay, by asserting the professional version of women's hockey as lesser and of little value. 

The attempt to subjugate women, and now trans women, are rooted in the same sexist and misogynistic ideas of the inferiority of women compared to men, and that women who deviate from societal norms need to be controlled and paternalistically protected. Related to hockey, sport has been used to uphold traditional gender boundaries, including through the creation of ringette in 1963 to directly challenge hockey and to put women in a societally "appropriate" sport.

Ringette was designed to move women from hockey, a sport considered a game for men, to a game, as Michael McKinley wrote in his 2009 book Hockey, A People’s History, that “prohibited body contact, both to address concerns that hockey was too rough and could damage the girls’ reproductive organs and to eliminate the need for costly gear, and transformed the dangerous puck into a harmless rubber ring.” 

The falsely presumed fragility of women led to body checking being banned in women's hockey prior to the 1992 World Championships, despite the fact body checking had been the rule of the game in women's hockey since inception.

Similarly, following the 1990 World Championship, when video was sent to the IIHF to assess the viability of women's hockey as a sport, the IIHF itself claimed “women can’t skate that fast and shoot that hard,” and organizers of the World Championship were accused of doctoring the tape.

As Elizabeth Etue and Megan K. Williams wrote of girls and women entering hockey in their book On The Edge, “The misconception that girls are more fragile than boys and therefore more prone to injury was commonplace and highly effective in impeding girls and women from entering the game.”

The same principles used to exclude cisgender women from sport, are now being turned on transgender women.

"For trans women, this means casting shame and rejection on individuals perceived to be male who identify or express as women by subjecting them to the objectification, sexualization and dehumanization that is directed towards women in a patriarchal society. This is often viewed as justified retaliation towards a person who has chosen to accept “reduced status” as a woman, and/or disgust at this person for having “lowered themselves” by “rejecting manhood” and challenging the presumed superiority of masculinity."

In hockey, this presents as cisgender women fighting to exclude transgender women, which ultimately places all women at a lower value in sport and society.

Despite forward motion, where the physical strength, power, and athletic prowess of women like Marie-Philip Poulin in hockey is now celebrated, politicians, anti-trans groups and individuals, are utilizing the same misogynist and patriarchal views of the past to again police women's bodies. 

This leads to the invasive and discriminatory practice of sex testing in sport. This practice targets women, such as Albertine Lapensée, or more recently Caster Semenya who do not fit society's view of feminine appearance, or more often, who are too successful, strong, or fast. 

As Nancy Leong wrote in Against Women's Sports, "One oft-repeated justification for gender verification testing, as well as for sex segregation more generally, is that these practices are necessary to enforce a level playing field. Yet this view is inherently premised on the idea that males are “faster, stronger, and better” at athletics than females. As a result, the same system that supposedly guarantees a space for women to compete simultaneously communicates women’s “competitive inferiority.”"

This same idea placing women below men is currently being used to exclude transgender women from sport. 

Some athletes, including US Hockey Hall of Fame and PWHPA board member Jocelyne Lamoureux, and Team USA member and Wisconsin captain Britta Curl claim to be protecting female sports. As Curl wrote in support of PWHPA board member Jocelyne Lamoureux, who has openly advocated for the exclusion of transgender women from women's sports, "Females protecting female players on the female players association board? Thank you @LamoureuxTwins"

Historically however, the arguments are the same that sought to exclude all women, including cisgender women, from sport. In the name of "Fairness in Women's Sports," lawmakers have used these arguments to pass policy and legislation to further police women's bodies and women in sport, and to place women's sport as lower and lesser than men's. The original wording of Florida's Fairness in Women's Sports Act which bans transgender women from competing in the category that aligns with their gender identity, would have allowed testosterone or genetic testing and genitalia examinations of any woman questioned. 

In action, this exclusion presents in the form of transmisogyny. 

Transmisogyny is the intersecting discrimination of transgender people based on their gender identity and expression, coupled with a devaluation and hatred for women.

As the individual who coined the term transmisogyny, Julia Serano proposes, the act of excluding trans women from women's spaces "is based on the assumption that femininity is worth less than masculinity, and that femaleness exists in the service of maleness."

Egale, a Canadian organization for 2SLGBTQI people and issues explained the connection between the subjugation of women and transphobia as an extension of the same patriarchal system that seeks to devalue women.

"It is a reality that we live in a patriarchal society where men and masculinity have been placed in a higher position of power and privilege over women, and femininity. As a result of patriarchy, trans persons often find themselves at the intersection of a rigidly binaried gender system where they stand to gain, or lose certain privileges in taking steps to affirm their gender identity."

While people like Jocelyne Lamoureux in hockey, or Riley Gaines in swimming claim to be fighting to protect women in women's sport, it risks harming all women, and subjecting all women - cisgender and transgender - to objectification, sexualization, abuse, and the need to prove a singular definition of womanhood.

As the Human Rights Campaign stated, any law, policy or rule with an "aim to bar trans women and girls from playing on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity, also ask all women to prove their womanhood."

For more information regarding the participation of transgender women in hockey and sport, read the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport's "Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review."