Community and Belonging: Being a Trans Man in a Queer Soccer League

Abstract

Sports are traditionally highly gender segregated, creating spaces of exclusion and discrimination for non-normative sexuality and gender identities. This has been countered with the creation and maintenance of lesbian and gay sports leagues that have, in more recent years, widened their scopes to include a wider array of ‘queer’ identities. This paper aims to understand and analyze a transgender man’s subjective experience of belonging and community in a queer Vancouver sports league through ethnographic research methods. While current scholarship relating to transgender people and sports largely investigates the ways in which transgender people experience unbelonging and exclusion in sports and ‘queer’ spaces, my research finds that my primary interlocutor experiences strong senses of community and belonging in a queer sports space. Through observation and interview, I examine the underlying phenomena that explain my interlocutor’s experience of positive trans selfhood in a space that is often problematic for trans individuals in Canada.