On the Justification for World Rugby’s Ban on Trans Women: Assessing Key Arguments in the Debate

Federico Luzzi

doi:10.1080/00948705.2024.2404200

On the Justification for World Rugby’s Ban on Trans Women: Assessing Key Arguments in the Debate

Federico Luzzi^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

This paper examines the philosophical justification for World Rugby’s ban of trans women athletes from the ‘Women’s’ category at elite level. It is argued that Jon Pike’s (2021) lexical priority argument in support of this ban is flawed; that Burke’s (2022; 2023) partially concessive response to Pike leads Burke to endorse an incoherent position; and that by rejecting Pike’s lexical priority argument, Burke’s view can both be made consistent and can be defended against the two criticisms levelled to it by Imbrišević (2023). A stronger justification for WR’s ban is identified and discussed, and a diagnosis for the debate’s intractability is proposed.

Original language	English
Number of pages	19
Journal	Journal of the Philosophy of Sport
Early online date	23 Sept 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2024.2404200
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 23 Sept 2024

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Vikki Entwistle, Sone Erikainen, Sandro Gulì, Gerry Hough, Jesper Kallestrup, Paula Sweeney, Stephan Torre, Ulrich Stegmann and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a prior version of this paper.

Keywords

Trans inclusion
safety
trans women
Pike
rugby
lexical priority

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10.1080/00948705.2024.2404200Licence: CC BY

Luzzi_JPS_On_The_Justification_EarlyOnline
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Final published version, 660 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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On the Justification for World Rugby’s Ban on Trans Women: Assessing Key Arguments in the Debate

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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