Field Recording Engineer

Transgender Athletes and the Myth of Inclusion in Sports was an audio adaptation of The Panic Over Trans Sports Inclusion by Jerry Brewer. I sat with Sadie Schreiner during this intimate field recording and thought a lot about the connections between eugenics and anti-trans legislation afterwards.

During the Paris Olympics, female boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu Ting of Taiwan were falsely accused of being transgender, after the International Boxing Association claimed without evidence that the women had failed gender eligibility tests in a previous competition.

The IBA is not recognized by the International Olympic Committee, which defended the women’s participation in the Olympics, and questioned the validity of the IBA’s tests. 

The outcry over both women’s participation – spread by prominent figures such as J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk – was a prime example of what sports columnist Jerry Brewer has called a “panic” over trans inclusion in sports in his “Grievance Games” series for The Post. 

“I think we think that sports is a place for everyone,” Jerry said. “But I think there's a myth of inclusion about sports. And I think that we have a long history of exclusion that brave people have had to fight through to make us more inclusive, to make us more diverse.”

On today’s “Post Reports,” host Martine Powers speaks with Jerry about how the promise of sports as a national unifier has buckled under the pressure of grievance and division. And we hear from a college athlete – Sadie Schreiner – about what it takes to compete as a trans woman.