Transgender Athletes and the Queer Art of Athletic Failure

Fallon Fox became the first openly transgender fighter in professional mixed-martial arts (MMA) in 2013. Her outing elicited fervent responses from the MMA community, reflecting the barriers many transgender women encounter in sex-segregated sports. Fox frequently faced pseudoscientific arguments alleging innate physical advantages over cisgender women, which are deeply entangled with sexist and racist assumptions about trans identity. For Fox, the only way to prove her “true” womanhood—that is, that she was just as biologically inferior to men as “regular” women—was by losing fights. In this article, we trouble Fox’s “damned-if-she-wins” and “damned-if-she-doesn’t” conundrum by drawing on Halberstam and Muñoz’s theorizing on the queer art of failure. In order to challenge binary logics that structure our sporting world—including male/female, winning/losing, success/failure—and that are specifically imposed upon transgender athletes such as Fox, we employ a queer methodology to center Fox’s voice as she grapples with the meanings and uses of failure. Her insights reveal a productive engagement with athletic failure, which not only challenges sex segregation in sports and the interlocking discourses of racism, (cis)sexism, and transphobia, but allows us to imagine queer modes of undoing beyond the athletic realm of the MMA cage.