BURKE'S PAPER ON DOMINANCE REBUTTED
Here is the paper from Michael Burke.
Dominance feminism, intersectionality and why the popular understanding of women’s separate sporting spaces is a step in the wrong direction
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17511321.2026.2731085
Michael Burke
Received 12 Aug 2025, Accepted 03 Sep 2026, Published online: 11 Oct 2026
ABSTRACT
Gender critical feminists (hereafter GCs) are winning the political battle that has been fought over the last eight years about the provision of separate sporting spaces for females – there is an accelerating trend of international, national and local sporting organizations excluding trans* women from women’s sporting competitions. The justifications used by GCs revolve around issues of fairness, safety and integrity of women’s sports. This paper suggests that the arguments utilised by GCs are the wrong strategic turn in the battle for greater power, resources and coverage for women’s sports. To make this argument, I will use ideas drawn from Catharine MacKinnon’s dominance feminism and Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectional feminism. These positions on feminism share a number of underpinning foundations. Both champion strongly political coalitions built from women’s (and other’s) experiences on the ground. Also, both remain sceptical of the value of equal opportunities law in challenging (white) male dominance. This paper uses an intersectionally informed dominance feminism as a corrective to the uncritical embrace of sports sex categorisation taken up by GC theorists.
Conclusion: what does dominance feminism still offer us?
There are many things from MacKinnon’s body of work that remain important in contemporary debates about women in sport.
1 It is important to observe the historical intent, use, and limitations of equal opportunity legislation generally, and the anatomical exemption clause specifically, when assessing its current utility. Equal opportunity legislation is useful in breaking down historical, and at times biologically false, barriers to women’s participation in sports that they have been excluded from, and this remains a worthy pursuit of feminism (Travers 2023, 2023), but not at any broader cost;
2. Following from English, it is important that women gain greater access to a share of the scarce benefits that are available to athletes in sport, and affirmative action remedies are justified given the long history of exclusion from sports, from certain sports, from public funding opportunities that have been available to exclusively male sports, and from equitable and respectful coverage in the sports media. It is important to defend what women in sport have had some success in changing;
3 At all times, feminists should be concerned with how interventions challenge and transform the difference discourses that sustain the dominance of men in sports. Some interventions may improve the lot of individual female athletes, whilst sustaining the discourses that support male dominance. These fit in a postfeminist perspective of individual rights and choices, but remain of dubious feminist value in challenging broader structures of patriarchal dominance. In short, biologically based arguments to ban trans* women athletes from women’s sport may not be the ‘win’ that GC feminists suggest;
4 We can learn something interesting about possibilities for the transformation of male dominance in sport by listening to what those on the margins say about hegemonic beliefs about the purposes of sport, the notions of fairness, and the impacts of cultural norms. More specifically, following Travers and Yang, we should promote as many opportunities for degendered sport as are possible, both to offset any male advantage that is culturally produced because of uneven resourcing, and to offer choice to those women who would benefit from playing, or would choose to play, sport against androgenised bodies. But most importantly, in MacKinnon’s terms, degendered sports produce challenges to the difference justifications that underpin male dominance in sport, and in society.
There are many of the usual fallacies in this paper. However, Jon Pike has a concise analysis of the paper.
https://x.com/runthinkwrite/status/2110395656439582806?s=20
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Here's a somewhat interestingly wrong paper (OA) in Sports, Ethics and Philosophy which earns a🧵 (link at the end). It's from Michael, an occaisional sparring partner here, do don't be abusive, please. It opens:
"Gender critical feminists (hereafter GCs) are winning the political battle that has been fought over the last eight years about the provision of separate sporting spaces for females - there is an accelerating trend of international, national and local sporting organizations excluding trans* women from women's sporting competitions. It must now be recognised that the GC voice in global sport is powerful. Sport has grown popular support for the more general GC position, explained by Bassi and LaFleur as ' .... centered"
and puts some of the credit in the right place, adknowledging Martina
and Sharron for providing 'broad commensical opposition' ...
- "The GC presentations of cis women and girl athletes as vulnerable and in need of spaces separated on biological grounds from men and boys are more easily digestible than presentations of cis women as vulnerable in other separate spaces such as prisons. As Jones and Travers explain, ' ... anti-trans policies that target trans girls and women in the sociocultural realm of sports seem to deliver what the bathroom controversy only promised: urgent policing and surveillance of gender-suspicious bodies ... in rigidly gendered spaces' (Jones and Travers 2023, 93);
- High-profile successful ciswoman athletes and ex-athletes like Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies, knowledgeable spokespeople for the GC position in sports, have helped to produce broad commonsensical opposition (Dembroff 2020) to
• inclusive trans* policies inside, and beyond, sport;
- Physical/safety threats posed by trans* women to cis women in sport are presented as scientifically justified and a necessary consequence of essential structures and practices of some sports (Pike 2021);
- GC views, including the suggestion that single-sexed spaces are needed for individual women to experience individual choice and achievement (Bassi and Lafluer
2022), are exaggerated in sport and intertwined with a long history of fairness-based arguments about the need for protection of women's sport from/by 'real men' masquerading as women. These arguments exist in the popular perceptions of most people from 'across the political spectrum' (Jones and Travers 2023, 95) about the necessity for segregated sport."
... “It must now be recognised that the GC voice in global sport is powerful.” is a welcome concession. But Burke argues the success is a strategic mistake: accepting sex differences in performance makes women “second-class athletes.” ...
...Burke doesn’t deny the science. He “happily concede[s] the arguments of the anatomists.” His worry is this: how can women demand equal pay and resources while accepting evidence that they’re slower?...
Here's the section, which follows an account of the work of @FondOfBeetles
on Pool and diffference in strength at the break
"Asked more bluntly, how can women athletes logically make claims to equal resourcing and pay, when they also accept and use a legal framework that states, and pursue scientific evidence to show, that they
are second-class athletes to men?"
... This is the same slippage I criticised in my JPS review of Bekker & Mumford’s Open Play: from “slower” (etc) (descriptive) to “inferior” (normative). Burke drops their sex denial but keeps the slippage. So his case rests on that slippage alone... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00948705.2026.2623888
.. So, it fails. This is how Flyweights hit less hard than heavyweights. Paralympians are slower than Olympians. Nobody thinks flyweight boxing is thereby second-class boxing. Mumford rightly refuses to call Paralympians “inferior.” ...
... Athletic excellence is class-relative. The boxing world implicitly understands this and has a phrase for it "pound-for-pound". Sha'Carri Richardson female sprinter is a great sprinter. Her achievement isn’t diminished by the existence of faster men. ...
... Nor do resource claims rest on performance parity. Women deserve equal resources because women and men are of equal worth, not because they’d run 9.6 with more track time. Tie resources to times and you’ve already lost. ...
... So Burke faces a dilemma. If “slower” really entails “inferior,” no change of discourse can alter that, and his advice reduces to “stop saying things that are true, because they are uncomfortable!” (and MB had the answer to that). But if it doesn’t, his argument fails.
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(apologies for the formatting fails)