Female and gender discrimination in professional or amateur sports

Abstract

In this essay, the authors face gender discrimination issues upon entry into sports championships. In the first part, the focus is mainly on transgender and queer transgender people with particular reference to the need by sports fields to disregard the social or legal identity currently centered on the psychological-character gender. In the second part, the authors deal with the issue of whether the lack of professional-category protection for Italian female athletes amounts to a form of gender discrimination, or whether instead constitutes a natural consequence of the legal principles, according to which, the Italian legal system differentiates practicing sport between professional sports and amateur sports. Undeniably, in the last twenty years there has been an evolution of the phenomenon in the direction of greater gender equality in terms of sports participation, as well as greater consideration by the media and interest attributed to the competitive performance of women athletes. However, the essay concludes that in Italy acknowledgement of women's professional football, seems to relate more to issues of economic sustainability, than to discrimination.