CHICAGO — When I think about transgender people in sports, I don’t think about lobbies or legislation. I think about my friends.
This is the greatest cognitive dissonance I have experienced over the last few weeks (and, honestly, years) while attempting to follow the debate around trans inclusion in women’s sports. Despite the rabid fixation upon the concept of trans women in sports, those who beat the drum the loudest for exclusive policies rarely seem to care about trans people themselves. The conversation swirls in increasingly violent directions yet somehow loses the central humanity at its focus.
But I don’t want to do that. I want to tell you about how playing basketball with trans women has substantially improved every aspect of my life over the last two years. I want to tell you about my friends.
My first few years in Chicago were lonely. I moved here in 2021 with exactly three contacts in the city, one of whom was my editor at the Tribune. It took time to find my footing. When I did so, it occurred in a familiar place — on the basketball court.
Many Tribune readers might not know that Chicago is a burgeoning home for queer pickup basketball. In the years after the pandemic, a handful of well-run organizations and a pair of long-standing recreational leagues created a buzzing ecosystem of basketball-loving queer people who gather weekly on the North, West and South sides to hoop and build community.
I came to this community slowly after highlighting one such group for a profile in the Tribune. It took a while to get up the courage to actually play. I hadn’t really moved my body in years and I was never all that good (read: very, very mediocre) at the sport to begin with. But I went to one run, then another. Slowly, playing basketball became a cornerstone of my life. The people I played with became a home of their own: friends who celebrate my birthday and take me on camping trips and eat dinner in my home, who cheer my wins and lift me through low moments.
The beauty of adult recreational sports is they represent the other side of a bell curve. It’s a return to the play of youth, a reminder of the joy that comes from playing a game for fun. That doesn’t make the games any less competitive — or physical — but a childlike glee underscores every aspect of those hoop sessions. Few things are more beautiful than playing basketball without consequence, even as an adult with legitimately zero handles.
It’s rare, in this setting, for me ever to hoop with a group of entirely cisgender people. I never have felt unsafe in this environment. (Anyone in these runs will tell you that the greatest threat to an adult hooper’s health is a cisgender former Division I women’s basketball player trying to maintain her quality of play in a recreational setting. Those ladies will make you touch earth.) I never have understood the desire to remove trans women or girls from these settings because I have experienced firsthand how enjoyable it is to play basketball with a group of people focused on inclusion.
This is not a comfortable thing for me to write about. I don’t care to publicly share my beliefs. I don’t think most people need to know them. My personal politics and ethics share little overlap with my duties as a beat writer who reports on a basketball team. But I’m tired. I’m sick of the fear mongering, the absurdity of it. And I’m fed up with watching this daily debate play out without ever actually mentioning the people at the heart of the issue.
It feels as if this entire debate — if you can call it that — is driven by those who have never actually interacted with a trans person. Those who wish to exclude trans people from sports use this anonymity as a weapon. They turn the concept of trans athletes into a monolith, use phrases like “little girls sharing locker rooms with grown men” to sow fear. They rely on the assumption that most of the people they’re speaking to never have known or cared about a trans child. They want you to forget that the people they’re villainizing are people.
That’s harder to accomplish when you play pickup basketball with a bunch of queer people every week. As a cis person who had consecutive shots blocked at the rim by a trans woman within the last week, I feel uniquely qualified to report that the only threat to my personal safety on the basketball court is the blow to my ego every time I get hit with a smooth step-back floater. Unfortunately, this happens quite often due to my complete lack of mobility as a perimeter defender, a weakness that appears to have nothing to do with the estrogen or testosterone levels of my opponent.
Many of my trans friends stopped playing organized sports at a young age as they became aware of their queerness. The locker room stopped feeling safe. The unity of the team stopped extending to include them. When I think about keeping kids safe in sports, these are the kids I think of first — the ones who were afraid to be themselves, who shied away from spaces where their body was put on display, who missed out on years of joyful play as they figured out their identity away from the court or field.
The absence of sports for all those years is often a driving factor in the joy found when my friends return to the basketball court. It’s like coming home. Many of my friends never got to play basketball as the truest version of themselves. Hooping now has become a form of reclamation, an outlet for recovering a childhood joy that sat dormant for years.
This is one truth that never has aligned with the lies peddled by those who hope to turn children’s sports into a battleground. Trans kids already are kept out of sports in vast numbers. My friends are evidence. But their exclusion doesn’t matter to the people who claim to fight for fair access to youth sports. To some people, certain childhoods are worthier than others. It’s important for the rest of us to question why that may be — and why those people should be placed in decision-making positions.
I know some questions are asked in good faith. I want to hold patience and grace for those who simply are trying to navigate a touchy conversation with limited context and information. For those who fit this bill, I would ask for a simple tracing of the logical next step that follows any cry to keep trans girls out of girls sports: How do you decide who gets to play? Any legislation attempting to bar trans girls from sports would, by definition, require cis girls to prove they are not trans.
Those who truly love women’s sports know what this means. We know that girls are twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports by age 14. We know that invasive testing and gender surveillance only would worsen the body-image and self-confidence issues that plague young girls, ultimately leading to their withdrawal from sports entirely. We know that the policing of trans bodies leads to the policing of cis bodies, such as the Orlando Pride’s Barbra Banda and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. And we know that anyone touting these measures as a victory cares more about isolating and alienating trans children than they do about uplifting and empowering girls and women’s sports.
There’s another argument to be made here. Trans people make up about 1% of the entire U.S. population, according to studies by UCLA’s Williams Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They account for less than 1% of the total participants in youth sports, boys and girls included, according to the same study by the Williams Institute. Participation rates in youth sports among trans girls are barely a third of those of cis girls. Those who advocate against trans girls participating in sports are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying against a straw man.
This is a valid argument, but it’s not one I care to use. I would feel the same way about this issue even if trans people made up 10% or 20% or 50% of our country. This community deserves dignity regardless of its population size. And more importantly, all of our girls — all of our kids — who want to play sports deserve the same privacy and support in their gender expression.
Sport is, first and foremost, a mechanism of socialization. This always has been true. It teaches teamwork and discipline and humility. It breeds confidence and leadership. The locker room is where girls learn to be girls and boys learn to be boys. Sometimes this is bad. Often it’s good.
But even for the least competitive athletes among us, the defining characteristic of sports participation at the youth level is the way it teaches us to relate to those around us. The desire to bar trans children from these spaces comes from a deeper, more sinister source — a desire to bar trans people from all spaces, to ignore and ostracize the community in the hope it might just go away.
I need those in the middle of the road to understand something. The people leading this charge don’t want to protect girls in sport. They want trans people to be gone. And they never will get what they want because trans people always have existed and always will. This movement won’t go away if you give it this victory. They will just take and take and take. There’s no point placating a campaign founded on hate.
I know my words won’t convince anyone. I have been out for nearly half of my life. I have grown accustomed to the confusion and vitriol that a small, noisy, ill-informed minority always will direct toward my community. I never will write anything in an attempt to change what’s in the heart or mind of someone who has decided that queer people aren’t deserving of equal grace, rights and dignity. But I want to speak to and for my community. My friends. I want to be heard, even if it’s only by the people who already show up for me every day.
I think basketball means more to us than to most people. Community too. It’s why we keep coming back to the basketball court, even when our knees aren’t up to it anymore, even when our childhoods drove us away from the sport. It’s why we care so much about each other. And it’s why we’re going to win. Because we love basketball and each other and ourselves more than we’ve ever scared anyone else.
Basketball will be here forever. So will the queer community. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon. That’s a promise.