Moving beyond the gender binary in the world of college athletics
I joined the girls’ track team when I was twelve years old because I had a massive crush on an 800 meter runner. Falling in love with the sport was an unintended side effect. I stayed with it through my sophomore year at Colorado College, long after my doomed crush on a straight girl had faded. Puberty had mutated my body into shapes I couldn’t recognize, but I could still lace up a pair of running shoes, hit the trail, and disappear into the rhythm of my footsteps. Running taught me to love my body like a machine—despite my aesthetic grievances with its design, the damn thing fulfilled its purpose efficiently. This detached, utilitarian love for my body carried me through the toughest years of my gender dysphoria.
Running had once been my release. But after coming out as nonbinary and transmasculine my sophomore year of college, the sport became the biggest cause of my dysphoria. Spending almost all of my free time in a strictly gendered space made me feel alienated and unseen. In some ways, it was worse than being closeted—though my otherness was now known, my identity was still unaffirmed. I gradually sank deeper into depression. I stopped taking care of myself, and because I wasn’t getting proper nutrition or sleep, I struggled to keep up with my training. I had breakdowns and panic attacks daily. I truly believe that my all cisgender coaches, trainers, and teammates wanted to support me, but the burden of teaching them how to do this fell largely and unfairly on me.
I wanted to start taking testosterone, but this would disqualify me from the girls’ team by the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) regulations. I realized that aside from the intimidating amount of paperwork it would take to join the boys’ team, I would be even worse off trying to conform to the social expectations of male jock-ness. I was expected to pick not just between manhood and womanhood, but between my gender identity and my identity as an athlete. So, I quietly quit the team.
During my last season on the track team, I felt entirely isolated in my pain and frustration. But it turns out that I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought in my experiences as a nonbinary athlete on a binary athletic team. Many athletes have struggled to navigate the binary division of gender in sports. Yet despite the growing presence of nonbinary and gender nonconforming athletes on both NCAA and college club teams, we are little more than a sidenote in most leagues’ official guidelines for transgender athletes. There are few resources for coaches, teammates, and trainers on how to support us. Nobody really seems to know what to do with us yet.
When Rin (they/them) is on the climbing wall, they feel liberated from the confines of gender and are fully present in their body. As they poetically phrase it,
“I’m in my element, I’m an athlete, a climber, a person excelling at what they love, pursuing their passion through each move. Not a boy or a girl or a non-binary person or a female climber … just a climber, a person.”
During their senior year, Rin came out as nonbinary to their teammates on the Colorado College rock climbing team. Though they received overwhelming support and affirmation on the team, the competitive climbing community as a whole was another story. For competitions, they were still forced to choose between competing as a man or a woman. Announcers at climbing competitions would misgender them over the loudspeakers, even after Rin explicitly told officials to use they/them pronouns. It got back to them that a competitor had mocked their nonbinary identity behind their back. On the wall, feeling invalidated was very distracting for Rin—they were often preoccupied with looking “like what people think a nonbinary person should look like” in order to avoid being misgendered. Another nonbinary climber on the CC team reported that self-advocacy on the team was extremely difficult for them (the climber, who uses they/them pronouns, wishes to remain anonymous). Despite being out to other friends, they have not felt comfortable coming out to their team. As the climber said,
“I’ve known most of [my teammates] for a few years but have heard some comments about they pronouns feeling ‘impersonal’ that have made me not want to bring up the subject,” the climber reported. “I wish they would ask for my pronouns.”
Self-advocacy presents a steep challenge for trans and nonbinary people who are early in their coming out process. Even in generally open-minded communities like the CC climbing team, speaking up for oneself as a gender minority can be socially terrifying or otherwise just exhausting. Rin’s climbing partners supported them in ways that made existing as a nonbinary person in a binary sport possible. Rin, however, had to constantly advocate for themself to earn this support. They had to create a space for themself where one previously did not exist, and often faced pushback in the process of doing so. To again use Rin’s eloquent words,
“I’m not trying to make things complicated. They’re already complicated. For me, for any non-binary athlete. The burden is on us to explain, to feel guilty and awkward for putting other people in the weird and uncomfortable situation of struggling to use they pronouns or call me by a different name.”
Bridget (they/them), an agender, nonbinary player on the CC Cutthroat rugby team, expressed feeling lucky that the task of educating their teammates had never fallen solely on them. “The team was one of the first places I felt comfortable being out,” Bridget told me. The Cutthroat team competes in the women’s division, but many of its members are gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and transgender. The team has been making efforts to adopt more inclusive language since before Bridget joined—naming themselves the Cutthroat team and referring to one another by the gender-neutral term “mates.” The Cutthroats wear more or less the same uniform that the Colorado College men’s rugby team wears, which Bridget feels also makes a difference in making sure trans and gender nonconforming athletes are comfortable. The coach occasionally struggles with Bridget’s pronouns, but their teammates always step in to correct him. Bridget feels like the Cutthroat team has their back. In their words,
“The love of the sport is still there. I’m willing to play on a women’s rugby team if it means I get to play rugby but it feels so much better when my team is like ‘no, we’re not a women’s rugby team, we’re a team for everyone.’”
Bridget experienced a similar duality to the one Rin reported on the climbing team, noting the stark contrast between the inclusive atmosphere of the CC team and the exclusivity expressed in games against other USA Rugby club teams. “It can be a little bit weird when we play other teams or go into other spaces where they still do all refer to us as ‘ladies,’” Bridget notes, “There’s this weird interplay of the decisions that our team makes and their impact on other teams.” Some of these other teams have mistaken nonbinary and gender nonconforming players for cisgender men during games and confronted the CC team, accusing them of having an unfair advantage. This sentiment about an unfair male advantage is not confined to the field, but is reflected in institutional policies as well.
As things currently stand, the majority of official club and NCAA policies on transgender athletes center invasive and demeaning hormonal regulations, focusing on how coaches should assist us in assimilating into existing binary gender teams. In the NCAA, athletes must provide a physician’s documentation of their transition if they wish to join the other gendered team. Transfeminine and assigned male at birth (AMAB) gender non-conforming or nonbinary athletes are required to be on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for a full year before joining any women’s NCAA team. NCAA policy says that transmasculine and AFAB gender nonconforming or nonbinary athletes can join a men's team without going on HRT, but are disqualified from competing on women’s teams the day they start HRT. USA Rugby requires a three-step testing process for transgender athletes who wish to switch teams. Though USA Rugby’s website does not specify what the medical interview and “eligibility work” entail, Bridget reports that rugby players can be required not only to be on HRT, but to have undergone gender confirmation surgery as well. Buying a gun in the United States requires less of a background check than simply joining a different gendered college sports team often does.
Not only do current policies put athletes who don’t strictly identify as men or women in a complicated position, but they also fail binary trans people who either can’t medically transition or don’t wish to undergo a turbulent second puberty. Ironically, in the same official NCAA document in which its prying and exclusionary regulations are outlined, the importance of respecting privacy and providing equal opportunity to all athletes is emphasized. These institutional barriers functionally exclude many athletes who don’t go through the expensive process of medical transition and violate the private, medical histories of athletes who do. The opportunities for transgender, gender nonconforming and nonbinary athletes are far from equal to the opportunities for their cisgender peers.
Despite the already rigid restrictions, some opponents of transgender inclusivity in college sports feel that NCAA and club team policies don’t go far enough. Various federal cases and bills propose amendments to Title IX which would force college and high school athletes to compete as the sex they were assigned at birth. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an ongoing Supreme Court case, asserts that allowing AMAB athletes to compete on women’s teams “will reduce the number of athletic opportunities for biological women and girls.” H.R.5702, the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2020,” proposes that “sex shall be determined on the basis of biological sex as determined at birth by a physician.” Under H.R.5702, federal funding will be denied to any athletic team or association that permits “a person whose sex is male” to participate in women’s athletics. If these proposed amendments to Title IX pass, they will greatly reduce the already limited number of athletic opportunities for transgender and nonbinary athletes.
One way that nonbinary and gender nonconforming athletes have dealt with strict gender regulations is by finding sanctuary on co-ed teams. Elizabeth (they/them), a nonbinary student at Vassar College, found validation on their college co-ed quidditch team. Elizabeth had given up on any organized sports in high school after finding them too strictly gendered. “Though I didn’t expect to actually stick with a sports team, the atmosphere was so welcoming and laid back in comparison to my previous experiences,” Elizabeth said. The Vassar quidditch team was already an inclusive space for LGBTQ players, and Elizabeth’s teammates had little trouble using their new pronouns or understanding their identity. “I felt compelled to classify myself as ‘non-athletic,’ so joining a sports team where I feel welcomed and wanted has been really empowering.” Yet despite its overall inclusivity, quidditch has a “gender maximum rule” that states “a team may not have more than four players who identify as the same gender in play.” The player’s gender is determined by how they self-identify, meaning that nonbinary players like Elizabeth sometimes have to publicly identify themselves on the pitch. Even though the gender maximum rule is pretty loosely enforced, it can put trans and nonbinary players in an awkward position.
Despite the potential for co-ed teams to be inclusive spaces for nonbinary athletes, it’s not uncommon for nonbinary people to still feel unwelcome. Marley (they/them), a nonbinary, transmasculine sailor, was recruited out of high school to compete on the Tufts women’s sailing team. The Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association (ICSA) divides the sport into a co-ed team and a women’s team. These categories are largely unregulated, meaning that athletes’ hormone levels are not tested by ICSA. While on paper, this sounds like an inclusive environment for nonbinary sailors, the culture of competitive sailing in New England made Marley feel isolated in their queerness. Even after they came out as trans to their other friends, they stayed closeted at sailing practice. “At that point, I was presenting myself as woman-lite,” Marley told me. “I molded myself to fit the expectations of the team.” They eventually quit sailing rather than switching from the women’s team to the co-ed team. Marley now spends more time in student activist spaces where they don’t have to hide to feel accepted.
Bella (she/they), a nonbinary, genderfluid “girl????” (their words) on the CC co-ed Esports team expressed her concern that despite the potential for inclusivity in Esports, the culture of competitive videogaming tends to be hypermasculine, transphobic, and exclusive of nonbinary players. The Esports team operates within the NCAA’s Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC), the same conference that I competed in as a runner, but the conference regulates Esports far less than running. “With SCAC being hands-off and saying ‘you don’t have a men’s team and a women’s team,’ I don’t have to identify myself as male or female which is awesome,” Bella said. However, they also feel like this unregulated approach allows Esports to remain an alienating and sometimes hostile environment for trans and nonbinary gamers.
The hard truth of the matter is that there is no one-size-fits-all fix to make sports teams an inclusive space for nonbinary and gender nonconforming athletes. Nonbinary is an umbrella term which includes a plethora of different identities, and what we need to make us feel safe and comfortable varies widely. This article by no means completely represents the diverse range of trans identities outside of the binary. No one I spoke with had been on a men’s team, and hyper masculine spaces can present their own unique challenges. This article doesn’t reflect nearly enough of the experiences of nonbinary people of color, intersex nonbinary people, or disabled nonbinary people in athletics—all intersections that should not be ignored when creating a plan to confront the discrimination nonbinary athletes face. That being said, based on my experiences and those of the other athletes quoted in this article, I’d like to suggest a few simple things that would greatly improve gender inclusivity on college sports teams. If you are a coach, trainer, administrator, teammate, or captain who wishes to begin making your team a welcoming space for nonbinary and gender non-conforming athletes, here are some very basic best practices to follow.
First of all, you should consider making teams and competitions as co-ed as possible. There is often less of a performance gap between AFAB and AMAB athletes than is commonly assumed, and there are certain sports where the playing field levels out entirely. Even though AMAB athletes typically tend to be faster over shorter distances, sex matters less at ultramarathon distances where tenacity and grit are more important than physical strength. Yet, more often than not, ultramarathons are still scored in men’s and women’s categories though there is little reason for them to be. Even if a sport still holds gendered competitions, there’s no reason why every competition has to uphold a men’s and a women’s category. In 2019, the CC climbing gym hosted a climbing competition where everyone was scored in the same category. Even in a sport traditionally dominated by men, within this smaller competition, the highest scores were spread fairly evenly between AMAB and AFAB athletes. Surely events like this one could be far more common in college athletics. Creating more spaces where athletes don’t have to “pick one” to compete would be a huge step towards the inclusion of nonbinary athletes. I personally would love to run in a race again, but have not found a race where I would not be forced to gender myself, and won’t be competing until I do.
Secondly, if you simply must divide athletes into gendered teams, consider making both of these spaces as gender inclusive as possible within the confines of this restriction. Explicitly acknowledge that while athletes may compete on a men’s or women’s team, they may not be men or women. Get gender-neutral uniforms. Everyone is doing the same movements with their bodies. There’s no argument in support of gendered uniforms that’s good enough to outweigh the dysphoria they cause transgender and gender nonconforming athletes. Always use gender neutral collective nouns and nomenclature. It may seem small, but it can really help us feel seen in spaces that can seem deliberately designed to keep us out. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude the day that the track team changed its GroupMe name from “Women’s Team” to the more gender inclusive and creative name, “Running Away from Men.” Do these things even if there are currently no nonbinary athletes on your team so that when someone does join, the space is already open to them. If you can’t get rid of gendered categories, simply minimize their importance.
Thirdly, you must openly oppose official policies that restrict who can compete on which gendered teams based on hormonal levels or “biological sex.” While Bridget expressed that they would have reservations about going up against a 200-pound cisgender man on the rugby field, they also noted that any attempt to regulate teams based on gender supports a toxic environment for nonbinary players. “I don’t want a clear definition—I think that would make it worse,” Bridget said. Indeed, we can look at the Olympic committee’s regulations as a real-world example of how regulating sex has made things worse—not just for trans athletes, but for cis athletes as well. “Sex-verification testing” in the Olympics was first practiced in the 1950s, based on Cold War paranoia that Soviet women were actually men in disguise. More recently, sex-verification testing has been used to single out black and brown women athletes for not fulfilling white, eurocentric standards of femininity. The invasive practice of investigating an athlete’s biological sex is not only transphobic, but also racist and sexist. Coaches and trainers have a responsibility to protect young athletes from the humiliation and heartache that Olympic athletes like Caster Semenya (she/her) and Dutee Chand (she/her) have suffered from their very publicized experiences with sex-verification testing. If the restrictions to Title IX proposed in H.R.5702 or the Harris Funeral Homes case pass, NCAA athletic administrators must choose to ignore the new rules, and have the power to make a collective impact by doing so. Athletics administrations will probably be sued either way, and may as well be on the right side of history.
Last but not least, you need to have our backs. Now more than ever, we need allies to go to bat for us. This means educating yourselves on how to be supportive teammates, coaches, and trainers to trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming athletes. Recently out people tend to have a hard time sticking up for themselves, and even those of us who have been out for a while get tired of constantly correcting people. Just because your athlete or teammate doesn’t correct you when you misgender or deadname them doesn’t mean they don’t mind. Ask us what you can do to help us feel welcome in the space and then take action. Avoid asking intrusive, personal questions or challenging how we identify. Bring in trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming coaches to be role models and allow coaches to come out to their teams. Rin’s boss at CityROCK told them not to come out to the youth climbing team Rin coached. This was not only uncomfortable for Rin, but unfair to young, queer climbers on the team, many of whom were bullied at school. “I wanted to be a role model and show [the kids] that there could be situations in their future where they could be unapologetically out, and that they would be supported and safe.” Rin said. Denying nonbinary athletes nonbinary role models in this way does us a huge disservice. No one knows how to support trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming athletes better than trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming athletes. Ultimately, uncompromising support can be the difference between someone staying on or dropping off the team.
Trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming athletes should not have to shape our bodies and identities to fit into the structure of organized sports. Rather, a sport should adapt its structure to the needs of its participants. We need a dramatic cultural and institutional shift or we risk losing an increasing number of talented, driven athletes along the way. The transition may be awkward in the beginning (I know firsthand that transitions often are), but it will be a transition worth making if it means that NCAA and college club sports can do what they were originally intended to do: empower all young people to get active, build community, and have fun.
The summer and early fall after I walked off the Cross Country and Track team were emotionally turbulent. I was in denial that my time on the team was over and told many people I would rejoin the team as a man. Or maybe I could delay medically transitioning for just a few more years to run as a woman? I became angry with myself for not enduring, for not sticking with the sport through my dysphoria. I blamed myself for the parts of me that didn’t fit neatly into a men’s or women’s team. I got depressed again. I felt like a failure for quitting, for not hanging around to improve things for athletes like myself, for giving up.
By the time November rolled around, however, I’d accepted my hand. I will not be racing on any men’s or women’s running team because I am not a man or a woman and that is not my fault. I now know that I didn’t fail my sport, but that it failed me. I finally made the decision to go on testosterone, and I have no regrets. I’m learning to love my body in an unconditional and far less deranged way—not as a machine, just as a part of me. I’ll admit that I’m not always great at the whole “radical self-love” thing, but I’m certainly getting better at it. My girlfriend, Annabel (she/her), is also an ex-runner and has been enormously supportive of me throughout my transition. Yes, I do realize the cosmic irony of joining a running team to get with a girl, only to leave once I started dating one. I still run from time to time, but recently I’ve gotten into roller skating for exercise with Annabel and our friends. We’ve built a community around it where there’s no pressure to pick a team.
*Having somebody to talk to makes a world of difference when coming out on a sports team. If you connected with the experiences of the athletes in this piece and want to chat, feel free to reach out to me at l_odowd@coloradocollege.edu, Rin at gentry.rin@gmail.com, Marley atmarley0137@outlook.com, and Bridget at b_galaty@coloradocollege.edu or Bella at b_christoffersen@coloradocollege.edu.
By Cedar O’Dowd
Art by Nik Chapleski
Body Issue | February 2020