Julie, the American Girl of 1974, is motivated by a desire to play basketball. Her school doesn’t yet have a girls’ basketball team, but with the recent passage of Title IX banning sex-based discrimination in schools, Julie advocates for herself to join the boys’ team. Reading Julie’s story taught me about Title IX, Billie Jean King’s Battle of the Sexes, and some of the lengths women have had to go to be treated equally in areas as simple as school athletics. Her (fictional) story has stuck with me as I’ve watched the proliferation of women’s professional leagues and bans against transgender athletes alongside navigating my own journey of queer athleticism.

I had a childhood dream that I would be the first woman to play Major League Baseball. This dream was thwarted fairly early; my parents worked on Saturdays, which meant they couldn’t take me to Little League. I’d have to wait until I was older to start playing, and by that point I’d be out of the running for professional play. Despite not playing then, it bothered me that girls and boys were eventually split into softball and baseball. Most other sports split on gendered lines, but the idea that girls had to play an entirely different sport left a sour taste in my mouth, especially as I watched MLB games and had no idea if there even was major league softball.

Around fifth grade, my parents put my brother and me in judo classes. There were far more boys in the dojo than girls, but there was always another girl in the locker room with me. Although I did not yet have an understanding of my gender or sexuality, I was repressed by a sense that I should keep to myself in the locker room; look down and away, face the other wall, change into the corner. No one ever told me to behave this way. All of my embarrassment was coming from myself, and besides the general excuse of modesty, I couldn’t say why I felt so mortified. Practices were not split by gender, but tournaments were, leading me to a number of first place trophies that felt less valuable because only five people were competing for them.

In middle school, I started fencing. There were two stages of getting dressed for fencing. The first — putting shorts, a sports bra, and t-shirt on in the locker room — I did with as much discretion as I had in judo. The second — putting on my fencing socks, pants, and jackets — was done in the small cafeteria room where we had practice. Everyone from the girls and boys teams got dressed together. Unlike the locker room, which still felt shameful and dangerous, this part of changing felt communal. We laughed and talked and asked other people to fence during the upcoming open bouting. Changing at this point in the routine was about getting ready to compete, and my woes about my body were pushed aside.

There was a cute girl on the fencing team. She was in my grade and thought I was cute too. Suddenly, I had my first girlfriend. I slowly came out as bisexual, more by holding her hand and kissing her cheek in public than by making a big declaration. Especially since I had started dating a teammate, the mandate to keep my eyes to myself in all locker room situations seemed to grow. No one ever said anything to me, since I was lucky enough to go to a liberal New York City high school, but I wanted to stop the rumors before they had a chance to begin.

Fencing was a spring sport, which meant I was never able to play school softball, which had the same season. I played a few games with my mom’s work team, but it just wasn’t the same as being with peers. Softball is certainly the more stereotypical baby queer sport, but I had made a commitment and found a community in fencing. So I kept with it.

My first girlfriend and I broke up. My second girlfriend and I broke up. I had my first real boyfriend around tenth grade, at the same time as I started to wonder whether “girl” was really the right word to describe my experience of the world. I was pretty sure I wasn’t a boy, but being a girl didn’t feel right either. I asked my online friends to start calling me a new name and started using new pronouns, which felt closer to right.

Around this time, I learned two things that would upend my childhood perceptions of women in sports. First, I watched A League of Their Own with my mom and was mesmerized by the idea of the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League. Although still no woman had played in MLB, there had been a women’s professional league — a big one. When Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and other stars of men’s baseball were off fighting World War II, Philip K. Wrigley founded the AAGPBL to give America some of its national pastime. As in the factory and the home, American women stepped up to fill gaps left by men going to war. The league dissolved in 1954 due to waning interest and the return of MLB play, but the seed of women’s professional sports in America had been planted.

My second revelation was that Billie Jean King was and is a lesbian. The 2017 film Battle of the Sexes depicted King’s relationship with Marilyn Barnett, which eventually led to King being outed in 1981. This was my first proof that queer women had been in professional sports for as long as those professional sports had existed. More proof would come with the 2020 documentary A Secret Love about the relationship between AAGPBL player Terry Donahue and her partner Pat Henschel. Historically, queer women and sports went together.

But what then to do about the question of my gender? Mack Beggs, a trans boy from Texas, was being required to wrestle in the girls’ division, while simultaneously being seen as a danger to the girls due to his testosterone prescription. No one had an answer on where Beggs belonged, and the question of trans athletes’ place in sports was growing every day. There were only two locker rooms at my fencing club: boys and girls. I kept using the girls. I wrote my college admissions essay about being bisexual in theatre and sports and not feeling like I totally fit in anywhere. The admissions department must have liked it, because I got into college. My fencing coach got a banner printed with all of our names and where we were going to school. I hadn’t said anything about my new name. It felt too late and too soon.

College was a natural fresh start. I went by my birth name for only June before emailing my peer advisor to change my name. She and my peer group graciously and easily did so. I was starting college as the person I was becoming: Pallas, they/them.

Although I was a long way from varsity, I wanted to keep fencing in college. I went to one or two practices of the club team, but my attention and interest fizzled. I was studying theatre and wanted to focus my energy on student productions rather than fencing practice. Perhaps more importantly, fencing felt like it belonged to a very straight and gender-segregated part of my life. Although I had loved being on the team while I had fenced, I was not sure I could keep going with my new self-knowledge. I turned instead to theater, to the school newspaper, and to impromptu trans gatherings held at peers’ apartments. We sat on hardwood floors, as hardly anyone had enough seating for all of us, and celebrated the ways our university was making strides for trans inclusion. My roommate and I lived in open-gender housing our sophomore year. Things were getting better, in small ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic started, I graduated college, and I moved home to NYC. I missed athletics. In doing half-hearted Googling, I found a queer softball league. I went to a recruitment day and was added to a brand new team. I was finally playing the sport I’d loved my whole life. I was by no means a softball prodigy, but in my new league I could be with other trans people and queer women and enjoy a good game of my favorite sport.

After a long simmer, the national question of trans people in sports was boiling over. Caster Semenya, a cis woman who had already undergone sex testing, would be required by the IAAF to take medication to lower her testosterone levels. In her case before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the court ruled that discriminatory rules were necessary to preserve women’s athletics. The case proceeded to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Semenya’s human rights had been violated, but World Athletics’ regulations remained in place.

Riley Gaines and Lia Thomas were freshmen in college at the same time as I was, but I had graduated a year early. During their senior year, Thomas, an openly trans woman, tied with Gaines for fifth place. This tie enraged Gaines to the point of becoming an advocate against the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports. The panic spread from college to high school, from swimming to chess. While some outlets, such as PinkNews pointed out that believing trans women have a biological advantage at chess is equivalent to believing that cis women are dumb, the transphobic rhetoric pushing removal of trans women from women’s sports continues on high octane. Trump, with the support of Riley Gaines, has issued an Executive Order threatening to revoke federal funding for any educational institution that allows trans girls and women to play on the teams that match their gender identities, misusing Title IX to push this agenda.

Different governing bodies have set forth various rules about trans athletes. The LPGA requires trans women competitors to have transitioned before beginning puberty; the NCAA has cowed to the Trump Administration and allows only people assigned female at birth to compete in women’s sports. Notably, most of the outrage has been around trans women; besides Mack Beggs, few trans men athletes have made the news, and policies about trans people in sports utilize the language of protecting women’s spaces. This erasure is ultimately just as transphobic, as the underlying assertion is that trans people cannot escape their assigned gender.

I don’t pretend to know what the perfect solution to integrating trans people into gendered sports is. A number of trans thinkers I follow have proposed different ideas, and the personal and individual nature of transition makes one general solution unlikely.  I do know that we cannot pretend trans people have not been athletes, and we cannot deny trans people access to this important sphere of life due to bigotry. Athletics are one of the most profitable ventures in America. But they are also a core part of the human experience. Athletics have always reflected the people we want to be. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated baseball as the whole country grappled with post World War II civil rights questions. Billie Jean King and golfer Babe Zaharias showed the world that women can play with the men. Hopefully, we will one day celebrate Mack Beggs and Lia Thomas in the same way.

I look more masc than I ever have. I have a barbershop haircut and wear suits to fancy events. I should probably just throw out all the makeup I bought in college that I haven’t worn since. As much as I would like to live in my bubble of queer sports in NYC, that is not much safer. Last year’s Lezvolley, a Fire Island volleyball tournament, was cancelled on the day of competition due to mishandling of a trans competitor. The Brooklyn Tennis League was criticized for kicking out a trans woman after a cis opponent complained about losing to her. The panic about trans athletes, a mere screen over a panic about trans inclusion in daily life, has spread from professional athletics to casual play.

As long as trans people continue to play sports and transphobes continue to oppose that, this conversation will continue. I am hopeful that leagues like my own, which is actively discussing the most inclusive language for all players, can lead the way in trans inclusion. I’m happy to have the community I’ve built through sports, and I hope young people can experience the euphoria of sports regardless of their gender.

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