In September 2022, Cammie Woodman watched the final matches of Serena Williams’ career from her apartment in Brooklyn. Cammie had never really watched professional tennis before and had never picked up a racquet herself, but she’d recently seen King Richard, the movie about Richard Williams coaching his daughters, Serena and Venus, to greatness. Cammie of course already knew who Serena Williams was — she’s one of the greatest athletes of all time. But King Richard had piqued her interest enough to actually tune into the US Open to watch her play.
It was a thrilling time for all fans of women’s tennis, old and new. Heading into the tournament, Serena had announced her intention to retire. It felt like the end of an era. Serena had gotten her first US Open title in 1999, around the same year I first picked up a racquet. Twenty-three years later, she was still inspiring others to step onto the court.
Cammie was about a year into her transition and was struck by Serena’s beauty: the crystal-studded stunning black dress and diamond-encrusted sneakers she sported for those final matches, but also the way she encompassed grace, strength, power, the way she screamed as she hit the ball. It spoke to Cammie. She wanted that exact energy in her life.
“It was kind of fate,” Cammie tells me. “I had seen those matches, and I was like okay, I’m really going to start playing. I really want to try this.”
She texted her friend after Serena Williams’ final career match to say she was going to look for a tennis racquet and that they should start playing. Right after she sent the text, she left her apartment to drop off laundry at the laundromat down the street. An abandoned tennis racquet sat right on the other side of the road. It really was fate. It’s easy to see it like a fairytale, one tennis icon putting down her racquet just as someone completely new to the sport finds her own.
Cammie and I laugh as she reveals the reality of the situation: “Looking back, it was like a really dinky kid’s racquet,” she says. “But I didn’t know any better, so I played with that for forever.”
Hey, a free racquet is a free racquet.
From there, Cammie started playing casually with her partner and one of their friends at a local court in Brooklyn, just on their own without coaching. Cammie had never played a sport before and had been bullied a lot as a kid. She’d never felt athletic. She wanted privacy, a safe and controlled environment, while she was still just beginning to learn. She watched videos about form, hit with friends who were also beginners, and went to the handball courts to hit against a wall, too. “I was so bad that no one would want to play with me, so I just played myself there,” she says. “I was just like you know what? I want to get good, and these people will be sorry that they said no.”
“Right from my first time stepping on court, I was like I am really into this. I really want to be good at this,” she adds.
Six months later, she started going to group clinics. She had her first lesson with her coach Isis in February 2023. Sometimes she’d be the only one out there working with a coach in the 30-degree New York winter weather. She was really in it to get good, so seasons weren’t going to stop her. Mastering tennis takes a lot of consistency and reps, and Cammie was doing the work. She took lessons twice a week and started learning super fast, telling her coach her goal was to start competing the following year. “She was like ‘I think you should just do it now,’” Cammie says, and she agreed, even though she didn’t have much matchplay experience and barely knew the specifics of formal matchplay like when to change sides and how to score a tiebreaker. About ten months after she’d first picked up a racquet, she competed in an amateur tournament run by Brooklyn-based nonprofit Lincoln Terrace Tennis Association and lost. But she liked the experience, and it only convinced her to work harder.
“Matches are so intimidating, but when you get your confidence up and when you start understanding and being able to track the score better, it gets so much easier,” she says.
I agree. It’s one thing to slam winners in a lesson. Matches require a ton of mental fortitude, which means doing work off the court as much as on it. Now that she’s almost three years into her tennis journey, Cammie exudes steady confidence. She’s no longer playing in private. In fact, quite the opposite: She posts tennis clips to Instagram frequently, highlighting killer winners, sick rallies, and yes, the occasional error to keep her humble. Her social media is how I found Cammie in the first place, and I’ve watched countless clips. She’s exciting to watch, especially when she’s ripping a forehand cross-court. Her feet are in constant motion between shots, the sign of a player who understands the overwhelming importance of footwork to good tennis. And her tennis style is enviable: cute dresses, a stack of chain necklaces, curly hair pinned back.
I ask Cammie to describe her own game. Since I’ve watched so many of her videos, I have my own takeaways and tell her as much: “You’re a strong baseliner with a wicked forehand.”
She says she models a lot after Serena and Venus. “I wish I had Venus’s net game, but don’t we all?” she says, and I agree. She also agrees that she’s a strong baseliner. “I really aim for power, and I try to get more creative with angles,” she says. “I love when you just see Serena come up with a crazy angle that you wouldn’t expect out of nowhere.” She says her serve is pretty mean, too, but it depends on the day. I know how that goes.
Cammie’s social media posts highlight not only what it’s like to start a tennis journey later in life but also what it’s like to be a trans athlete in a time when it’s so politicized to be exactly that. Trans identity is often at the forefront of her videos, either in the caption or in the overlaid text. “I never just wanted to be like ‘oh, this is how you hit a forehand’ or ‘watch this point’,” she says of her videos. “As much as that’s fun, there’s no Cammie the Tennis Player without my identity informing a lot of my game.”
In one of her video captions, she writes: “After starting my transition, tennis gave me a place to find my beauty and strength.”
Queer and trans visibility in tennis is incredibly important to her. She points out there’s several out women who have played in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), but there has only been one out gay man in pro tennis, and there are currently no active trans pro tennis players that we know of. And even just beyond the pros, I struggled to find tennis content created by queer players when I returned to tennis after a decade-long break in 2024. It was my first time playing the sport since I’d come out, and I wanted to find other LGBTQ+ players to connect with. For once, the algorithm came through and showed me Cammie.
“For me, I just always felt tennis is so connected to my transition,” Cammie says. “I think a lot of trans people could benefit from playing sports and just using their bodies, whether it’s dance or working out or just self-expression, because when we transition, it’s another puberty. Our bodies, our emotions are completely changing, and everything about our lives is changing when we decide to take this step.”
Since Cammie was a year into her transition when she started tennis, she could feel her body changing very fast. It was hard to keep a handle on it sometimes, easy to get lost in it. She had never been the type of person to work out and always felt super uncomfortable in her body before. “I just feel like everything clicked when I was playing tennis,” she says. “It was just like I could wear these outfits that made me feel truly so beautiful and seeing myself continue my transition as well as improve in tennis, it’s just been a really big marker in my progress.”
Tennis provided a total self-awareness she’d never had before. It made her appreciate her body. “I could see what my body was capable of and still honor how it was changing and honor my identity,” she says. “It’s just been super vital to my journey and feeling comfortable in my body as it changes.”
Cammie’s declaration that all trans people could benefit from playing sports makes it all the more devastating that sports have become a key battleground for transphobes and TERFs to win over public support for excluding and erasing trans people. Not only should trans people be allowed access to sports because all people should but also because, as Cammie demonstrates, playing sports can be so beneficial for transition and all the physical and emotional challenges it brings. Sports build confidence, self-image, connection, community. Excluding trans people from sports is just cruel.
And unfortunately, around the time I discovered Cammie, I also learned she’d been kicked out of a recreational tennis league, allegedly for being trans.
Cammie joined the Tennis League Network in 2025 after confirming there were other trans players who had played in other cities in the nationwide league network. She also had friends who had played in the league, so she joined the Brooklyn division with the intent of competing a lot more this summer. “I just really wanted matchplay,” she says. “I wasn’t really going into it expecting to do super well. Matches have always been a big mental block for me.”
It’s a flex league, meaning you don’t play on a team. You set up your own matches individually with your opponent week-to-week. It’s a great way to meet people, get matchplay, and potentially find someone with a team you can join down the road. It’s usually the number one thing I recommend people sign up for when they’re looking to competitively play tennis for the first time. Cammie joined thinking it would be a fun, chill way to get some more matchplay experience; it feels a lot lower stakes than competing in a tournament or on a team.
Through the league, Cammie found another woman who was willing to come to her court to play. They set up a time and day. And when they met up, Cammie felt she got to know her a bit. They were both nice to each other during warmup and throughout the match. “It was a pleasant experience,” Cammie says.
She surprised herself by winning the match 6-2, 6-0. She hadn’t won a match in a while, but she had been working really hard not just on her physical technique but also on her mental game and being positive with herself. She was determined to stay present during the match. Her strategy resulted in a win.
Cammie says she had a positive interaction at the net with the other woman when the match concluded. They went their separate ways. “I just remember being so excited,” she says. “I didn’t even really go into this league expecting to win much at all because historically I’ve lost first round in women’s tournaments and just really struggle with matches. It was a huge milestone for me to be able to pull off the win.”
The next morning, her opponent submitted the score, common procedure in a flex league. Everything seemed totally fine and normal. So Cammie proceeded with scheduling her next matches. She was psyched, ready to hit the courts again for some more friendly competition. Later that day, she got an email from the founder of the Tennis League Network, Steven Chagnon. All it said was: “Can we move you to an appropriate men’s division?”
She noticed Chagnon had also forwarded her an email from the opponent essentially calling her a “male” player in the women’s division and saying it was unfair. The email repeatedly misgendered Cammie. “It was just a really frustrating situation because I’m being described as a man and as if Roger Federer just decided to join this random league for women and start blowing the competition out of the water.”
It had been Cammie’s first match of the season, and beyond that, she feels her opponent objectively was not a 3.25 player (tennis leagues often operate on a universal rating scale to help skill-sort divisions; a 3.25 rating roughly translates to an intermediate skill level). Cammie noticed even just in warmup that her opponent did not seem to play at the appropriate level. This hadn’t fazed her at the time, because she knew it’s still easy to still lose to someone at a lower skill level if your mental game isn’t airtight.
The emails forced Cammie into a position to defend herself. “And so I did,” she says. “I said something along the lines of ‘I think there’s a skill difference here.’” She was certain there were other players at the same actual skill level as her in the division. Even though it would be illegal for the league to demand to see any kind of medical paperwork, Cammie informed the league she had been transitioning for a while and could provide proof of it. Ultimately, she told the league she’d still love to be a part of it but if it didn’t work for them, she’d like a refund for league fees.
Chagnon responded saying the league wanted nothing to do with any of this and then kicked Cammie out. “I just felt it was really poorly handled and bizarre,” Cammie says. Her opponent had completely misrepresented her as someone playing at much too high a level for this division, not to mention misgendering her repeatedly. And then Chagnon completely mishandled the situation. “I just feel like if he was actually accepting of trans people, he could have just told her: ‘Trans people are allowed to play here. If you don’t want to play against her, you don’t have to.’ Because no one’s required to play me at all!”
The extreme whiplash of having a pleasant experience on court to receiving the emails to being kicked out without any real conversation frustrated Cammie — and rightfully so. In New York, what happened to Cammie has legal grounds for a discrimination lawsuit. When other folks in the league heard about it, they voiced support for Cammie and, subsequently, also found themselves kicked out.
“It would have been one thing if it was a conversation of ‘can we move you to a higher level women’s league’ or ‘we think your level’s too high for this’ or something like that,” Cammie says. “Instead, they made the choice to disrespect me and not coordinate with me on a solution, which I also just feel like as a paying player is really unfair.”
At first, Cammie wasn’t sure if she wanted to publicize the experience. She’d only told her friends in the league and some very close friends. It was one of her league friends who had told her it was illegal, which she hadn’t realized at first. “I mean, in the past, I’ve always wondered if something like this would happen, and I’ve always been kind of ready for it in a way, even though you can’t really be ready for it,” she says.
But when she realized it was illegal, she decided it truly wasn’t fair for Chagnon to get away with treating her so poorly and speaking to her in this way. So she took to social media to tell people what had happened. “This is happening in Brooklyn, and it’s supposed to be this amazing safe haven for trans people, and it’s just like the reality is nowhere is really completely safe for trans people.”
Chagnon hadn’t given Cammie a chance to voice her side of the story at all, so posting it on Instagram was a way of reclaiming her agency. Support flooded in immediately. Members of United States Tennis Association (USTA), the national governing body for tennis, reached out in support, including a captain who wants to recruit Cammie for her team. Cammie had a bit of a relationship with USTA before; the USTA Eastern Instagram account had previously featured her in a video for Pride month. USTA’s official stance on trans inclusion maintains that all USTA-sanctioned recreational junior and adult leagues, tournaments, and events allow players to participate in the gender-specific programs that align with the gender they identify and register as.
As Cammie’s story started gaining traction on social media, it also attracted attention from the wrong people: TERFs who apparently have nothing better to do with their days than harass trans people online. Among those losers? Martina Navratilova, whose accolades include 59 major tennis titles and being blocked by Autostraddle’s Twitter account after she came after one of our contributors who wrote a piece about professional cycling’s trans exclusion problem.
“Martina Navratilova took to Twitter to just be essentially a bully,” Cammie says. I’ve seen the tweets. “Bully” might be putting it too lightly. The language Martina repeatedly uses toward trans athletes on social media is on par with Joanne Kathleen Rowling in terms of downright nastiness.
Cammie came across Martina’s comments on her when a publication posted an article that included the tweets. Social media attention had become media attention, and several outlets were quick to cover Cammie’s story but did so in a way that sensationalized the controversy rather than really telling the full Cammie Woodman Tennis Story. In this particular piece, Martina’s tweets were the entire focus, centering TERF tweets rather than Cammie herself. The clickbait headline read: “Martina Navratilova labels transgender tennis player ‘lousy’ amid controversy over removal from NYC league.” Cammie found the story by searching for her own name and “tennis.” It was one of the top hits. Cammie wasn’t on Twitter herself and didn’t know Martina spent so much of her free time espousing transphobic nonsense.
“I was horrified to see it,” she says. “I felt horrible because she was one of my idols. To me, it’s on the level of if Venus had said something like that to me. It hurt my feelings so badly.”
“I had cried a little bit,” she adds. But she was ultimately able to make peace with the experience when she realized it had nothing to do with her, specifically. “It’s personal, obviously, because she decided to say my name, but I mean, it’s just like if J.K. Rowling said something about you. We all know she is not in tune with reality and just says stuff about any trans person doing anything. I was able to, I guess, accept it and just kind of move on.”
Martina Navratilova’s hateful stance, the Tennis League Network’s decision to expel Cammie, and trans-exclusionary policies throughout the tennis world are at complete odds with the history of the sport, which has long been at the forefront of huge wins for gender equality and feminism in athletics. Tennis was one of the first sports women could play in the Olympics. Martina herself was among several lesbians who competed in the WTA, founded by fellow lesbian player Billie Jean King in 1973. (Martina has been stripped of some of her LGBTQ+ tennis accolades following her transphobic comments, including the organization Athlete Ally cutting ties with her. Billie Jean King, meanwhile, has spoken in support of trans people.) Billie Jean King made fighting for equal pay for women in tennis a core tenet of her career, and in 1973, the US Open became the first major tournament to award equal prize money to its men’s and women’s champions. Tennis became one of the first sports to close the gender pay gap. The sport’s history isn’t perfect, especially when it comes to the historical exclusion of Black players from the sport, but tennis is well positioned to be a progressive and needle-moving sport in the trans athlete debate. The history of gender revolution on the court is right there.
In the 1970s, Renée Richards was a trans woman who competed on the professional tennis circuit. Her medical transition was outed by a TV anchor in 1976, and the USTA, WTA, and United States Open Committee (USOC) updated their guidelines to be more explicitly trans-exclusionary. She applied to compete in the women’s bracket of the US Open in 1976 but refused to take the Barr body test, a new requirement for all women wishing to compete. She was subsequently not allowed to compete in the 1976 US Open, Wimbledon, or Italian Open.
Renée sued the USTA on the grounds of gender discrimination. In 1977, a judge ruled in her favor, granting her an injunction against the USTA and USOC that subsequently allowed her to compete in the US Open. She continued to play professionally as an out trans woman until 1981 when she retired and became a coach. During her coaching career, she worked with none other than Martina Navratilova. She coached Martina to two Wimbledon titles.
Even if you don’t play tennis, you’ve probably heard of the Battle of the Sexes, a series of exhibition matches, the most famous being the 1973 internationally televised match between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, during which Riggs was convinced he could easily win and was instead beat by King. The match — viewed by 50 million people in the U.S. and 90 million worldwide — and its lead-up are the focus of a very good sapphic sports film. On its surface, the event was a gimmicky affair, and Riggs no doubt was motivated by the impulse to reinforce gender binaries and biological difference in the sport. But King won. And when she did, it challenged the notion of biological difference in athletics. Indeed, watching pro tennis today, the radar guns display pretty similar numbers whether it’s men or women on the courts. Transphobe’s arguments about trans women in sports always hinge on the porous science of biological difference. But it’s rarely “fairness” these people are after. It’s exclusion.
As for where tennis is now, USTA’s very inclusive stance on trans athletes for recreational programming does not blanket apply to the professional tour or collegiate programs, which are governed by different bodies and where inclusion gets a little more complicated. But the long-criticized Barr body test is thankfully no longer used in professional tennis, and the WTA does allow trans women to play in womens categories under specific conditions, including not exceeding certain testosterone levels. You will not be shocked to learn Martina has criticized this policy loudly. The NCAA governs collegiate tennis and recently updated its policies in a knee-jerk reaction to Trump’s heinous sports executive order aimed at trans women. And the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee recently imposed a ban on trans women from competing in all women’s sports categories, including tennis.
Cammie and her lawyer have filed a lawsuit against the Tennis League Network, her opponent, and Chagnon on the grounds of gender discrimination in violation of the New York Human Rights Law, the same law cited in Reneé Richards’ lawsuit in 1977.
While the comments from Martina on her story stung, Cammie has received overwhelming support and positivity, too, especially from fellow queer and trans people in the tennis community. A trans tennis player in Queens reached out to say they’d never played with someone else who’s trans before. And a lot of queer people ended up finding Cammie’s page as a result of the controversy, which Cammie says was cool since she hadn’t known many queer people in the tennis world previously. “It’s also just brought about a lot of people who don’t know anything about tennis but want to support,” she says. “There’s definitely people too who are allies or are trans or queer themselves and just reached out to be like ‘let us know when your next tournament is because we need to show up and support you.’”
Cammie started competing again this summer and has played in two tournaments on the local park circuit in Brooklyn, winning one and making it to the semi-finals in the other. A whole crew showed up for her matches, including her partner, friends, and people just wanting to support. I followed along on her tournament trajectory from afar, checking her Instagram story with the same obsession I brought to following Wimbledon this summer. On a 48-hour writing-related trip I had in NYC this July, we had plans to meet up to play each other that fell through, but rest assured, we hope to face off soon. I can’t wait to play Cammie. Before I found her Instagram, I’d been searching for more LGBTQ+ community within tennis, frustrated by the lack of overlap in my queer life and my tennis life. Cammie’s content bridged those gaps. I wanted to tell her story because I felt like so much of the media coverage left her real story out of it, sensationalized the conflict and moved on, never really shining a light on just how hard she trains and how inspirational her tennis journey has been.
“I really just want to be a person that people can see and be like ‘I can try this, too,’” Cammie says. “Even if they’re not trans, just starting a whole new sport in your twenties or whatever point you are in your life. I hope that people kind of find inspiration in that.”
She isn’t letting this experience with the Tennis League Network get in the way of her becoming the best player she can be. Her hard training makes me want to train harder, too. As I watch her videos, that forehand is only getting stronger. She tells me she’s working on her serve and tries to go out to practice it at least 20 minutes a day. So long as weather allows, she plays four times a week. She works at a fitness studio where she also does multiple fitness classes and cross-trains with spin, boxing, running, and functional training. This is all a huge overhaul from her past, when she could barely run at all. She feels like this is the part that gets left out of her story. She won that first match of her flex league so handily because she worked hard. There aren’t a lot of rec players putting in effort and training hours like she is. The only “advantage” she had on that court was all the work she had put in to better her game leading up to it.
“People just think I waltzed in and just picked up a racquet and was suddenly so good,” she says. “I was so bad.” I’ve seen her post some footage of some of her earliest tennis lessons, and yeah, the difference between then and now is remarkable. That kind of improvement has no cheat codes. She trains at an intensity level on par with juniors and touring players. That level of commitment and competition is what drew me to her in the first place. It’s what I strive for, too. She sets a high bar for what a rec player can be.
Her lawsuit is ongoing, and for now, Cammie is focused on tournaments and matchplay. She’s really trying to stay present in matches, and she can feel the difference the last year of training hard has made. She’s ready to win.
“I feel most beautiful when I play tennis, the most beautiful in my whole life,” Cammie says. “There’s no place where I feel so truly myself.”
so fun to write this and looking forward to the big Cammie v Kayla showdown one of these days!!! 🎾
I love this! More women’s sports content please! Go, Cammie!
Incredible story about an incredible woman
Awesome to learn of Cammie finding joy in tennis, hate to hear how hard she’s having to fight to compete. As it happens, I only found out about Renée Richards last week (listening to BJK’s autobiography where she talks about playing doubles with her,) but so bleak that Cammie is stuck in the same fight 50 years later instead of just being able to play the sport she loves.
Instant follow on Instagram, and cool to see Naomi Johnson giving her tips in the comments!