From nearly every angle, lawmakers, far-right pundits, influencers, and people from across the political spectrum are attempting to push trans people out of public life entirely. And they’ve used trans exclusion in sports, particularly women’s sports, as the “winning” strategy to fuel their backlash against trans equality.

In their urgent new book Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes, sibling writing team Rachel Browne, an accomplished investigative reporter, and Harrison Browne, the first openly trans professional athlete to win a national championship in a team sport, interrogate this “winning” strategy and try to help readers — especially “progressives” — understand how destructive anti-trans policies in sports are to not only trans athletes and the people who support them but also to the future of elite and non-elite sports in general.

I spoke with Rachel and Harrison about the necessity of understanding the complexities of trans exclusion in sports, how people’s biases impact their perceptions of trans athletes, why “progressive” bystanders should be doing more to combat these policies, and how we can achieve true equity for athletes at all levels.

Stef: I want to discuss the current climate your book is being born into right now. As you were writing and researching, you wrote that the situation for trans people in sports is worse than it ever has been, but it’s arguably gotten much worse now, specifically with Trump’s executive orders targeting trans people and trans athletes. One thing I noticed is that many sports organizations’ governing bodies immediately complied with the executive orders, even though they’re not official policy, and they’re certainly not laws. Why do you think sports organizations and governing bodies so quickly and willingly abandoned their plans for revising inclusivity measures or even entertaining the possibility of discussing them further?

Harrison: What sparked this book was an increasingly hostile landscape for trans athletes and gender non-conforming athletes, and we really wanted to debunk this rhetoric that has been used. We started writing it in 2023, and we had no idea what it would be like in 2025. The timing of this book couldn’t have been better, and I think the world needs it the most right now. We’re just seeing so much misinformation, and we’re seeing so many people jump on bandwagons that they don’t even know where they’re headed.

People are really looking to sports and seeing how each organization is going to respond to this new issue, but it’s not a new issue. Obviously, we know that trans people have been participating in sports for decades without any sort of media attention, without any sort of backlash because it’s not an issue. But we’re seeing politicians latch onto this image of a man annihilating young girls in sports, and we saw the U.S. presidential election run on that type of fear-based argument. And we’re seeing sport organizations and people that are leading sport governing bodies cower to this and fall victim to this moral panic.

Rachel: And I’ll also say, you’re asking about why people have been so quick to sort of change their whole ethos, change their own policies so quickly…that is something that in and of itself is inherently flimsy. Like you said, it’s not been put through Congress. This isn’t a law. This is something that should and can have very little teeth. But it has exposed a lack of moral courage and a lack of conviction among these sports organizations. And not just sports organizations, but you see it in law firms, you see it in corporations now. You see it in nations around the world that are acting from a place of fear and a scarcity mentality and only thinking about their own self-interest and bottomline in the face of authoritarian regimes and policies that are rooted in, as Harrison said, this fear-based mentality.

So, it was very disheartening to see the NCAA come out and reverse its policies around inclusive participation as problematic and as broad as they were. They’ve undone what was arguably something that could be worked with in terms of building on inclusion for the trans and non-binary and intersex communities. It’s been this moment where a lot of people have been exposed for their lack of moral courage and their lack of actually having principles rooted in inclusivity and fairness, and we’ll see who ends up being on the right side of history. I think it’s going to become very clear.

Stef: What have you noticed about the immediate effects of this early compliance, and what could that mean for the fate of these conversations and the fate of trans athletes in the near future?

Harrison: The biggest thing that I see is how this rhetoric and how this landscape is affecting the youth. The thing that affected me the most when writing this book was speaking to trans families and speaking to families of trans kids in the U.S. We talked with a kid from Boston, and we talked with a few kids out of Texas who were excited to play sports and maybe follow in the footsteps of their parents. And now, that’s just not a reality.

We’re just seeing a lot of fear out of this community, and that’s exactly what people wanted out of this. We’re seeing it affect kids that are as young as 10-years-old, just unsure of their places in society and feeling really alienated from their cisgender peers. We’re just seeing a lot of sadness and a lot of fear from the families and the people who are affected the most. And, arguably, the people who are affected the most are the youth. It’s really, really disheartening to see the sparks disappear from these kids’ eyes when talking about sports because that should be something that’s of great joy. Sports should be something that every kid has access to.

Stef: As you mentioned several times in the book, there’s just this wide spectrum of arguments coming from a diverse array of characters inside and outside of sports about whether or not trans athletes should be able to compete on the teams that match their gender. What audience did you have in mind in the process of writing this book, and why did you choose to zero in on this audience specifically?

Rachel: Given the nature of the publication and ourselves and where we’re coming from, it’s for a progressive audience. It’s for an audience who is, in theory, engaged with debates around inclusion in general, LGBTQ+ rights, issues around race and identity, and thinking about those issues in a progressive manner.

What has struck us is that most people who are progressive and most people in this audience, it’s not exactly clear which side of this particular issue they come down on. And in fact, we’re seeing it increasingly become a wedge issue on the Left and within “progressive” circles. And it’s pretty alarming because maybe we had been taking that for granted that we would be kind of preaching to the choir, and I don’t think that has turned out to be the case. We’re seeing this unfold as more and more people who are supposed to be “progressive” are showing their true colors and are showing that they actually haven’t really engaged with these issues and are not practicing true allyship and curiosity and empathy on these issues.

Stef: Yes, I noticed that when I started writing about these issues for Autostraddle. It’s surprising the comments that come out from an audience who you think already knows what’s right or what’s morally correct when it comes to these issues.

Rachel: Or that they’d even be willing to engage with it.

Sports should be something that every kid has access to.

Stef: The very first chapter about the moral panic of it all begins with an anecdote about the nine-year-old cisgender girl in British Columbia who is heckled and accused of being trans because she had a short haircut. And it sets up an argument for that chapter regarding the wide-reaching effects of moral panics and how they work. But I also thought that it provided an effective inroad to this conversation for people who are reluctant. What were your intentions behind beginning the book there, rather than starting with the story of a kid who’s actually trans and being heckled or potentially being barred from playing on their sports team?

Harrison: Most people think of this as just a “trans issue” when it’s an issue that affects everybody, and it affects cisgender women the most. The argument for trans exclusion is to “protect” cisgender women when actually this harms them greatly.

We really just wanted to highlight this thinking around gender norms and the problematic nature of them because trans people are breaking barriers. We’re going outside of the prescribed notion of what makes a man and what makes a woman, and there’s a lot of pushback against that. I played women’s sports my whole career, and women’s hockey is a very masculine sport. It’s a sport that’s filled with lots of LGBTQ+ individuals and a lot of women that are just really big and really strong. A lot of people have short haircuts. It’s just a really great space where gender is fluid. And when you start policing bodies in the way that trans bodies are being policed, it bleeds over to all types of bodies. That’s what we really wanted to show, because lots of people don’t know trans people, but lots of people know cisgender women. Or the reader might be a cisgender woman. Knowing that this topic affects you in that way helps bring it to a more personalized view so that people can open their minds and be empathetic towards trans people. And the argument for trans inclusion in sports can be looked at in a more nuanced way.

Rachel: And what are the knock-on effects of these policies that are “targeting trans people”? We saw at the Olympics with the Algerian women’s boxer, Imane Khelif, it was a classic example of how this moral panic that’s “targeting trans people” has brought implications for cisgender women. We’re asking people to open their eyes to the ways in which they are also going to be affected by these policies and points of view that are just rooted in fear and in paranoia.

Harrison: We also wanted to highlight a story that wasn’t an elite athlete. People are talking about trans issues as a trans Olympian, as a trans person trying to take an NCAA scholarship, but for the most part, people don’t reach that level in sports. For the most part, people are playing recreationally, especially at the youth level. You’re playing for fun. And to have your body policed in that way when you’re nine-years-old, that’s ridiculous.

Stef: In the book, you write that when people discuss “fairness” in sports, they’re mostly talking about keeping trans women out of sports, and that’s usually where the conversation ends. This sets up a powerful distraction from some of the real systemic issues impacting athletes in the women’s leagues. What do you think are the most glaring reasons why the people and the pundits who prop up the argument against trans women participating in women’s sports keep obscuring the question of true “fairness” in women’s sports?

Harrison: Because they’ve never been fair. They never will be fair. And the most glaring obstacle for fairness is socioeconomic status. You’re going to excel in sports if you have access to equipment, if you have access to coaches, and if you have access to nutrition. The puberty you experience and the types of hormones that you have circulating through your body are a very minuscule aspect to what makes a person a person, but even more so for what makes an athlete an athlete. Saying one single substance like testosterone is the magic indicator of how great someone is going to be at sports is a myth, it’s false, and it’s rooted in misogyny.

There are tons of people that have a testosterone-based puberty who are very much worse at sports than somebody who has an estrogen-based puberty. You’re not going to see somebody who just doesn’t train suddenly come and be better than Serena Williams or Hilary Knight. You’re just not going to see it.

The argument against trans inclusion in sports is distracting from socioeconomic status and the real barriers for women to excel.

Rachel: In general, with these kinds of blanket statements about “fairness” in sports, we need to break down what we’re talking about. We’re also talking about equality and access in sports. For instance, how do we promote equality in sports that are very expensive, like hockey? It’s more complicated, and it’s more costly to address how we’ll make sports for women more equitable compared to men. But no one wants to talk about that because it’s too tricky. And it is not going to grab the headline or the vote the same way that demonizing trans and gender-nonconforming athletes is going to do.

So again, we come back to this topic of moral courage. Who has the moral courage and the conviction to talk about actual policies that will help promote fairness for everyone when it comes to accessing sports at all levels? We want to stay away from focusing exclusively on elite sports, Olympic level sports. How do we make sports equitable and fair for elementary school students or high school students for kids?

Harrison: We see it directly with Donald Trump’s executive order or the Save Women’s Sports Act. It does nothing to provide more funding. It does nothing to provide equal marketing. It does nothing to provide safety. It does nothing for women’s sports. All he did was sign something and stand in a room full of young girls. That is pointing to directly how hollow this all is.

The argument against trans inclusion in sports is distracting from socioeconomic status and the real barriers for women to excel.

Stef: You also make the argument that it’s equally urgent we pay close attention to how trans men are treated in regards to participating in athletic competition, but we don’t. There’s a perception that trans men in sports could never achieve the same level of success as their cisgender counterparts. So, they’re generally viewed as much less of a “threat.” You’re right that both this and the pushback against trans women in women’s sports are coming from the same deeply misogynistic beliefs our society has about people’s bodies and what they’re capable of. Could you just briefly discuss this connection a little bit and how it’s being weaponized to create both legislation and new policies within sports organizations and governing bodies?

Harrison: We’re largely seeing trans men be overlooked in the same way that cisgender women and their sport abilities are being overlooked because testosterone is the be all, end all when it comes to sports. And this helps uphold the patriarchy. People overlook AFAB bodies and their athletic abilities, and they overlook the training and the dedication that these athletes have put towards their sports. Trans men are great athletes. You see someone like Chris Mosier or Patricio Manuel, and you also see someone like Iszac Henig, who beat Lia Thomas in an NCAA race. And I know people are just not seeing athletes as athletes. It perpetuates the stereotype that somebody who is born in a female body can’t excel or somebody who is born in a female body is less than. Saying that trans men are not “real threats” as competitors is just not true because we’re seeing trans men excel on the men’s side in proportion to how much they take up the population in society. We’re seeing trans men put a foil against arguments that somebody who is born in a certain body can only achieve a small level of success in sports.

Rachel: When we’re talking about policies for sports regulators, at the end of the day, they need to include trans people in these discussions. It needs to include trans men, trans women, intersex folks, and non-binary folks. And when that’s not done, when those discussions aren’t being had with the people these policies would be affecting the most, that’s when people fall through the cracks. And that’s when you have policy structures that aren’t able to withstand the test of time and aren’t being rooted in humanity and empathy. So all athletes of all types, people who are participating in sports at all levels, should at least have a voice in those discussions and be taken seriously. But that to a large extent is not happening.

Stef: Something that I always find myself spiraling about in regards to this “debate” is that scientists who specifically study hormones and their impacts on our bodies have essentially said over and over again the results regarding hormones and athletic ability are totally inconclusive. But it doesn’t stop anti-trans people from using this kind of junk scientific understanding of these studies as a core part of their argument against trans inclusion in sports. In the book, you discussed the limited research that exists and how much of it points to the fact that hormones alone can in no way predict or guarantee a person is going to perform well in sports. These results are easily accessible, but people are still convinced that hormones are the key to doing well in sports. Why do you think these arguments persist even though they can be so easily debunked? And do you think there’s any effective way of pushing back against them?

Rachel: I think that it’s very hard to dismantle this entrenched narrative we’re told from birth, basically, that biology determines sex, that biology determines gender, that biology determines sexuality in many cases. And I think untangling that narrative is very difficult. This binary is part of a core belief that many people hold. So, in the face of nuance, in the face of complexity, in the face of things that go against the binary, people often get very defensive and they’re unwilling to listen and be open and curious. Unless you have people who are open to this idea and to have their core beliefs challenged, it’s very difficult.

We were reading a study recently that only around 35% of people in the U.S. even know someone who is trans. And I don’t know if they know them, there’s no indication of whether that person is an actual friend or a family member. So, there’s just this big void in terms of people’s personal and close interaction with people who are trans and non-binary. And in that void is misinformation, is fear, and that relates to the ways that people can engage with this topic around trans athletes, too.

Harrison: I also think it’s rooted in laziness. It’s the laziest policymaking that we’ve ever seen. You’re not seeing people conduct exhaustive studies with exhaustive amounts of people over many years or even over many sports. People are just like, “Oh no, trans people have this advantage, or trans women have this advantage. We don’t need to prove anything. All we need to do is just say this and we can make this policy.” And the same goes for the general public who is reading this information. They’re not interrogating it. They’re seeing articles that have cherry-picked some data. It’s just reading everything at face value and not looking into things yourself and informing yourself.

Stef: Something I didn’t know before reading this book is actually, prior to the late 2010s, some of the biggest sports organizations and governing bodies, the NCAA and the IOC in particular, had policies that were more inclusive. This progression has obviously eroded over time. And we know that part of pushback is an attempt to push trans people out of public life entirely. But because trans people, especially trans athletes, make up such a small portion of the population, it’s obvious that the far right’s fanaticism regarding this topic has much further reaching implications. Could you discuss some of those impacts and how we’re already seeing some restructuring to how people think about sex, gender, and our bodies?

Rachel: I think we’re just continuing to see trans youth, their families, their doctors, and their teachers continuing to face more and more unprecedented attacks from these extremist right-wing politicians who at the end of the day, whether they say so explicitly or not, want to eviscerate their civil rights and erase these people from public life. We are seeing that in healthcare. We are seeing that in sports. We’re seeing that in civil rights, in due process. Already these knock-on effects are happening. People are calling into the snitch lines to report others. There’s a U.S.-based snitch line where people can report people who are supporting gender-affirming care. They’re reporting Canadian doctors. We’re seeing this on a broad, global scale.

This is dictating the way that trans people and gender-diverse people around the globe are being treated because what happens in the U.S. has very significant consequences for the way that human rights are enacted in Canada and elsewhere. We’re already seeing it up here with different politicians talking about having no “woke ideology” in our universities up here in Canada. We have a province, Alberta, that’s pursuing bans for trans women athletes in sports from youth upward. So, it’s serious and it’s happening in real time, and it seems like a runaway train.

Harrison: We all know that this sports issue has nothing to do with sports, and it has nothing to do with protecting female athletes. This topic has been a roundabout way to erode rights for transgender people. Sports has been the issue that’s opened the door for people to be able to openly say they are against transgender people. They were trying to do it with the bathrooms. It didn’t work. Now, suddenly, sports became this thing, and now we’re coming back to the bathrooms. Now we’re coming back to healthcare. So, sports was used as a vehicle and it worked.

The argument for exclusion won the U.S. election. Trump’s slogan was, “Kamala’s for they/them, Donald Trump’s for you.” Using trans people as a scapegoat worked to get people in power. Now that we have somebody in power who was elected on that basis, we’re seeing it open the door for a crazy amount of censorship, not just in sports. Exclusion has opened the door for the U.S. and, honestly, the rest of the world to be part of a new type of authoritarian regime.

Rachel: There’s a rightward swing happening now because trans people, including trans athletes, became more and more visible. There’s always a backlash that comes with that because governments and the patriarchy want to maintain hegemony, maintain power. And we’re seeing that backlash now with trans athletes and trans people because there was an increased visibility. There was an increased equality being pursued. At the same time, we’re seeing people being forced to come to the table to engage with people like Trump. You’re seeing people like Gavin Newsom tilting rightward. We’re seeing some governments, not all, but some governments around the world tilting rightward.

So, if there are people on the left and people who are “progressive” who are trying with all their might to maintain power at this time, then you look at public opinion polls and you see that people are largely against trans inclusion, especially when it comes to trans women. If they have power on their minds and they’re obsessed with maintaining that, then they will latch onto that and they won’t feel compelled to stand up against it and to speak out.

Harrison: And I think what we’re seeing through this narrative is another backwards slide into reducing people to their bodies. We see it with women and just thinking they are a vessel for child-rearing, childbirth, and it dehumanizes women in that way. Now we’re seeing trans people really be put under the microscope of their bodies. We’re not talking about them as people. We’re talking about what hormones they have. We’re talking about how tall they are. We’re talking about if their voices are deep, if they have facial hair. We’re just talking about bodies in a way that’s really opened the door for people to dehumanize us, and that’s why we’re seeing so much violence. I think that’s the most pervasive thing that I’ve seen in the discourse that I’ve had with people in my life: just people reducing trans people down to what they’re capable of and not what’s in their soul, not their struggles. And just really focusing on if somebody is faster than somebody else, when it’s like, “no, their life is really hard, and they’re going through a lot of things that have nothing to do with sports.”

We all know that this sports issue has nothing to do with sports, and it has nothing to do with protecting female athletes. This topic has been a roundabout way to erode rights for transgender people.

Stef: I wanted to end this conversation on a lighter note. First, I found the argument at the end of the book regarding reorganizing sports with a mixed gender approach particularly compelling. Can you just give our readers an idea of what you laid out in that section and how creating a “mixed gender sports utopia” could help free us from the trappings of exclusivity and build an actually equitable culture for all athletes?

Harrison: For me, the most eye-opening thing about this book was really interrogating my own biases. And when somebody suggested that gender should be eradicated from sports, I was like, “That’s crazy. How could you do that?” Because we’ve just been conditioned to believe that’s the way it is.

When I was playing on Team Trans, an all-trans hockey team, we played against the Gay Hockey Association in Madison, Wisconsin, and all the teams were broken up into skill levels, which it’s like, “Huh, maybe that should be what we do.” Playing with and against people of all different body types and of all different backgrounds just created this joyful experience that I’ve actually never had before. And it was fair competition. And I never thought of that. I saw it in practice in a very small way, but it worked.

And I’m not saying that gender should be totally eradicated. There is a space for women’s sports, and there’s a space for men’s sports, and saying that trans people should just be participating against themselves is not the answer there. But there are options. There are ways that sports, especially if we’re talking about non-elite sports, if we’re talking about recreation, could really open up.

We only really need policies and ways to enforce them at elite levels. We don’t need it in grade school. We don’t need it. Especially if somebody’s six-years-old, they don’t need it. They just need to play against other kids. It opens up the door for people to just come in contact with different types of people, and I think that it would just, at the grassroots level, create a more open mentality, especially of what women are capable of. If they’re playing against people of different genders, it opens their mind to what their teammate is capable of doing. And it can really help empower female athletes to feel strong, to feel included, and to feel valued.

Rachel: We see in prepubescent kids who are engaging in sports at school and recreational sports, we see that girl swimmers have faster times than their boy counterparts in swimming alone. So again, it’s about looking at different sports differently, too. It’s an interesting thing to think about how the benefits of having young children play sports with each other could prevent fostering this implicit “us versus them” mentality. If you’re able to play sports and bond together at that level as kids, especially when the science is clear that they haven’t even undergone any type of hormone-related puberty, I think that these divisions at that level are quite arbitrary. It’s about just being curious and thinking about why these binaries exist. Why are we dividing sports in this manner? And that sort of opens up different possibilities and different ways of exploring different types of community-building efforts.

Stef: Finally, most of the time, especially with people who call themselves “progressive,” the conversation about trans inclusion in sports revolves around who’s winning and who’s losing and why. But many of us who actually compete in sports know and understand that winning is simply just a consolation prize amongst so many other more important benefits we gain from being athletes. I think it’s important for people, especially for people who are just spectators or fans, to hear about some of those benefits because I just think it opens up new considerations about why and how sports are important beyond the “glory” of victory. Could you share one or two of the most important lessons you’ve learned from your time as athletes, and how those lessons bleed into your life outside of sports?

Harrison: The community I’ve garnered through hockey and the camaraderie that I have with people is what it’s all about. It’s just this siblinghood, and there’s this bond that you have with people in a way that’s familial and is a no-brainer. But I also think I’ve taken the lessons of how I excelled in hockey. I worked hard and consistently trained, and I didn’t always like it but I always loved it. I’ve taken that into my life post-hockey in a way that I probably wouldn’t have. I’m an actor and I’m a filmmaker now, and I don’t love it every day, but I go back and think, “Oh yeah, but I didn’t love hockey when I was skating. I didn’t love it when it was bad. I will get over this, and I’ll get through this. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love this thing.” Those are some small, tangible things that I take into my every day and I’m able to get through hard times, because I got through hard times in sports. It taught me resilience in a way that I wouldn’t have had without it.

Rachel: I don’t want to speak for you, but also, what about being in women’s hockey and coming out as trans? You talk about feeling that support from that sport. So I wonder how much of that links to your own experience of coming out.

Harrison: If we bring it back to what sports meant for me and how it affected me with being trans and stuff, for me, growing up playing women’s sports, there was nothing that I had to compare myself to. I was just myself in this space, and I was just a teammate among teammates. And I think that really empowered me to figure out who I was without having all these gender biases and having these images of men or having men around me telling me what I should be. Being in the women’s hockey space, I was around gay and lesbian people at 16, and it really empowered me to not hide in a way that I would’ve hid if I wasn’t surrounded by empowered, strong women who were just like, “This is who I am and I’m going to be myself.” I was really influenced by the strong women that I grew up with. And I think it just gave me the strength, and it gave me the courage to be authentically myself because I saw a lot of my teammates doing that.

Rachel: I would encourage anyone who’s kind of on the fence or thinking that trans people should be excluded from the sport that aligns with their gender identity to go to a game. Go to a PHF (Premier Hockey Federation) game. Go to a gay league in your town, and go see hockey or go see a different sport. If you’re so sure about your stance, how about you go see one of these games that’s not your typical NHL or gender-segregated game or sport? Go see the community, go see the camaraderie, go see the support and the joy that it brings the people who go to these events and are part of these communities.

Harrison: I would not be here without sports. And that’s what really saddens me about this whole thing is sports saved my life and sports saved so many people’s lives. It’s not just a distraction from gender identity or sexual orientation. It’s a distraction from life’s stresses. It’s a distraction from class, it’s a distraction from homework. It’s just a way for you to have a really nice reprieve for a few hours a day, hanging out with your buddies and just being yourself and figuring out who you are. That’s what is at stake right now. Sports saved me, and I hope that people of all walks of life have access to the same experiences that I had.

Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes by Rachel Browne and Harrison Browne is out now.

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