It's Just Sports, I Tell Myself, With Nervous Laughter
or: it's just acceptance in society
Maybe five years ago now, I came out as trans to the guy cleaning my septic tank in rural Appalachia. We’d been talking for a couple of hours, because I was curious how septic tanks worked and because I was pretty happy to be rid of the accumulated shit of the previous owners of my house. We talked mostly about being preppers and about converting vehicles into living spaces… I had my van, he had an ambulance. He sorted out that I was in a band, so he asked what band, and I told him Feminazgul. In order to explain the name, I told him I was trans.
“Oh, so like, you’re a chick when you go out?”
Now, in the life I lead, I don’t hear the word chick too often. But I suppose I am one when I go out. And when I’m at home. But I was wearing black jeans and a sleeveless shirt, because I may be a chick but if so I’m a punk chick.
I didn’t feel like arguing, so I said “yeah, basically,” and we talked about that for awhile.
“What’s your opinion, or I guess the opinion of the trans community, on trans people in sports?” he asked.
I thought about it for a moment, then told him: “it’s a distraction. It’s a wedge issue they can use to get people mad at us.”
“Oh,” he said, thinking about that while a two-hundred foot hose sucked sewage out of my backyard and into his truck. “That makes sense.”
Later, while I settled the bill, he asked me: “So… does your chick know you’re a chick?”
“She does,” I said.
“Whoa,” he said. “So you’re like, lesbians?”
“We are.”
“That’s cool, my cousin is a lesbian.”
Most of the time I think about this story, it’s a story about rural acceptance. It’s a story about how most people, at least poor people in Appalachia, don’t really give a shit what you do. It’s a story about a funny but friendly little culture clash while living in a holler.
Sports, I can tell myself, don’t matter. I didn’t grow up playing sports—I grew up reading books.
It shouldn’t be a dichotomy, though.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided that states could ban trans girls from girls sports, and a lot of it centers around a West Virginia girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who has never had a “male” puberty in the first place and just wanted to play track and field in her middle school. In high school, as a freshman, after years of hard work and training, her and her inherent male superiority (that’s sarcasm) placed third in discus and eighth in throwing shot.
She’s the third best girl in West Virginia at spinning in a circle and letting go of a frisbee and she’s the eighth best at throwing a heavy object, so we’ve got to protect the rest of the girls from her.
This past weekend I was talking with someone, a midwestern guy in his late 60s who’d coached girls soccer for his three kids. The world cup was on, and he asked if I followed sports.
I like being honest if at all possible. I told him I didn’t grow up playing sports.
I went into my usual defensive “we went to the library instead,” which is true. And I gave him my usual “in high school gym class I sat with the other girls in the corner and we painted our nails and didn’t participate,” which is also true. Those both sounded like cute, wholesome stories to me. Easy ways to explain who I am today.
“That’s a shame,” he said. I’d never realized that.
“Oh?” I asked.
“It’s a shame you didn’t get that experience of togetherness, of teamwork and accomplishment.”
I could have kept expanding on that list of things I was missing out on, I realized. I didn’t get the experience of getting to know my body, of getting to know my limitations and strengths.
Because the truth is, I loved playing sports as a kid, when I could handle it socially. The only reason I hadn’t played is that I was routinely mocked and assaulted. The polite word is “bullied.” I hadn’t chosen to sit outside society, I’d been cast out.
I was also bad at sports, but that’s a real chicken-or-the-egg problem.
It seems to me, in retrospect, that boys and girls know one another instinctively, and I didn’t belong with the boys and we all knew it, and the only girls who would take me in wore Marilyn Manson shirts and big stompy boots and sat in the corner and glowered at everyone. So I did too, and those girls saved my life. Emily died of cancer a few years back, and I don’t know what came of Valerie or Maria. Two of the others are still my friends, and one is an anti-ICE organizer and another is my collectivemate in Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
Us weirdos even played sports sometimes, though never in school. We strapped on rollerblades and played street hockey on the tennis courts, and we didn’t segregate ourselves by gender and we didn’t exclude those of us (like me) who were terrible at it.
I admit that when they came for trans athletes, I didn’t speak up much on the issue, because I “hated” sports in the first place. It was so transparently a wedge issue that I figured the best use of my time was to simply continue to defend trans people existing in public life at all.
Sports are such a successful wedge issue because, well, there are responses to hormones that build our bodies differently. And both sides of the issue can read published science that agrees with them. Yes, there’s a 2026 meta-analysis of studies that show that trans women who take hormone replacement (not all of us do) have no statistical advantage over cis women when adjusted for height. But the other side can look to an ostensibly reasonable publication like the BBC to see an expert confidently claiming otherwise four years ago.
Trans athletes are in a strange bind. Even when they’re allowed to compete, they can’t get too good at their sports, or the pitchforks and torches will come out.
Of course, we’re already seeing the wedge issue drive further down. It was never going to stop at trans athletes, and it hasn’t. The fascists currently in the process of gaining control of the US government have stripped right after right from us.
Last weekend, I went with some folks to a science museum in Chicago, because I wanted to see the captured Nazi submarine they have on display, because I’m having a sort of hyperfocus on World War II submarines right now, because I am very normal and have very normal interests.
I didn’t use the bathroom at the museum because there wasn’t a “family” bathroom anywhere to be found. I don’t know if cis people know just how long we’ve learned to go without peeing.
I use the men’s room when I have to use a public bathroom, even when I’m wearing a dress and makeup. I count on my general spikiness and punk rock demeanor to keep me safe. Other women I know use the women’s room and hide in the stall when they’re done pissing, waiting for the coast to be clear to exit.
It was never just about sports.
It was never just about sports, but even if it had been, we need to fight back, because participation in sports is as regular as having a place to piss in public. Participation in sports means participation in society.
I grew up with dysphoria. It took me until my thirties to really understand the size and shape of my body. I always thought I was much smaller than I am. The two things that corrected my own conception of my own body were coming out as a woman and beginning to consciously exercise.
I lift weights now, and my coach calls all of us “athletes” and most of us have never been called that in our life, but we’re a bunch of fat people and queer people and old people deadlifting and squatting and snatching and doing exercises I’ve never learned the names of like “lift the hundred pound sandbag over the bar over and over again.” I call the class “heavy objects class” and I never want to go but I go anyways and it’s the highlight of my week. I started lifting weights by myself in my basement when I turned forty and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
I like weightlifting because I’m not competing against other people, not really. There will always be people who can move a bigger number than me. I’m competing against myself. I want to be as fit as I am able; I want to work within some of my limitations and I want to push past others.
I tell myself I was born to be a rebel, because society never accepted me. But I don’t dream of a society in which I’d have to rebel in the first place. I dream of an anarchist society, a horizontally structured, non-capitalist society in which local councils make decisions together and then federate to create larger decisions while avoiding creating a state or a national border.
If I lived in that society, I wouldn’t be a rebel, except maybe in a Le Guin The Dispossessed way in which I always want my society to improve.
I don’t actually like living on the outside of everything. I’ve been telling people for years that the only reason I’m not weirder, aesthetically, is that I’m at “peak weird” already. I’m as weird as I feel like putting up with. I’d rather have pointed ears and I’d rather wear a cloak and I sure spent one whole summer wearing chainmail under my punk vest. Those things match my aesthetic understanding and I want to do them, but I’m already stared at as much as I feel like dealing with.
I don’t actually consider this cowardice on my part, though maybe it is. Maybe it comes from the same place that tells me it’s not safe to wear dresses in public, which I do anyway.
But I don’t dress strange in order to dress strange. I’d actually prefer to dress even stranger, but y’all keep being weird about it.
I don’t refuse society. Society refused me.
The reason that the sports ban breaks my heart is because when I see trans youth I see everything that I was denied. Society denied me a girlhood, and for a brief moment in the 2010s I saw trans girls who got to just be girls, who got to grow up right. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express in words how much I just wanted to be one of the girls as a kid, or just how grateful I am to the girls who tried to let me. I’m eternally grateful for the girls who let me paint my nails with them in the corner, who helped me put on makeup after I made it to school. I’m eternally grateful for goth, which told me it was okay to genderbend.
But it would have been cool to be on the field hockey team too. It’s fun to get good at things. It’s fun to get to use our bodies. It’s fun to do all of those things together with other people.
There are going to be endless knock-on effects of the sports ban, of course. We’re already seeing racist policing of cis women’s bodies in the name of transphobia. Society is going to start staring at kids’ genitals in order to sort them into boxes at school, which isn’t good.
And of course, fascists love to be able to categorize people in order to oppress or destroy them, and anti-trans liberals are helping them determine “womanhood” as an immutable category. Fascists will build a prison for cis women built out of trans people’s bones.
But even if this ruling only affected the trans girl athletes, formally casting them out of society by casting them off the sports team that would be bad enough.
Even if it only affected the third best discus thrower in West Virginia, it would be bad enough.
"Fascists will build a prison for cis women built out of trans people’s bones.”
So, so right! Can I quote you online for this?
Excellent piece! Thank you for writing it.
I could say that's one more reason the whole idea of a coercive state is fucked, but you already know that. I could say we only have ourselves to rely on, but you already know that too. So since I can't say anything productive, I guess I'll say I read this, a lot of what you said resonated with my experience, and I'll keep doing the only thing I can do, which is keep working on building local community.