SPORTS AND THE DANGERS OF EXCLUSION
It was the top of the bottom half of the 10th inning at Truist Park on April 10. The Cincinnati Reds had just scored a run, so the Braves needed two to win. With Austin Riley on second (as extra innings now start with a player on second base to make them go faster), Sean Murphy was first up to bat. With his first swing, he hit his first home run of the season, clinching the Braves a 5–4 win.
With more than 150 games left in the season, this was a relatively unimportant win for the Braves. And yet being there to witness it felt magical to me. It was poetic, a so-perfect-it-could’ve-been-written ending to a tense game. But the whole experience was also somewhat uncomfortable. Even though it was an incredible moment, being at that game felt like I was somewhere I didn’t truly belong. It felt like I was in high school again.
I hated sports in high school. On one hand, it felt to me like sports embodied everything I disliked: they were heavily gendered (which meant a general antiwoman bias, as all gendered things tend to exhibit) and valued body over mind. On the other, more real hand, I was severely unathletic. I was gangly, awkward, and asthmatic; my lack of athleticism was so obvious it became a running joke among my friends. Freshman year, before I wrote sports off as an option for me, when all my friends signed up for powderpuff football, I did too. I performed so poorly in practices that the “coaches,” boys who played football for the school, completely overlooked me and only played me for a couple minutes in the actual game because I told them to. It was so profoundly embarrassing that even now it’s painful to remember.
There were no rules keeping me from participating in sports. There were no organizations dictating whether people like me were allowed to play against my peers. And still, just the perception of exclusion was enough for me not only to write off sports altogether, but also to hate myself and my body even more than I already did. My experience with sports as a teenager left such a bad taste in my mouth that I’m still having a difficult time allowing myself to truly enjoy sports almost a decade later.
I will never pretend to know what it’s like to be trans. But I know what it’s like to be a young person seeking acceptance, and how painful exclusion feels. I know my experience with sports was not as exclusionary as I felt it was. I know I was just experiencing the heightened insecurity and awkwardness of adolescence and that I am perfectly safe to enjoy sports as much or as little as I want to now. I wish I could say the same is true for trans kids. We who care about and love trans youth know the impact bills banning them from sports or empowering their peers to misgender and deadname them will have. They will have detrimental mental health impacts, if not outright leading to an increase in suicide. These kids will feel like they don’t belong because there will be systematic rules in place explicitly telling them they don’t.
I wish that it would help to convince the lawmakers championing these kinds of bills of the harm they will perpetuate if passed. But it won’t because they don’t care. They don’t give a fuck about trans kids. I would say they care more about holding the hands of cis kids (especially cis girls) so that they don’t lose to the big scary trans kid than they do about the humanity of that trans kid, but I don’t even believe that’s actually true. These lawmakers literally do not care about anything other than maintaining their own power and the status quo that granted them that power to begin with. They’re more than happy to paint literal children as freaks unworthy of protection if that means they get votes.
Sports are fun. They foster community and connection with your peers and a healthy self-esteem. Those benefits should not be reserved for only some people. Sports should be for all of us, and queer people who love sports know that. This issue is dedicated to the people carving out a space for us to be our true selves and serves as a reminder, especially to trans kids and their parents, that regardless of what the greater society thinks of us, LGBTQ people will always take care of each other. We will create whatever space is necessary for us to experience the acceptance and love we all need and deserve.
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