Shooting hoops can bring solace to trans children
Texas is taking away a pastime proven to enhance kids’ mental health and social well-being.
On a breezy weekday afternoon in June 2019, I found myself sharing a beer with a friend in the backyard of RIPCORD, a gay bar in the Montrose district of Houston. It was my first time there. But it was hardly the bar it would be on a Saturday night. Other than a few people smoking at nearby tables, talking idly about the weather, the backyard was empty — though this did little to settle my nerves. I felt both out of place and eager to be there, though I never would have gone on my own. The friend had insisted on taking me out, and I was grateful for his insistence. He was teaching me a lesson in the importance of a community of support — a lesson especially relevant to today’s debates on trans children and sports.
I had been living in Montrose for three years. In 2016, I moved to a ground-floor apartment in the neighborhood and began my PhD at the University of Houston. When I arrived in Houston, I had not yet come out as trans, though I knew in my heart that I was. Most people assumed I was cisgender, meaning that my gender corresponded to what I was assigned at birth, and, not yet ready to come out, I never disabused anyone of this presumption. I often went for walks past queer bars, wishing I had the courage to go inside.
The friend understood the difficulty of joining a new community. He invited me out as an unofficial guide, hoping to acclimate me to local queer bars. After RIPCORD we went to JR’s and commiserated over coming out. He’d been out for a while and time had calloused his story into something contained and knowable. I was an open wound, testy and selfconscious, stung by the reactions of people closest to me. Our stories were wildly different on the surface, but we
shared something vital and affirming.
My friend came out because he was tired of wanting to die. In the weeks before I came out, I spent my nights driving for miles down Westheimer, wondering whether I ought to swerve into traffic.
I am supremely fortunate for many reasons. Chiefly, the difficulties I have faced as a trans person have never exceeded the pain I felt hiding my true self from my loved ones. And my loved ones and family have been supportive of my gender identity. Trans people routinely face increased professional, medical and housing discrimination. Because of this, it is vital to find and build community outside of traditional institutions, either with other queer people or allies.
For me, sports served as a site of community since I was a child. I played football, baseball and basketball throughout high school; on rare occasions I even played goalie for my friends who loved soccer. In Houston, I regularly spent entire Saturday afternoons playing pickup basketball in the university gym, often against athletes much younger and stronger than I was. In these games, I formed a community with other people I might never have otherwise met, but who became important to me, especially when I first moved to the city. I played against new dads and medical students and former college basketball players and freshman engineering majors. It was an easy way for me to join up with longtime Houstonians and other transplants. In the final months before I came out, as I grew increasingly depressed, I found solace in those hours I spent running and jumping, often with strangers, because they were rare moments in which I wasn’t thinking about how I might break the news to my partner or tell my parents that I was trans.
Playing sports likely kept me alive. It gave me something to look forward to when the rest of my life seemed overwhelming.
The trans children currently being legislated off their varsity athletic teams are facing a very different scenario than I faced. I was not publicly out when I played — though I did start wearing nail polish my last few months in Houston. Additionally, though we always kept score, the basketball I played was about having fun and staying in shape, not a competition for state championships or records. But we have something in common: For all of us, sports can be a way to learn to love our bodies, a way to make friendships and create a shared language with people we might not otherwise know.
Many opponents of trans children participating in youth sports according to their gender identity argue that their presence is unfair to cisgender athletes. But there is insufficient evidence to suggest that trans athletes hold a competitive advantage over their peers. The science is complicated. Those same opponents often claim that assigning a true gender is straightforward but the fact is that at elite levels, including the Olympics, officials have struggled for decades to determine the eligibility of people with differences in sex development. Chromosome and hormone tests have often led to more confusion than clarity.
A March study published in the journal Sports Medicine concluded that “even the most evidence-based policies … are unlikely to eliminate all differences in performance between cisgender women with and without (differences of sex development) and transwomen athletes.” Any remaining advantages after hormone suppression, the study found, “could be considered as part of the athlete’s unique makeup.” I am no scientist but neither are Texas legislators who are pandering to small groups of voters. It’s clear they are not basing their laws on evidence.
In amateur and youth sports, the primary focus should be on building camaraderie and selfworth among children. Allowing trans children to play youth sports, then, means allowing trans children to deepen their bonds with their peers and form communities outside of school and their families. Even if championships and college scholarships are top of mind, the fact is that not a single example of unfairness involving transgender student athletes was cited by legislators.
Trans people already face so much discrimination, especially in Texas, which by virtue of its size has one of the highest populations of trans people in the U.S. — the state has also reported the highest number of killings of trans people so far in 2021. If Texans want to protect children, their goal should not be to prevent trans kids from participating in sports. They should aim to give all children, of all genders, the freedom to make friends and play without fearing the kind of discrimination many older trans people face on a daily basis.
Gov. Greg Abbott is preparing to sign into law a bill that will only further discriminate against trans people. House Bill 25 requires public school sports teams be divided by the genders listed on students’ birth certificates. Currently, University Interscholastic League rules state that a trans girl, for instance, could play women’s sports if she received a court order allowing her to change the gender on her birth certificate. But the new law will undermine the UIL rule and force many trans children to leave their current athletic teams.
House Bill 25 is not only taking from these children their ability to play, it is taking away a pastime proven to enhance their mental health and social wellbeing. And that appears to be exactly the point. In claiming to try to protect the integrity of women’s sports and the safety of female athletes, this cruel bill and others like it rely on the false premise that trans athletes are not female athletes. The integrity of the sport does not demand their exclusion; it requires their participation.
The rhetoric of protecting women is not new to anti-trans legislation. This language drove many of the bathroom bills that swept across the U.S. throughout the mid-2010s. Many of those bills were eventually struck down thanks to the tireless work of trans activists — and the occasional multinational corporation. And, in due time, bills preventing trans children from playing sports will likely come to seem as misguided, discriminatory and archaic as those bathroom bills.
Over our last beer at JR’s, my friend prepared me for the future. I was set to leave Houston at the end of the month, and he made me promise to find a queer community in my next city. “I’m normally cynical about everything,” he told me, “but not about building community.” He insisted that I would need it, that he’d needed it. Two years later, I’m lucky to have a strong and supportive group of trans and queer friends in Brooklyn, where I now live. We go out for drinks, for meals, to movies and, occasionally, make plans for a shootaround at the nearest basketball court. My heart breaks for the children whose opportunities to do the same may be limited during the most crucial time in their lives.