‘Happiest I’ve ever seen her’: the sports teams giving trans kids a safe place to play | Transgender

LLike many seven-year-olds, Gregory’s daughter discovered her love of soccer on the playground at recess. She started walking home talking about sports and asking to join her friends’ cheerleading squad. Gregory, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, whose name we have changed to protect his family’s safety and privacy, signed it. But his daughter ended up being assigned to a different team than her friends were on.

Gregory was worried about his daughter not being on a team with a coach and players she knew – she is transgender and he wanted her to be in a supportive environment. Gregory’s wife called the league coordinator to see if they could get their daughter on the original team and explain the reasons for her request, but he said she shouldn’t play on a girls’ team if she’s trans. “We were told she would have to play on a boys’ team if she wanted to participate in games,” Gregory told the Guardian. He immediately withdrew his daughter from the league.

They later found out that the league’s official policy for transgender athletes was to allow them to sign up for a team that matched their gender identity, but it was too late. Gregory was already nervous about signing his daughter up for soccer and wasn’t planning on continuing with a league that might not support him in practice. “Sports has become such a point of bias,” he said. “Almost any new environment is scary and nerve-wracking for us as parents, and sports was definitely one of them.”

Within days, however, Gregory and his family found the Portland Community Football Club (PCFC), an organization where his daughter could play on a mixed-gender team and even wear a Pride flag on her official jersey. “During her first soccer game, she couldn’t even run normally because she was screaming and jumping with joy down the field. This is the happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

Currently, 23 states have laws that prohibit transgender student athletes from participating in some sports in the name of fair competition. In response, he often advocates for fairness in sports point to research this shows that no sexual advantages in prepubescent children when it comes to sports, and that much more data is needed on the possible advantages or disadvantages of having a person undergo hormone therapy and other gender-affirming care.

These discriminatory laws often result in lower levels of sports participation among young transgender athletes. And in countries where laws do not exist, harassment and intimidation on trans childrenor these suspected to be transgender, they have are becoming more common. The combination of legal and rhetorical antagonism against young transgender athletes makes it difficult for them to participate in sports, even when they make up a minority of young athletes – only 1.4% of youth ages 13 to 17 in the United States identify as transgender.

But across the country, parents of transgender and non-binary children rely on small, inclusive sports clubs to give their children access to the games that many parents consider an important and fun part of childhood. These groups provide a supportive, low-stakes environment for LGBTQ+ children and families to explore sports amid growing antagonism to transgender inclusion in athletics.

“Public Health Imperative”

Kaig Lightner had been a professional youth soccer coach for over a decade when he decided to create a soccer club that was truly affordable. He sought to include players from the city’s most racially diverse and under-resourced neighborhoods, kids who were often excluded from the pay-per-view clubs that catered to the rich. In 2013, he founded PCFC as a league that charges minimal registration fees, provides free uniforms and encourages low-income, immigrant and refugee youth to join their teams.

PCFC teams, which cater for players aged six to 18, are also inclusive of all genders. Lightner, a 44-year-old transgender man, noticed that organizing teams based on skill level, instead of gender or sex, was a way to attract young people of different genders. As a child, he found the sport comforting and a reminder of the binary world he didn’t feel a part of, so he said it was extremely important for PCFC to have an open acceptance policy for all players in the LGBTQ+ community.

“When they look at this particular way of structuring sports, the kids themselves are letting go of the binary ideas of how girls play and how boys play,” Lightner said. “I’ve had guys say to me, ‘I thought girls couldn’t play soccer until I started playing here.'” While he’s not opposed to having all-girls or all-boys teams in the future, Lightner said the club would never got rid of gender inclusive teams for those who prefer it.

The gender-inclusive structure and level of acceptance Gregory has seen from PCFC in one season has allowed his daughter to be herself and explore a sport she’s interested in, as any child would. “When we recorded it, no one batted an eye. I felt normal. And on the field, she’s just a kid who can be on a soccer team, who can play soccer with other kids.

While that might not sound revolutionary, sports can be life-saving — especially for marginalized young people — because they can actually change your brain, said Megan Bartlett, founder of the Center for Healing and Justice Through Sports. Her program offers diversity, equity and inclusion training for coaches and sports administrators. “When sport brings together these positive relationships that help us feel safe and practice being stressed but being able to deal with that stress, you really build resilience in the biological definition of resilience,” Bartlett told the Guardian. “In this country … making sport more accessible to these groups is a public health imperative.”

Increased confidence, new friends, encouraging mentors

As political attacks on transgender youth who play sports have grown across the country in recent years, Javi Valdez, a soccer coach in San Diego, California, began to feel a responsibility to create a new kind of sports space. “It started to weigh heavily on me,” Valdes told the Guardian. “I couldn’t imagine someone telling me I don’t have the right to play because of who I am.”

The soccer field was always where Valdez felt she could be fully herself, especially while growing up as an incarcerated woman of color in El Paso, Texas, in the 1990s. “I was a teenager when Ellen [DeGeneres] came out, and at the moment of Matthew Shepherd [‘s murder],” she said. “It was scary.”

But on the football field, Valdez said, life is different. “I got to be as big and loud as I wanted. I couldn’t get out, but I had to be free. As a coach, she has always been passionate about giving more kids the opportunity to see the soccer field the way she experienced it: a place that boosts confidence, skills, and brings her friendships and mentors. For years, that meant focusing on coaching girls’ soccer, a vastly under-resourced side of the game.

Valdez’s soccer program, Lambda Rising, launched in March 2021. About 40 kids participated, mostly kids of queer parents she knew and kids of their friends. Like Lightner in Portland, she didn’t segregate kids by gender to play. She also hired coaches who were part of the LGBTQ+ community, and instead of asking about the children’s sex or gender when signing up, Valdez simply asked for pronouns.

That level of openness helped convince “Chloe,” a queer therapist and former competitive soccer player, to enroll her child, “Taylor,” in Lambda Rising. (We’ve changed their names to protect the family’s safety and privacy.) Shortly after starting to play with Lambda Rising in 2021, Taylor, who is 9, felt more confident in his own identity as non-binary.

“I just want my child to be able to be a child,” Khloe told the Guardian. “A lot of it is just being able to be themselves. I never thought twice when I went to that field on Sunday about our safety or whether or not someone would say anything. I think the sports world would be a lot better if we just figured out how to let people just play and just be athletes.”

Since its inception, Lambda Rising has served approximately 200 young athletes. Valdes estimates that about 20 of them identified as transgender or non-binary. Currently, she organizes training camps and scrimmages, as well as some after-school programs, but she would like to develop an entire league of more competitive teams so that these mixed-gender teams can compete against each other instead of trying to fit into the gender-separated leagues that exist.

“We’re here for kids to have fun”

Traditional binary sports leagues can feel especially strained for young people in the midst of exploring their own identities. So when Jacob Toops and Luis Vasquez founded Rainbow Labs, an after-school program for LGBTQ+ high school-age youth in Los Angeles, California, they wanted to make sure they offered relaxed opportunities to come out and participate in a variety of “labs,” from sport to the arts and entrepreneurship.

“I always tell our partners that maybe we’ll find another LeBron James, but the truth is, we’re not here for that. We are here for the kids to have fun,” Vazquez said. And they’ve seen the difference their programs make, whether it’s just kids trying out sports and not being made fun of, or making other LGBTQ+ friends. In a survey of youth in their programs, 85 percent of whom are children of color, six in 10 self-identified as trans or non-binary.

Anyone who has experienced the intensity of youth sports will know that a complete overhaul of the system is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And while co-ed or gender-neutral programs are one way to be more inclusive, that doesn’t mean all sports have to go in that direction to provide access to LGBTQ+ youth. Some just adapt.

For example, when Ana Aviles, a community development specialist in San Francisco, went to find a football program last year for her then-sophomore, who had just come out to her as transgender, she worried it would be difficult. But she was surprised that she ended up advocating more at her son’s acceptance school than at the soccer leagues she contacted. In fact, the league her son joined said they had worked with other trans youth and were happy to put him on an all-boys team.

Last summer, her son got the chance to play in a Pride Weekend play that was made up entirely of transgender youth. “He was a little nervous at first, but seeing the acceptance of everyone there made him feel comfortable,” Aviles told the Guardian. Aviles just wants her son to grow up not being ashamed of who he is, and she knows that’s something that playing football on a team that supports him can give him in the long run.