Fair Game and the Future of Trans Athletes with Anna Baeth, Ellie Roscher, and Chris Mosier

[Music] Welcome to the end of sport, a collective of comrades committed to analyzing contemporary capitalist sport. This isn't a show about box scores or highlights, we're here to dismantle the spectacle, the machinery of sport under capitalism, the lines of harm and the axes of exploitation that keeps the industry running. We're a proud member of Harbinger Media Alliance, an independent group of podcasters committed to social justice, critical journalism, mutual aid mobilization, and knowledge dissemination. And good news, we are now available finally in video format on YouTube, and you can keep up with us on Instagram, Blue Sky, and even TikTok following @EndOfSportPod. Please follow, like, share, and interact with us as we enter this new era for the show. This is not your typical sports show, this is the end of sport. Hi friends and comrades, welcome to another episode of End of Sport. I am so like y'all, I woke up today and I was like, it is Fair Game Podcast Day. I was so excited, we have an amazing group here today, but first and foremost, I am joined by my friend Joanna Melis. Joanna, how are you today? I am excited to be here, really excited. We have an amazing, amazing episode for you all today, because we are joined by the three brilliant authors of Fair Game, trans athletes, and the future of sports. We are joined by all three of you today, which is fantastic. So first we are here with Dr. Anna Bath, who is a feminist scholar, whose work blends empirical research, innovative theory, and reimagined narrative. And for a decade she has explored the gendering of sports spaces, the moving body, and sports culture role in social movements. Bath, how are you today? It's so good to see you. It is great to be here. It is strange to hear the word decade there. I'm feeling seasoned. Oh, you are wisdomiths. You are wisdomiths. Yes, there's something there. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. We are so excited. We are also here with Ellie Rocher, who is the author of multiple books, including the "In Body Path," which highly recommend. It was actually my introduction to your work, Ellie, was the "In Body Path." So, highly recommend. She also teaches writing in yoga in Minneapolis. She was a two-sport college athlete, competing in gymnastics and softball, and went on to coach both at the Rec Club and high school level. Ellie, thank you for being here. It's so great to see you. It's such a pleasure. And wrapping us up and finishing strong, we have Chris Mosier, who is a trailblazing athlete coach and founder of transathlete.com, and was the first openly trans man on a U.S. men's national team. Chris is a five-time national champion and a relentless advocate for trans rights. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us. This is going to be amazing. We are so looking forward to this conversation. It is, again, literally woke up and my first thought was like, "It is Fair Game Podcast Day." And because we have such a great. Right, literally! This book is groundbreaking. It's incredible. And I am not over exaggerating with this. I had a chance to reread it before this episode, and I was reminded of the care, intentionality, and just work. I was reminded of this book and this project. And it's incredibly timely, given both the national and global landscapes we find ourselves in now with regards to trans rights, both in and out of sport. The one thing I love so much, I love everything about this book. But the one thing that really has resonated with me, since I first read it over a month ago, two months ago, a while ago now. But it resonates with me so strongly, is how you organize each chapter of the book by conservative narrative, or I'm going to just say myth around trans athletes. So you talk about the purported exponential growth of trans athletes, trans athletes unfair in quotes, physiological and competitive advantage, the question of safety, and whether trans athletes harm other athletes, especially cis athletes. And finally, whether trans athletes, particularly trans women, are undoing progress in girls and women's sports. And you tackle these myths, and what I think is the most important and often overlooked approach, and that is bringing in trans athletes' voices to talk about their experience. And so to borrow your phrase, you and Ann Gouravitch have written about this phenomenon right now as a moral panic, and it feels like there's been a lot of moral panic since January 2025. And we know that the anti-trans movement and larger fascist US project keeps lying about the number and cultural power, cultural political power of the trans population, and the cis population too. And Charlie Baker in 2024 telling the Senate panel, there were less than 10 trans athletes out of over 500,000 college athletes. And so you draw explicit attention to how they fabricate and blow up these numbers. And so for example, you note that of thousands of online articles written by trans women athletes, only 7.8% mentioned a trans athlete by name, and less than 2% quote a trans athlete, with more articles quoting conservative lawmakers about their opinions on trans athletes than talking to trans athletes themselves. Legislatively, you show us how there is only, there is 13 times the number of anti-trans bills proposed across the US than there are out trans athletes. And if we even narrow this to trans girls, and there is more than 85 times the number of proposed bills than out trans girls and women. And you also talk about the financial, emotional, mental, and physical cost on trans athletes from therapy appointments to flights, to everything in between that can be upwards of $100,000. In addition to changing documents, identification documents, and the time it takes to do all this. Under the backdrop of this enormous anti-trans landscape, this is a really long build up. But I want to ask you how you arrived at these numbers, what extent do these numbers help motivate the idea of the book, and how does you go about researching and finding trans athletes just kind of give us a peel back the curtain for us of approaching this book. Because these numbers are staggering. Yeah, maybe, maybe I can kick us off. So, Dr. Bathier, I, so a big part of this project really began when I began working in the LGBTQ movement. So, I was hired by an LGBTQ rights organization in 2019. And, admittedly, I really didn't know a whole lot about this topic. And when I look back on it, it kind of makes sense as to why I didn't, because nobody was really talking about this. Now, that's not true in the wider world, but in the academy, in particular, there wasn't a lot of attention to trans athletes. Now, I came into this work kind of blind. And all of a sudden, you know, I'm working in this advocacy space, and I start seeing the news. And we're hearing about this flood of attention on trans athletes. And all of a sudden, there are all these anti-trans bills being proposed. And I start getting a bunch of calls as a researcher from folks who are saying, well, what do we know? You know, what are we supposed to do about this? And admittedly, I had to say, we really don't know a whole lot. And so, I spent five years just digging into anything I could find, any relevant data that I thought would be useful. And with Chris' advocacy, and I think Chris' is when we really started to team up, I started to try to put some of that data out there. But what I found was actually, even when I was sharing these statistics, even when we were sharing this data, there was a lot of resistance to it. I remember having conversations with politicians in conservative states and trying to explain, like, you know, why do you need 13 bills for this many trans kids? It just doesn't make any sense. And it wasn't moving the needle. And so, I ended up talking to Ellie, reading Ellie's book, The Embodied Path. And Ellie, I'll just pitch it over to you to say, we wanted to start infusing voices and life into these statistics. Totally. So, because of the disproportionality, the lie is hinging on the fact that a lot of people don't think that they know a trans athlete. So, then they can talk about trans athletes without talking to them, which is on ethical, right? But they caught me. I knew trans athletes before the bills started coming out. As, like, these lies you're telling are not true, not by the people that I know and that I've met and that I love and that I advocate for. Right? And so, I saw right away that there was a lie and that there was some disconnect from the folks I knew, and I also value the stories of bodies. So, it's like, let's let trans athletes speak for themselves and be part of the conversation. Right? And so, we put the call out and we did not know how that was going to happen. to go. But just like, hey, if you identify as an athlete and if you identify as trans and you want to be part of our project, let us know. And we were overwhelmed by how many people wanted to talk to us. And I've backwards designed my life so that I can sit at people's feet and be like, tell me the longest version you're willing to tell me. And I learned so much from trans athletes talking to me about what it felt like to be in their bodies and also to navigate this very cis sports face. And so the very low hanging fruit affair game was that if nothing else, we were going to share trans athletes own stories about their experience to be part of this conversation. So we weren't just talking about them and that their body stories were part of the wisdom that was at the table in these conversations where it makes abundantly clear that the lies being told about them are lies. Yeah, I love that of like, this is just these lies. Like you said, they're just straight lies and you're speaking for a group of people rather than with them and and through them in like a non creepy way, but like through them and letting their voices speak and tell the stories. Right, right. Why do you think right now seems to be like trans people have been around, these athletes have been around forever. Like we've never had a sports world without trans athletes and we've never had a world without trans people. But I don't maybe like I'm just like new to the game, but it just feels like it has grown exponentially. I think actually in your book, you talk about the massive growth in the last five years. Why now do you think? I get asked the question a lot. So I figured I'd pitch it to the experts. Yeah, I'll start this off. This is Chris and you know, I think the the issue here is that sports is a entry point into a larger issue, which is trying to eradicate trans people. And if that sounds extreme, it absolutely is. But that is they've they have messaged this like this administration has openly said time and time again from different people within and from what they've done with executive orders that their goal is to make it so that transgender people do not live open and public lives with the rest of society. That is the end game here. Sport was just the entry point because sport is so incredibly emotional. It's something in our in our society that is, you know, the only other thing that I can think that unites and divides people like sport is probably music, right? But sport is something that's so incredibly special that no matter what I think of my neighbor down the hall, you know, they can play loud music, we can not we can disagree about a number of things about how we live, but we can bond together because we both love the Chicago Cubs. That is something that you know, you just don't find in other spaces. And so because sport is part of the fabric of American society, it is something that whether you play sport or not, people tend to have deep emotional feelings about in terms of fairness and competition and winning and losing. There's just so much and it's part of our educational system as well. And so youth sports is part of every child's young person experience in our school systems. And so sport was just the just a ripe battleground for folks to come into and start to see if they can change people's opinions in terms of the rhetoric around transgender people. And that's really what we've seen. The framework that has been created to exclude transgender people from sports is the exact framework that's being used to exclude us from healthcare opportunities to exclude us from public facilities and spaces like we've seen recently in Kansas and many other bills across the country. And it's also the framework that's being used to invalidate our IDs in birth certificates. And so each of these makes it easier for the next bill or law to pass or policy to pass. And so sport was just the entry point. And so you know, it makes sense that people are saying like, why sport? Why now? It's not an influx of athletes. It's not a sudden rise of transgender people in our country. It's literally that this was the crack in the facade that people could get into to start to wage attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Well and for a moral panic to take hold, one thing that has to be there is scarcity, a sense of scarcity. So that fear can take hold in the clinging. And we are still in a moment where there is a sense of scarcity in girls and women's sports. There's a sense because it is. The numbers are still so incredibly embarrassing. And so if you drop this invitation that the breadcrumbs are going to be taken away, the hard earned breadcrumbs, there's going to be that clinging, that gripping and you're going to get some momentum. And so it has taken off in part because women are still not seen as equal players in this very binary sports world. And I think the last addition I would make to that is in my mind, this is of course about trans people and it is also about bodily autonomy. I think we are talking about trans athletes or we're talking about trans folks in social systems. But when we really stop and pause and look at sort of the longer history of this, it's not lost on us that all of this was happening right around when Roe v. Wade was being overturned. When we've been seeing all sorts of rollbacks around different people's bodily autonomy. And I'm talking specifically about the United States here because that's really what I study. But it is also this gateway to say who gets to access their body, who gets to live a healthful life, who gets to access care. And I think that is the beginning of something much broader, much bigger, a much larger colonial project. That led me in so easily to like the kind of like common I was going to make is that the attempted like genocide, I mean, the attempt and that's what it is attempted because obviously people are fighting it every day. The attempted genocide, right? They are projecting that women are being erased, right? That's the whole thing is like we fear being erased. So we are actually going to erase the people that we are claiming are trying to take over our spaces. As you said, it is a colonial rights rights prime minister's project. I was just teaching about this in class of the day, not related to trans people, when there's a European colonialism. And yeah, so just this whole like spinning of the near the fabrication, like this is what happens, whether it's like quote unquote, microns taking over, right? All of these things that it is about who has as you as you noted, it's the bodily autonomy. And who has the right to decide who has autonomy to move and to not move, whether it's actually moving states, right, driving cars are actually like moving bodies on a field. Yeah, and I just that is to think the way to go back to like the way that you all organized the book around conservative myths. I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about how you arrived at some of them because I'm sure there are like men need you right? So like how did you pick the ones that you picked? How did you arrive at that as an organizing structure? I mean, for me, it was repetition, right? Like when I step away from the media and I hear what clickbait is making its way into our verbal communication, there, it would, to me, is one master lie. That's so complex that we had to break it up. So I'm, I am, there are some writers who don't talk about what project they're working on. I am the opposite. I'm constantly talking about what I'm thinking about so I can get beta information just from people that I am interacting with. And when I say, Hey, I'm interviewing trans athletes, there was that, that was that clinging, the like the gripping, like they're the pullback. And it was like the whispered questions were boring questions. Is it fair? Is it safe? Like what's going to happen to the female category? You know, it was like that was it. So it was just the repetition of those, of those questions that weren't coming. I could tell it wasn't necessarily coming from inside the body of the person, but it had trickled in from the repetition of the clickbait where we're not reading as many books. We're not reading as many articles. We're not getting, we're not asking trans athletes to tell their stories. It's just this like residual thing in the air. And I just found those questions so boring that I wanted to get at them and what's behind them and what's the clinging about? Like what are we actually afraid of? Can we ask more interesting questions that don't have these assumptions embedded in them? And so to me, the master lie is trans athletes are coming in droves to steal your medals to do harm to your daughters in locker rooms. Like when I, when they're when someone was really well meaning and like the bottom line was their daughters in a locker room, it was so easy to be like, well, yeah, I don't want your daughter harmed in a locker room either. Let's take a look at that. Let's talk about who's doing harm. in locker rooms. Why is that taking hold? It's because locker rooms are a scary, scary place. Tell me your body story. What happens to your body in a locker room? You know, like, where can we meet in this with like our actual stories? So to me, the master lie was just which of them are like really taking hold and doing the work to motivate that moral panic where folks aren't able, like they're frozen and they're not able to move past it to look at what's actually happening. I think all of our questions have like more interesting question that's a different version of it. So it's like all of us are deeply, deeply committed in our sports world being a little, in being safer. Right? So it's like asking, is it safe? Is it safe? There's nothing wrong with that question. When you're assuming it's not safe, which is why you're asking it. And you're assuming it's trans girls and women doing the harm. It's just like, OK, well, that's when we need to, we need to infuse the conversation with rigorous information and with actual stories. So that we're having, we're focused on the right thing. Like we can focus on safety. I want more bodies to feel safe. All bodies, in fact, right? But the assumptions embedded in those boring versions of the questions we wanted to kind of pull apart. So for me, it was just of like what, what reframes were, was a sick of hearing that were like not spinning anywhere interesting, right? Because they're not gripping onto reality. They're spinning the fear and it's working. And I think for me, it was also taking a look at all of those myths and saying, which of these myths is doing the most harm. That's right. And the overarching theme or one of them in the book is the myths that we are hearing are way, way more harmful to all people than trans athletes ever happen or ever will be. That's right. And we got to start there. So I think being really clear about the disproportionate harm that these myths are doing. And then for me, I was able to come in with the lived experience of being a trans person and mentoring trans people over the last 15 years and saying, what do we want people to know about our experience? And to layer that on top of these myths that, Ellie was absolutely right. These are the questions that I've been hearing or been told in conversations for a decade and a half as an out trans athlete. And they've largely been the same. But the way that they've been spun up, the rhetoric is so toxic. It's so file. It's so aggressive at this point. And it's so disproportionate to the actual reality of a lived trans person's experience. And so we were able to come through with those body stories and say, what do you want people to know about you as a trans athlete as a person and layer that in to help bust those myths throughout the chapter using trans people's words? Well, and how the lies are-- I keep saying lies instead of myths because I actually really like myths. Do you know what I mean? Like, myth as a genre is like a really beautiful genre. Like, myth-- These are not beautiful though, Ellie. These are not beautiful. These are like toxic, venomous lies that were needing to debunk. I've come to that. We were using myth, I mean, but it's like, these are lies and they're doing harm. And one of the ways that they're doing harm is they're distracting. Right? Like, we are blaming the wrong people. And not only are they the wrong people, they're the people that are arguably the most vulnerable and need the advocacy. And any energy we're moving toward that-- our eye is not on the prize, which is actually addressing the real harm. So I always mention as a gemnest, like coming at this conversation of like, let's get really clear that Larry NASA is the one who's doing harm. Not trying to-- like, how dare you. How dare you blame folks that aren't doing harm and like, use that energy that could be focused where we actually need to be doing some very serious work that keeps people safety and actually in mind, right? So this is a weird misdirection of energy and it's on purpose. And so to get, like, darkly curious about that and figure out who is benefiting from the lies and follow the money, it's not so hard. But it's so-- we don't want to talk about money. We don't want to talk about race. We don't want to talk about how much we hate women. It's just so much easier to talk about trans athletes if you've never met one, which, by the way, now you have-- OK, so now let's have a better conversation. Thank you for bringing in the gymnast's connection because, yeah, I mean, the fact that this comes on like the-- really ramps up on the tail end of-- right me, too, and right at the moment, the Jennifer Say, who came more prominence, right? And Nutsham-Ason, Nancy Hoggs, had May Carr, who has like my tickular eye, particular eye, or is a former D1 college athlete, is like just really like made it her thing before early gains, came onto the scene. But I mean, you two already let us off really beautifully, but I would love to hear if there's anything more you wanted to add, or we can start with you, Bate, about how your lived experiences in sport and your work in trans advocacy. How do these experiences inform your research? And Chris and Ellie, if there's anything more that you want to add to what you already said, I would obviously love to hear that, too. I think I actually want to point this back to Chris a little bit because I've been reflecting a lot on sort of the mundanity of activism in this space. I have been doing this work not full-time for a few years, and Chris, you've been doing it forever. And I want to hear more about how you came to this. Yeah, so I think like a lot of trans people, I became an accidental activist in fighting for my own rights. And I did make a conscious decision to put myself in this position. So I'll say that first. I waited heavily before I came out publicly. Part of me wanted to move to another city, get a new job, meet new people, and just start my life over as the person who I knew I was meant to be. And the rest of me saw that, wow, I'm going through this experience of not having a role model, of not seeing anybody who's like me, who's a trans person, who's competing in sports, who's competing on the men's team, who's competing at a high level. There was no one for me to look to, and I didn't have community. And honestly, so many queer people can relate to this. It was a very isolating and lonely experience, feeling like I was the only one in the world. And I wanted more than anything to, in the process of fighting for my own rights, to change categories in USA Triathlon, to begin to compete on the men's division. I wanted to be able to make that process easier for everybody else who would come after me. Because I know trans athletes exist. I know that we're out there. I know we've been playing side by side with our cis peers forever. And I also knew that so many of my peers who were in a similar position were not out about their identity, or were holding back telling people, or taking action to be their true selves, because sport meant so much to them and they didn't want to lose their ability to participate. And that was my story. I did not want to lose my ability to participate in sports because from the age of four years old sport was my safe space. It was my home base. It was where I felt the most like myself. And it was the space I connected to people the best. And so thinking about what it would mean for me to, be my authentic self and transition, but to lose the thing that meant the most to me was devastating. That was just not an option for me. So I wanted to make sure that those spaces would be open and accessible to other people, which ultimately led me to coming out publicly as a trans athlete and really making that not just my brand, but sharing my life's experience through everything so that other people could see me and know that they could do it too. That it is possible to be your authentic self and to continue to play the sports that you love and not have to compromise any part of who you are. And so I think just in so many spaces, we say visibility is powerful, right? Like it's a powerful tool for social change. It's a way that we can see a future for ourselves. And not having that when I was younger, that's all I want to do. And so in addition to creating a pathway for other athletes, I wanted to make sure to share the information that I was getting and also use those experiences to advocate for change. And that's really how transathlete.com was born And that's the reason that I do so much mentoring. and so connected to other athletes. And we were able to bring in a lot of those athletes in the youth side through the athletes that I've mentored in the past. - Yeah, and I will add that when we first put out the call for this project, so we started, for the scholars who were listening, you will appreciate that this was an almost two year long IRB process to be able to interview these kids. But I'll say, so when we started, I was like, there's just no, it's gonna be really, really tough to get approval to interview trans kids. And so we put out the call and we said, trans adults reach out and within first few days, I had heard from maybe four different families who all said, hey, we heard about this project, our kid really wants to be a part of it. And more importantly, many of them said, our kid really wants to be interviewed by Chris Mosher. They really wanted me to Chris. And so I was like, okay, I will go back and forth with an IRB for years so that this kid can talk to Chris Mosher. And honestly, I think that is part of the advocacy of doing research in some ways. But I think in terms of my own story and doing this work, some of it is in the book and in the positionality statement, but overall, I had a pretty positive experience with sport. I was a two sport college athlete also and as a cis woman who competed in primarily women sports, namely field hockey, I really saw sport as a distinctly feminist space. But I think when I started doing this work, I will say that I received many calls from advocates and scholars in the women sports space who said to me, you should not touch this topic. It will ruin your career. It will position you in a way that could be very difficult to come back from. And I think for me, there was an immense amount of fear internalized fear around what potentially could happen to women's sport. I mean, I think for those of us who know women's sport and who have studied it, to some extent, it's a very fragile system. Title IX itself is very fragile. And I still have some questions about that. But as I got deeper and deeper into this work and thank God for Chris and Ellie and for many, many other advocates, it just became very clear. This, there is no turning away from this. And that fear that I felt was not my fear. That was somebody else's projected fear onto me as a cis woman who ostensibly cares about women's sport. And so for me, I will say I had to do some work to get over that. And once I did, again, I mean, the data is clear as day. This is colonization. - That's right. - This is genocide. - Yep. - This is a very clear mission to control very specific groups of people. And I cannot abide that. I will not watch that and not say something. - And so yeah. - Specifically sport is an entry point to the more beautiful society, right? Because if we think about how the project of racial capitalism to sit on an assembly line and zip up and disengage from your body and put your head down and don't complain, right? Like sport is antithetical to that. So we want more play. We want more embodiment. We want more joy. Those people are gonna be harder to control. And that's what we want. We want people who are so joyful and so embodied and so exuberant that they can't be controlled. Like this is a project about freedom. And the interesting thing when we talk about like, yes, this is happening in sport, which is a microcosm of everything. One of the reasons we love hanging out in this conversation about sport is because we think sport is gonna be one of the ways that can get us free from this, right? So who's controlling who's body? Who's paying for it? Who's bodies are seen as disobedient and who's seeing as obedient? And then what do we get from the work? So Chris says he's coming at it as a transphobic person. I'm coming at it as a cis person because I understand that privilege is a dead and a-er. And I don't want to be dead inside. So I need to check my cis privilege and I need to get an activist's identity and one of the things that helped me is sitting at the feet of trans folks and being like, tell me, tell me everything. What do you got? And meeting a meeting body to body and getting more free in that. So what do I give up to become white? What do I give up if my cis identity is dormant and I don't come out actively as cis? These are privileges that are restricting me. And so then the work of solidarity is breaking me back, open breaking me back free. There's a lot of folks who get challenged by that and want to snuff that out. We want to snuff out Chris's joy. And then as I'm getting free, they want to snuff out mine too. But because we don't know life without sport, we understand what it feels like to move freely and have collective movement be part of liberation. And so that's why it's fun to be fighting with in this specific conversation because the more bodies we can get, just inhabit and stay free, the better shot we have of having trans folks lead us into a more beautiful future with their joy. - Yeah, and Ellie's right, this is about freedom. And I just want to talk quickly about something that Faith just said about, this could ruin your career. And just in hearing that, I've heard that said to cis women over and over and over again about this topic that if you are a high profile athlete who is supportive of the trans community, that you're putting your potential career on the line if you speak up and use your platform as a professional athlete to support the trans community. You know, this is because it has become so political, it's become so weaponized, our cancel culture is so strong. And the other side has the advantage of being able to drop lies in one line that need to be refuted in an entire book because it actually is a lot more complicated than that. So, I say that to say, when I hear that it is so incredibly painful for me as a trans person to think that my identity, my presence in sport, and maybe even more specifically, the presence of a trans woman in women's sports could potentially ruin somebody's career. What does that say about me as a trans person, right? Just even supporting me in sports could potentially ruin your life. You know, that's a lot to carry. And I think that's the reason why it's so important that we actually brought in the voices of transgender athletes to talk about the things that are important to us, to talk about our relationships with our cisgender peers and our cis coaches and the positive experiences that we've also had in sport because so much of what people hear is the doom and gloom of the trans experience. It's the negative things that are happening, the discrimination, the hatred. And yes, all of that is ever present and rising every day. And that is a part of our lived experience, but we often bypass the joy and the freedom that Ellie was talking about and how important that is in sport. And so, you know, it is incredibly emotionally charged to be a part of a project like this for me. And it's very painful to live in these conversations about the myths and lies every single day. And that's why this book is so important because we have the opportunity to introduce people to athletes, to hear lived experiences. And like Ellie said before, you don't know a trans athlete, you do now, you know 20 of them. You know, it's really important introduction points for people to make those connections. - Well, and Chris, I'm gonna go, like it's gonna ruin Beth's career to not advocate for you. Transphobia is dehumanizing to the whole project. We have to start talking about how everybody is losing with this. It's super easy to focus on girls and women, trans and cis, right? But I'm raising two boys and they're losing in this project as well, right? And so, like we just have to get crystal clear, no one's winning right now. There are people who are making money who think that they're winning, but at the expense of their humanity, right? And so we gotta go, we gotta go long infinite wins here, right, where we're not dehumanizing trans folks. And we're seeing how such people who do that are actually dehumanizing ourselves in it, right? And claim our humanity, get our humanity back through this solidarity work and work for a world where everybody gets to play. Everybody gets to play. I could listen to you all talk literally all day. Like this should just be my alarm clock is like this conversation because I would wake up so fired up about making the world a better place. Because like everything you're saying is so true though of like the dehumanization of it, finding joy, these lies that are perpetuated over and over again. And one thing that I like you mentioned like this like binary structure and in the book you talk about like sex aggregation as well. And something that I wrestle with and think about probably a lot more than I should. And is this is this binary, this like just nefarious everywhere possible binary and specifically not just like the harms that it causes, but actually in a lot of ways trans athletes like their portray does these like disruptors of the binary they you know, probably do all these terrible things to these normative systems. But actually they they in a lot of ways work within this system. They're switching from one category to the other. They're not actually trying to disrupt and change the entire sporting world as we know it. They're actually not challenging sex aggregation. And a lot of the quotes you have in the book, I'm going to put it up on the screen again because it's that important. They talk about in the book is that these athletes they don't they care a lot about fairness. They care a lot about supporting their cis counterparts. And I'm not criticizing to say like they should everyone should be disruptors. I'm actually not at all. I'm think it's another lie that comes forward. But like as a sports sociologist I just find it so interesting in this paradox that of course we want to dismantle this binary because it's so harmful. But trans athletes are not like in the in a good way like not a good way. But like in a way that is not aligned with the conservative narrative. They're not trying to change these social these statusquos. And so can you articulate for us right? The gas. Seriously. Can you can you articulate for us ways that you think this binary sex aggregated system continues to harm trans athletes cis athletes all athletes. And then conversely what does your vision of inclusive sport look like? Okay, I'll start on the first half. I'm picturing this person that we interviewed that played Frisbee in a couple different settings. And while this person so I okay let's back it up. I I got to teach sex and sexuality and gender and dating to young people. I love that. I do it full time. Bring it on. And it's just it's so fun with young people like part of part of their work in the world. Just just like try on different identities and see if it fits. And so one of the like one of our catchphrases is like use a label if it sets you free. You know so it's like it does the label feel constricting or does it feel expansive? Does it align? And I heard so much of that in these interviews of folks trying on labels to be like and drudgeness worked until it didn't. And I thought I thought I was gay until I realized that I you know it like it's just like we're trying stuff on like letting our identity be dynamic. I think that's one of the things that I give up if I'm if I'm if my cis identity is dormant is that I move into stagnancy right. And dynamicism is way more interesting. So is variety. So is diversity. We need it. Our bodies are so cool and complex. Like let's let them breathe right. And so there in some sports there's comes this moment where they're like who are you? Tell me right now this second are you a man or a woman? Are you going to go here or there? Who are you going to match with? Like what body out here on this field? Are you going to match with? And it's so much pressure like all I feel in how they're telling the story is constriction of like is it okay if I don't know for a hot second? Can't I just run around and catch a frisbee? This is wreck pickup. Like what's happening? Why are you forcing me to choose? And that's what like I'm kind of loving like what non-binary athletes being like what are you going to do with my body? You know intersects athletes being like tell me where I fit. You know like just like being brave enough to be like well this is who I am there's something wrong with the system not me right? But can wins especially when stakes are low? Okay especially when stakes are low. Can we remove that moment where we ask someone to constrict instead of expand? Right can we just be bodies playing? Does it have to have a label that could do harm in that moment? Right? And hearing these athletes be committed to playing over the period of different moments in their journey where sometimes a label felt good and then other times it did not right? Like we can in so many instances right now create a sport system with in low stakes at different moments in different sports where we can just let that breathe and just be bodies playing and figure it out. And I mentioned Frisbee because I think a lot of times they exist outside of capitalism and kind of self-direct and there's a lot of space for creativity and diversity there that we can like learn from in so many other instances. Chris, Faith, what would you add? Because I'll keep going if you want me to but I think I should share. I mean I think everybody can understand why writing a book with these two humans is so much fun. So I'm just I'm trying to remember the question a little bit. Sorry Anna can you so yeah about like inclusive vision for sport like what kind of harms does sex aggregation binaries enact on all athletes? All a cart whichever one you want or none of the above and just teach us and educate us. So in my mind I think binary sport really allows for a siloing and an iteration of isolation that is not helping us. You know some of the stats that we talk about or some of some of the studies that we talk about in the book that I I would just want to highlight quickly. Our first you know there's been one fairly robust study that looked at the impacts of inclusive policies on cisgender girls and what they found is that in states where there are policies that protect trans kids. cis girls are healthier happier more likely to stay in sport. It's sort of a no brainer right if you have good policies if you have policies that are executed well by people who are educated on the topic everyone will flourish. The other study is a more recent one really looked at cisgender boys and their experiences and understandings of anti trans rhetoric. And what it found more or less that cisgender boys don't necessarily walk away from hearing those rhetoric and locker rooms with a strong opinion about trans athletes. But what they do walk away with is a very clear narrative about how they are supposed to perform masculinity in their lives and in sport. Right and so I think those two studies alone indicate a lot for me about how gendering is working in sport right now. And what is also clear is the only way that we can maintain these systems of teaching boys to be quote unquote men and teaching girls to potentially be afraid or be apprehensive or whatever we teach girls. I think we teach girls a lot of different narratives. Perhaps the most pervasive one in my mind based on most recent data is that girls shouldn't participate in sport because other people are looking at their bodies right. We know in the past it's been that girls are twice as likely to leave sport by the age of 14 and boys as of this year. It's now the age of 13 and the reason that they give almost always is I don't want other people seeing me. I don't want people seeing my body. And I'm not quite sure how to process that. Except to say that story, that narrative is working because of the binary system of sport. And that's not to say hey let's get rid of the binary right. I mean that's impractical. But it is to say, what can we learn from this siloing so that we can make sport healthier for all people? Right. Right. How do we make boys sport, men sport healthier? How do we make girls sport, women sport healthier? That's right. And I think there's a lot to be learned there from the trans community, from hearing these stories, and really getting creative and finding the joy and going back to. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this in the first place? For me, it's about getting people in their bodies. Right. Yeah, sport did not create the gender binary. We just live within it, right? So as a trans person who's been reimagining sport for many years, I don't see an opportunity in my lifetime where the gender binary will disappear within sport. And I'm not sure that I want it to, to be very honest. I think women sport is an incredibly special and sacred place. As a young person who grew up playing girls in women sports, that was a space where I learned so much about myself, but also had an opportunity to learn things that were never told to me by adults. I got to learn confidence and being in my body. I got to learn how to be competitive when I was told not to be, right? Like, in a really healthy way. And I got to learn all those other things that every kid learns through sports like teamwork and communication skills and leadership skills and all of that, right? There are so many good parts of sports and specifically women sports. You know, they've played field hockey and that there's not a match for that, right? That is a very special unique experience. And I think that we need to, if we're imagining what is the future of sport, what would women sport look like if we poured resources into women sports, right? And we brought them up to the level because today, still today, is it now 53 years past, you know, when Title IX has been introduced? Girls today still have fewer opportunities than boys had in 1972. And when you hear that, it's just, it's just wrong. We can't say that we want to protect the women's category that we support and women's and girls sports and then not give them the resources that they need to actually thrive, right? So saying that trans people are the problem is a, it's a distraction. And that's it, right? If we put the same energy that folks have put into trying to keep the handful of trans athletes out of the sports that they love and actually funneled that into how can we really uplift the media coverage for women sports, the pay and the contracts, the opportunities, the resources that they need to be able to perform, practice, play, compete against one another. There are so many ways that we can push sports forward, but banning trans athletes is not one of them. That's right. Hmm. I, I think about that all the time, Chris. Look, what if we took every news article, every podcast, every radio segment that talked about trans athletes and the focus was instead just on women athletes? What would we, what would sport look like right now? What would our culture look like right now? Right? I mean, it's, it's astonishing. It's astonishing. Well, and you mentioned money, you know, like it's not just for girls. It's also for boys who don't have as many resources, right? Like, it is, it is a, it is a dodge where we need to be talking about Disney world and youth sports. We need to be talking about how expensive youth sports is. We need to be talking about how parents aren't doing their own work and projecting things onto their kids in youth sports, right? Bringing it back to play will just keep saying out loud if, if you want to make things interesting in terms of fairness, make youth sports free and see what happens, see which kids thrive. I would, gymnastics is a very expensive sport. So I just, I always wonder who wasn't there? Who would have kicked my ass? And one of the reasons I, I was thriving in a college athlete, I, I totally know is because we had the resources to send me to a good facility with good coaches and I had two parents who loved me who created a stable life where I didn't have to work eight hours after school every day, right? I could train. So we have, we have to talk about capitalism and how expensive play is and again, going back to like what are the wins? How can we bring it back to exuberant play? And I do think Chris, like thinking about affinity groups, right? Because like my fifth grader benefited a lot by playing on a mixed gender soccer team, right? And like I saw both boys and girls, like unlearning what society was trying to tell them about boys and girls as they were playing as equals. I think it's also important because of how toxic patriarchy works for girls and women to have access to affinity spaces where we can be a little bit braver, we can feel a little bit safer and let's just be real clear. I had a trauma therapist come up to me after one of our book talks. She's like, I just want to double down on something that you're saying. Syswomen come to talk to me and process through trauma done to them by cis men, not trans women, right? So it's like, let's just keep our eye on the prize of like where the healing needs to happen and understand that in this toxic patriarchy, the boys are losing too. We got to blow the thing up, right? Which doesn't necessarily mean blowing the binary up immediately, right? Like working on more healing, more play, more healthy sport for everybody. Thank you for all that. And that really leads into, yeah, we have a question about joy and anyone and I like intended one of your workshop events like late and I don't think I do the context of it. And like when I opened when I joined the room, there was like so much energy and it was totally not what I was expecting and I was like really tired of that in the day. So I just kept my camera off. But I was like, well, there's like there's so much like energy and joy, but also like passion in this. And I was thinking about that because we're also like in a moment where women's forces boom me, right? Like we're in such an interesting moment. And I, you know, I always talk about Michael Waters' book because I teach it and I think it does so much good work. But this idea that we're in this intensely fascist moment, women's forces booming. Like I don't want to say it's a carbon copy of the 20s and 30s, but it is so similar as in history and I always go to historical parallels. But in all of that being said, like how are you all finding joy, whether it's in terms of the book launches, book launch parties and the podcast interviews, but also like within your own lives with each other, just kind of curious how you are cultivating that for yourselves. Hmm. Okay. So one is on our team, like the three of us, we have one Zoom meeting a week and all three of us like look forward to the Zoom meeting. That's how it should be. I think part of that is that we are three people in our bodies who love to play and I think we're really passionate about this work and like don't get stuck in the politics of it. Like we just want less trans kids to complete suicide. Like let's focus. Let's go. Let's go. There's stuff to do here. I'm in Minneapolis. It's been heavy. And the revolution is in live and simultaneously, right? So as we are resisting ice, I'm also going into our book launch planning and like we're doing things like ordering ping pong balls because there's a ping pong ball on the cover and like getting pong pong. I'm just like how can we create an embodied joyful, mark in time like to build something that people want to belong to, right? And that's what I mean by by humanizing. We're not doing this work because it's the right thing to do. Like my liberation is tied up in this and I'm getting more free as we go. So come on, jump on. Like don't you want to get more free too? And so I feel like the three of us in our friendship and like being thick in the work of it, but staying in our bodies like is just invites other people to join in. And I think that modeling is actually really important because there is this live being told about the movement where it's just going to be drudgery. And it's like no is extremely in liveening to like bring back my humanity by doing solidarity. We're getting closer to people that the systems want me to stay apart from. It's about, it's about connection. So yeah, like how do we constantly model that being in our lives and playing even when we're on Zoom is part of the deal that it doesn't have to be drudgery, right? Like that it can be joyful, exuberant movement and that that collective movement is part of liberation work. And dancing, the revolution will have dancing. And hi, Kate. Yeah, we got, we got a dance and good dance. I mean, yeah, I for me so much of this is, I was tumbling a little bit because Ellie and I went to an academic conference a few years ago, a sport academic conference. And we went into the gym and we were the only two people. And we thought, isn't it funny that the embody, the people who were talking about embodiment are the people here. There's the things that we know that they're sitting still. thinking about it. Yeah and I think that's not like that's more of a commentary on the systems. Right? Like, but for me for sure, getting in my body and I will say as a scholar, writing this book has been incredibly fraying, incredibly joyful. And with the Olympics, with the boom in women's sports, unrivaled heated rivalry, I am just leaning hard into like, I'm going to consume all of the joyful fun, occasionally smuddy, fabulous sport content. Because hey, like we all, we need that. And I want to be able to talk about it with people because that is getting proximate. And we need to start getting proximate. That is, that is the number one cure to isolation, loneliness, all of the, I think the crises, social crises of our time. So yeah, I'm just leaning in and finding it. And then whatever Chris tells me, and whatever Ellie tells me to read or watch or try. I'm like, mm-hmm. Okay, got it. Women's sports, like, it's so like again, like we're not going to be nice and supportive, right? Like, I bring my boys to Timberwell's games and links games and links games are more fun. And the basketball is more interesting to watch and they're super in unrivaled. You know, like it's like, we're not being supportive because we're good people. The culture of women's sports right now is has its finger on the pulse. It's so, it's so symbiotically beneficial to get up into that culture and be a part of it. Chris, sorry, you're up. There was an incredible clip during the winter Olympics of Eileen Glue. Eileen Goo talking about her press conferences were just incredible all across the board. But there was one particular clip I saw where she was talking about, I think the question to her was, do you ever think before you talk because you, which is like such an offensive question, right? But the reporter meant it in an amazing way of like every time that you respond, it's just like instant and you have such brilliant responses. And her reply to that was, she got to the point where she said, you know, each of us has the ability to control the thoughts that we think. How amazing is that, right? So like, hers was in the context of being an athlete. You can really lean into, if I think that I'm going to have a horrible day, I could, I could have that horrible day that I'm dreaming of or if I'm positive in my mindset and I'm thinking of specific things, I can really change the trajectory of my day or of my performance. And that clip to me was just so profound because it really, it really talks about how I find joy right now. In this world, my whole work is being a trans person 24/7, 365. I can never separate my identity as a trans person from my identity as an athlete and as a person. And so much of what's happening right now, every single day is unwinding my life's work. For the last 16 years, I have fought for trans people to have easier pathways to play the sports that they love. And in the last six years, I've seen state after state, rip away those opportunities from kids like me. I've seen national governing bodies across the United States universally ban trans folks from participating at the elite levels, which then trickles down to our youth sports. And I'm seeing what was my life line be taken away from people like me of all ages, of all levels of competition from the eight year old who's wants to play middle school soccer with their friends to the 50 year old trans woman who wants to run a local 5K and finish in the last 10% of people. It's universal and it is so disheartening to watch your life's work be picked apart for literally no reason, no good science, no good reason. It is all rhetoric. So I have to be really, really intentional about how I cultivate joy. And I do that through my athletics. It's the reason why I'm still competing in sport. It's the reason why I'm still shooting for T. U.S.A. I had a world championship in September that I literally couldn't tell people about because people were afraid that I wouldn't make it back in the country as a trans athlete on T. U.S.A. So even my joyful moments come with this deep profound sadness and disappointment. And so for me, it's really about the personal connections that bring this work to life, that talking to the trans kids that I interviewed and their families and seeing how they're doing. And talking not about the policies that are happening, not about the doom and gloom again or about those experiences. But what's happy in gym class? What's happy in sports play after school? What are you doing to be a kid? And those are the moments that really bring me joy because living with this rhetoric, having social media accounts that are very public and very advocacy focused, my DMs are a mess. Every single day and anytime that something happens in the news that trans people are scapegoated to distract from us starting a war in another country or the Epstein files or any number of atrocities that are happening, trans athletes are always the focus that they go to. And every single time that happens, I get so much hate, so many negative comments, death threats, emails. You name it. Every avenue that people can contact me. So joy has to be a really intentional process. And I think that this is not, this is not explicit to me as a trans person. This is universal. The news is so upsetting right now and there's so much overwhelm and things that we could be tied up in. We really have to make conscious efforts to find those pockets of joy. And so communication, the connections, real life people, touching grass, like that's the way to like realize that we're real people that have lives offline. And there are so many people in this world who love and care about me and want to see me happy and succeed. And that's how I have to remember to stay in that place. You all radiate joy. Like I just want to say like for the right, you all just like radiate joy. And that is why as soon as like I was kindly invited to be a coast on this podcast, I was like, you know who we need to have on here? Three of the most brilliant, joyful, kind, generous people that I know. And so for all our listeners, again, fair game. You need it. If you don't have it, you, you are not a light of joy. And you could be if you read this book. This isn't an ultimatum, but if you want it to be. But all this to say, I just want to thank all three of you so much for being here with us today and having this amazing conversation. You fill my cup. Thank you so much for taking the time. And we look forward to future conversations and collaborations.