and othersLike any 7-year-old, Gregory’s daughter discovered she loved soccer on the playground at recess. When she came home, she started talking about soccer and asked to join her friends’ recreational teams. Gregory (whose name has been changed to protect her family’s safety and privacy), an attorney in Portland, Oregon, enrolled her, but she ended up being placed on a different team than her friends.
Gregory was concerned that his daughter wasn’t on the same team as the coaches and players she knew. She is transgender, and Gregory wanted her to be in an environment where she felt supported. Gregory’s wife called the league coordinator to ask if they could put their daughter on the original team, explaining the reasons for their request, but was told that if she was transgender, she shouldn’t play on a girls’ team. “They told her if she wanted to play, she had to play on a boys’ team,” Gregory told The Guardian. He quickly removed her from the league.
They later learned that the league’s official policy for transgender athletes was to allow them to sign up for teams that matched their gender identity, but it was too late. Gregory was already nervous about signing his daughter up for a soccer team, and he didn’t want to keep her in a league that might not support her at practice. “Sports is a flashpoint,” he says. “For us as parents, almost any new environment is scary and intimidating, and sports was definitely one of them.”
But within a few days, Gregory and his family discovered the Portland Community Football Club (PCFC), an organization where their daughter could play on a mixed-gender team and even wear the Pride flag on her official jersey. “At her first soccer game, she couldn’t even run normally because she was screaming and skipping across the field with so much joy. It was the happiest I’ve ever seen my daughter.”
Currently, 23 states have laws that ban transgender student-athletes from participating in some sports in the name of competitive fairness. Sports fairness advocates often respond by saying, Point out the research it is There is no gender advantage More data are needed regarding differences among prepubertal children with regard to sport and possible advantages and disadvantages following hormone therapy and other sex-affirming treatments.
These discriminatory laws often lead to lower participation rates for young transgender athletes in sports, and in states where they don’t exist, Harassment and intimidation of Transgender kidsor their Suspected of being transgender have Becoming more commonA combination of legal and rhetorical hostility toward young transgender athletes makes it more difficult for them to participate in sports, even though they make up a minority of young athletes. Only 1.4% of young people ages 13 to 17 in the United States identify as transgender..
But across the country, parents of transgender and non-binary children are turning to small, inclusive sports clubs to get their kids involved in what many parents consider an important and fun part of childhood. These groups offer a supportive, low-risk environment for LGBTQ+ kids and families to enjoy sports amid growing hostility toward transgender participation in the sports world.
“A public health imperative”
After more than a decade as a professional youth soccer coach, Keig Lightner decided to create a soccer club that was truly inclusive. He wanted to include players from the city’s most racially diverse and under-resourced neighborhoods — kids who were often excluded from the wealthy, fee-paying clubs. In 2013, he founded PCFC as a league that would charge a minimal entry fee, provide free uniforms, and encourage low-income, immigrant, and refugee youth to join teams.
PCFC’s teams are made up of players ages 6 to 18 and are gender neutral. Leitner, a 44-year-old transgender man, found that organizing teams based on skill level, rather than sex or gender, was a way to attract gender-diverse youth. As a child, sports were both a source of comfort and a reminder of a binary world in which he felt he didn’t belong, so it was crucial for PCFC to have a policy that was openly inclusive of all players from the LGBTQ+ community, Leitner said.
“When kids see this particular way of structuring the sport, they kind of let go of the binary notion that girls play this and boys play that,” Lightner said. “I’ve had boys say to me, ‘I never thought girls could play soccer until I played here.'” Lightner said he’s not opposed to having all-girls teams, or all-boys teams in the future, but the club would never do away with mixed teams for those who want them.
The gender-neutral structure and level of acceptance that Gregory witnessed in his one season at PCFC has allowed his daughter to be herself and explore the sports she’s interested in just like other kids. “When we signed her up, no one cared. It felt like normal. And on the field, she’s just a kid on a soccer team playing soccer with other kids.”
This may not sound revolutionary, but sports can save lives, especially for marginalized youth. That’s because sports can actually change the brain, says Megan Bartlett, founder of the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport, whose program provides diversity, equity and inclusion training to coaches and sports administrators. “When sports builds positive relationships that make us feel safe and help us deal with stress even as we’re stressed, it really builds resilience in the biological definition of resilience,” Bartlett told The Guardian. “It’s a public health imperative in this country to make sports more accessible to these groups.”
Confidence boost, new friends and encouraging mentors
As political attacks against transgender youth playing sports across the US increased in recent years, Xavi Valdes, a soccer coach in San Diego, California, began to feel a responsibility to create a new kind of sports space. “It started to weigh on me,” Valdes told The Guardian. “I couldn’t imagine someone telling me they wouldn’t allow me to play because of who I am.”
The soccer field is a place where Valdez has always felt like she could be herself, especially as a closeted woman of color growing up in El Paso, Texas, in the 1990s. “I was a teenager when Ellen started playing soccer. [DeGeneres] It was Matthew Shepard who came out. [‘s murder]”It was scary,” she said.
But on the soccer field, Valdez says, life was different. “I could be as loud and as vocal as I wanted. I couldn’t go out there, but I could be free.” As a coach, she’s always been passionate about giving more kids the opportunity to experience the soccer field she did, a place that built confidence and skills and provided her with friendships and mentors. For years, that meant focusing on coaching girls’ soccer, a severely under-resourced part of the sport.
Valdez’s soccer program, Lambda Rising, launched in March 2021. About 40 kids participated, mostly the children of queer parents she knows and their friends. Like Lightner in Portland, she didn’t separate her kids by gender. She also hired a coach who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, and instead of asking kids their sex or gender when they signed up, Valdez simply asked for their pronouns.
That level of openness helped Chloe, a queer therapist and former soccer player, decide to enroll her son, Taylor, in Lambda Rising. (Names have been changed to protect the family’s safety and privacy.) Soon after starting to play with Lambda Rising in 2021, 9-year-old Taylor became more confident in his identity as non-binary.
“I just want my kids to be kids,” Chloe told The Guardian. “It’s important that they can just be themselves. When I go to the field on Sunday, I never think about our safety or whether anyone is going to say anything. I think if we could just figure out how to allow players to just play and just be athletes, sports would be better.”
Since its founding, Lambda Rising has helped about 200 young athletes; Valdez estimates that about 20 of them are transgender or non-binary. Now, she organizes training camps, scrimmages and after-school programs, but she hopes to foster an entire league of more competitive teams and have these co-ed teams compete against each other, rather than trying to fit them into existing gender-specific leagues.
“We’re here for the kids to have fun.”
Traditional binary sports leagues can feel especially unsettling for young people who are exploring their identity, so when Jacob Toups and Luis Vasquez founded Rainbow Labs, an after-school program for LGBTQ+ high school youth in Los Angeles, California, they wanted to provide relaxed opportunities to unwind and participate in a variety of “labs” that range from sports to arts to entrepreneurship.
“We always tell our partners, maybe we’ll find a LeBron James, but we’re not here for that. We’re here for the kids to have fun,” Vázquez said. And they’ve seen the change their programs make, from kids trying out sports and not being mocked to making LGBTQ+ friends. Surveys show that 85% of the youth in their programs are kids of color, and six in 10 identify as transgender or non-binary.
Anyone who has experienced the intensity of youth sports knows that a complete overhaul of the system isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Mixed-sex and gender-neutral programs are one way to become more inclusive, but that doesn’t mean all sports need to move in that direction to provide access for LGBTQ+ youth. Some are simply adapting.
For example, when Ana Aviles, a community development specialist in San Francisco, went looking for a soccer program last year for her son, who was then in second grade and had just come out as transgender, she worried it would be difficult. But she was surprised to find that she was doing more to lobby her son’s school for inclusion than the soccer leagues she contacted. In fact, the league her son ended up joining had worked with other transgender youth and was happy to place him on a boys’ team.
Last summer, her son had the opportunity to play in an all-trans game during Pride Weekend. “He was a little nervous at first, but then he saw how accepting everyone was there and felt at ease,” Aviles told The Guardian. Aviles wants her son to grow up without feeling ashamed of who he is, and she knows playing football on a team that supports him will give him something in the long run.
