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

Like many seven-year-olds, Gregory’s daughter discovered her love for soccer on the playground at recess. She started coming home talking about the sport and asked to join her friends’ recreational team. Gregory, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, whose name we’ve changed to protect his family’s safety and privacy, signed her up. But his daughter ended up getting assigned to a different team than the one her friends were on.

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

Later, they found out that the league’s official policy for transgender athletes was to allow them to register for a team that matches their gender identity, but it was too late. Gregory had already been nervous about signing up his daughter for soccer and didn’t plan on continuing with a league that might be unsupportive in practice. “Sports has become such a flashpoint for bias,” he said. “Almost every new environment is scary and nervous for us as parents and sports was definitely one of those.”

Within days, however, Gregory and his family discovered 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 really run normally because she was squealing and skipping with joy down the field. It’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

Currently, 23 states have laws barring transgender student athletes from participating in some sports in the name of competitive fairness. In response, advocates for sports equity often point to research that shows that there are no sex advantages in prepubescent children when it comes to sport, and that there’s a need for far more data on possible advantages or disadvantages after a person undergoes hormone therapy and other gender-affirming care.

These discriminatory laws have often led to lower sports participation rates among young transgender athletes. And in states where laws don’t exist, harassment and intimidation of trans kids, or those suspected of being transgender, have become more commonplace. The combination of legal and rhetorical antagonism against young transgender athletes has made it more difficult for them to take part in sports, even while they make up a minority of youth 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 nonbinary children are relying 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 and low-stakes environment for LGBTQ+ children and families to explore sports amid growing antagonism toward transgender inclusion in athletics.

‘A public health imperative’

Kaig Lightner had been professionally coaching youth soccer for more than a decade when he decided to develop a soccer club that was truly accessible. He sought to include players from the city’s most racially diverse and under-resourced neighborhoods, kids who were often excluded from the pay-to-play clubs that catered to the wealthy. In 2013, he founded PCFC as a league that charged minimal enrollment fees, provided free uniforms, and encouraged low-income, immigrant, and refugee youths to join their teams.

PCFC’s teams, which serve players from ages six to 18, are also all gender-inclusive. Lightner, a 44-year-old transgender man, noticed that organizing teams based on skill level instead of by sex or gender was a way to attract gender diverse young people. As a child, he found sports to be both a comfort and a reminder of the binary world he didn’t feel a part of, so he said it was incredibly important for PCFC to have an open acceptance policy for all players in the LGBTQ+ community.

“When looking at this particular way of structuring sports, the kids themselves let go of the binary ideas of how girls play and how boys play,” Lightner said. “I’ve had boys say to me, ‘I thought girls couldn’t play soccer, until I started playing here.” Though he’s not against having all-girls teams, or all-boys teams in the future, Lightner said the club will never get rid of gender-inclusive teams for those who prefer it.

The gender-inclusive structure and the level of acceptance that Gregory has seen from PCFC in one season has allowed his daughter space to be herself and explore a sport she’s interested in like any kid would. “When we signed her up, nobody batted an eye. It felt normal. And on the field, she’s just a kid who gets to be on a soccer team, who gets to play soccer with other kids.”

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

Boosted confidence, new friends, encouraging mentors

As political attacks on transgender youth playing sports across the country increased in recent years, Xavi Valdez, a soccer coach in San Diego, California, started to feel a responsibility to create a new kind of sports space. “That started weighing heavily on me,” Valdez told the Guardian. “I couldn’t imagine someone telling me I wasn’t allowed to play because of who I was.”

The soccer field had always been where Valdez felt she could be her full self, especially growing up as a closeted queer woman of color in El Paso, Texas, during the 1990s. “I was a teenager when Ellen [DeGeneres] came out, and at the time of Matthew Shepard [‘s murder],” she said. “It was scary.”

But on the soccer field, Valdez said, life was different. “I got to be as big and loud as I wanted to be. I couldn’t come out, but I got to be free.” As a coach, she has always been passionate about giving more kids the opportunity to see the soccer field as she experienced it: a place that boosted confidence, skills, and brought 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. There were about 40 kids participating, mostly the children of the queer parents she knew and their friends’ kids. Like Lightner in Portland, she didn’t separate the kids by gender in order to play. She also hired coaches who were part of the LGBTQ+ community, and instead of asking for kids’ sex or gender when signing up, Valdez asked simply for pronouns.

That level of openness helped convince “Cloe,” a queer therapist and former competitive soccer player, to sign up her child, “Taylor,” for 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’s 9, felt more confident in their own identity as nonbinary.

“I just want my kid to be able to be a kid,” Cloe told the Guardian. “A lot of it is just about them being able to just be themselves. I’ve never thought twice when going onto that field on a Sunday about our safety or whether or not somebody’s going to say something. I think the sports world would be a lot better off if we just figured out how to let people just play and just be athletes.”

Since its founding, Lambda Rising has served around 200 young athletes. Valdez estimates that about 20 of them have identified as transgender or non-binary. As of now she organizes training camps and scrimmages, and some after school programs, but she’d like to grow an entire league of more competitive teams, so these mixed-gender teams can compete against one another instead of trying to fit into the gender-divided leagues that exist.

‘We’re here for kids to have fun’

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

“I always tell our partners, maybe we’ll find another LeBron James, but the truth is we’re not here for that. We’re here for kids to have fun,” said Vasquez. 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 the youth participating in their programs, 85% of whom are kids of color, six out of 10 self-identified as trans or nonbinary.

Anyone who has experienced the intensity of youth sports will recognize that overhauling the system entirely is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And while co-ed or gender-neutral programs are one way to be more inclusive, this doesn’t mean that all sports need to go that direction to provide access to LGBTQ+ youth. Some are simply adapting.

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

Last summer, her son got the chance to participate in a game over Pride Weekend that was made up entirely of transgender young people. “He was a little nervous at first, but seeing the acceptance of everyone there made him feel comfortable,” Avilez told the Guardian. Avilez just wants her son to grow up without being ashamed of who he is, and she knows that’s something that playing soccer, on a team that supports him, can give him in the long run.