Christina Kahrl

Not every major issue confronting this country can be dealt with in substantive detail in less than 200 pages (setting aside footnotes, appendices and the like), but coauthors Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth manage it with sincerity and a striking moral clarity writing about transgender youth and their participation in sports.   

The arguments of Roscher and Baeth rely on positive policy examples and the lived experiences of trans athletes, in contrast to most of the national conversations about trans people, which proceed without including the notional subjects themselves. The authors keep trans experiences at the forefront while noting the general absence of feats on the field, making the media reaction against trans athletes even more striking in its lack of substance.   

Structurally, the book takes a very direct approach. Its four chapters address who transgender athletes are, a question mainstream media has been ill equipped to answer when not actively incurious; whether or not trans athletes have competitive advantages as a function of their being trans (not so much, building on past research, not least that of Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young in their book about testosterone); whether trans athletes present a unique safety risk for teammates and opponents (there being no evidence to sustain such accusations, their instead finding “many trans athletes, instead of doing harm in locker rooms, avoid locker rooms so they themselves don’t get harmed”); and the elaborately false dichotomy drawn between trans inclusion and the state of women’s sports, which had been thriving in sync but are now subject to elaborate scarcity narratives about scholarships and opportunities that encourage a focus on the exclusion of transgender men and women from sports rather than on, say, fighting for greater commitments to all women.   

While the plural of anecdote is not data, given the reliable absence of trans people in most mainstream media reporting and the authors’ demonstration of the absence of statistically meaningful trans participation in sports – a quarter of a single percentage point, lower than the less than one percent of the population in the US that is transgender – their approach is simultaneously authentic to trans athletes’ experiences as it is revelatory for those unfamiliar with these very few on far-flung fields.   

This book presents you with evidence of trans experiences in sports that should engender plenty of questions of your own. (Some of them are even helpfully listed in one of its appendices.) There is, however, an overarching question that the book answers, if indirectly: What are sports for? The answer is that they are for all of us, and as the authors make clear, our enjoyment of them should not be freighted with expectations about gender or genderized perceptions of performance. Sports get played or contested across varying levels of talent and innate ability.   

But this raises the even more important question: Who is this book’s audience? Administrators and educators? Elected leaders? Or should it be the huge number of Americans and others who appear to be very ready to share their opinions about transgender athletes across social media and message boards? Ideally, the answer is simply “yes.”   

The hope would be that policies on trans inclusion in sports would follow evidence and experience. But an increasing number of governing bodies in sports and governmental institutions in the US are enacting trans-exclusionary policies without the benefit of either. The authors acknowledge up front this book’s added problem, which is a function of when it was written – they started in 2023, but as they note, the experiences of the athletes they followed changed dramatically by 2026, as sports were taken away from many of the athletes they spoke to.   

Despite that, the authors share more than an earnest perspective as cisgender women on the related subject of allyship on behalf of trans athletes; they also boast robust backgrounds in coaching. There are many elected leaders and several newsrooms that need to be coached up on what’s happening in this country, as Americans whose basic rights and ability to participate – on youth soccer fields or in the life of the nation – are at stake. 

Maggie Mertens

Writing about sports, gender, and equity from a feminist perspective as a journalist has become a balancing act in recent years. While I’ve long strived to paint the picture of how important access to sports for women and girls is in terms of gender equity, the sudden obsession with women’s sports only when it comes to keeping transgender athletes out, supposedly for “fairness” reasons, has honestly been horrifying. Pair this with the political attacks on transgender people’s very existence and access to health care, and suddenly the idea that transgender women are out to ruin women’s sports has somehow become a political sparkplug firing up both right-wing politicians and, sometimes, those with outdated ideas about feminism. (i.e., that feminism is about protecting women and not equal opportunity for all).   

As a journalist who has been writing about women’s sports and equality and culture for more than a decade now, I am well aware of the growing need of feminist texts addressing the issue of transgender athletes. I cannot write an article, discuss my book, or give a talk about women and sports history without being asked personally about the “fairness question” regarding transgender athletes. I have written and spoken (and repeated ad nauseum) many of the same statistics and rationales in Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth’s Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports in my own work for years. Many of us in women’s sports media and women’s sports have. Unfortunately, the rational viewpoint of seeking equal access and opportunity to sport regardless of gender seems to have been swept away by the noise of the fearmongering, lies, and restrictive rules and legislation that appear to be winning society’s attention.  

For that reason, I do hope that this book will succeed where others have failed, but I am not overly hopeful. I appreciate the fact that the authors of  Fair Game, two white cisgender athlete women, do not kowtow to any misleading talking points in order to try to make TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) feel better. The setup of the book, splitting up the chapters  to focus on the major untrue claims that people tend to make when discriminating against transgender athletes make the topics accessible and provides an easy-to-follow roadmap for those of us who also find ourselves trying to respond to false narratives and claims with straightforward facts, findings, and anecdotes.  

In fact, for me, the power of Fair Game comes from the breadth of interviews done with transgender athletes of many diverse experiences and backgrounds. Their stories are all vastly different and make clear not only the complexity of discovering and embracing one’s gender identity but how sports can act as both a balm and a painful reminder that the world is not built for gender diversity. And in a world where sports are consistently put on a pedestal that undermines women, feminists would do well to recognize the power that lies  in challenging the barriers that all who are not cisgender males face when accessing the world of sport as a major blockade to equality, instead of obsessing over the “fairness question” for cisgender women alone. Many of these athletes’ stories will stick with me for years to come, and I will add them to my arsenal of facts, studies, and stories to draw on whenever I am asked about the “fairness” question in women’s sports. They will help to remind my fellow feminists that the best way to protect women’s sports is to protect the full humanity—including access to sport—of every single person, no matter our gender. 

Elizabeth Sharrow

When Kye Allums came out as the first out transgender athlete in US collegiate sports it was, in the grand scheme of things, a nonevent for national politics. Kye’s experience as a transgender man on a women’s team was covered by limited media, authorized as it was by a policy passed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) the same year that enabled him to retain his athletic scholarship.  

Ten years later, the world for trans athletes at all levels of sport dramatically changed. Idaho passed the first law banning the participation of transgender girls and women from school-sponsored teams in March 2020 and, to date, twenty-six other states would follow. Whereas Kye remained the center of his own story of transition, the trans athletes impacted by exclusionary laws often appear as mere projections of a politically concocted gendered cultural panic. Very few are given the dignity of competing openly, using their own names and making their own choices, without intense media scrutiny, even lawsuits, challenging their right to access sports. Fair Game reminds us that the contemporary political “debate” around trans exclusion impacts real trans kids (and cis kids, too), families, and teams – often in ways that harm gender-transgressive children during the vulnerable time of their puberty and young adulthood. In an era where trans people often figure as phantoms, devoid of their names and personal stories, the authors remind us that this “debate” begins by stripping trans athletes of their full humanity. 

How can this be some fifty-four years after the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the progressive (if not fully enforced) federal law designed to outlaw sex discrimination in education? As state after state passes exclusionary laws specifically targeting transgender people, institutional failures abound. The distortions of Title IX have found refuge in both hostile and neglectful partisan leadership. Yet this book, with its clear and gentle focus on the young athletes currently harmed by marginalizing practices, foregrounds their dignity and the fight among adults to retain or deny it.  

We are living in a moment of extreme political polarization, a regressive rightward shift in national leadership, extraordinary disparity in gender-based rights across states, and the collapse of civil-rights governance, each fueled by rising authoritarian and fascistic impulses at the top of the US federal government. The second term of Donald Trump’s presidency has witnessed the gutting of the US Department of Education (DOE) and the staff that runs the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), specifically. These public servants have, for half a century, been charged with enforcing civil-rights law and investigating claims of discrimination in schools across the country. In the past year, supposed cost-saving reductions in staff at OCR under Trump have actually increased costs at the DOE, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report, while simultaneously decreasing investigations of civil rights discrimination complaints . 

Rather than standing by trans youth who are “excluded from participation in” and “denied the benefits of” full access to school-sponsored teams (as the text of Title IX guarantees), the administration is affirmatively pursuing investigations to reprimand districts that allow trans youth (and mostly trans girls and women) on their extracurricular teams. The young athletes profiled in Fair Game are being increasingly marginalized, even maligned and erased, by the federal institution legally charged to protect their interests. Historically, OCR has operated to investigate discrimination claims from the most vulnerable students; under the current administration, they are initiating enquiries against the schools and districts attempting to protect them. 

This book envisions a different feminist future that includes and values trans life. Anna Baeth’s other research suggest that trans and nonbinary athletes comprise about 1.6 percent of current NCAA athletes, even as the fight to exclude them operates at an outsized pace and scope. Yet the authors remind us that sports are not, ultimately, about “fairness.” Sports are about the joy that each of us can find in fully and autonomously inhabiting our bodies and enlivening our human spirits through play, compassion, camaraderie, and belonging. These precepts of self-determination and freedom from oppressive forces are, to my mind, core to a feminist agenda. Thus this book reminds us that sports for trans youth are as central to our individual and collective freedoms as the battles over reproductive rights, voting rights, and embodied sovereignty. Sports for all bodies is the feminist way. 

Anna Baeth

Ellie Roscher

In reading these reviews, we were struck by a sense of relief. As authors speaking out in support of transgender athletes, we knew the climate this book would enter into: one where trans athletes have been met with extraordinary cruelty and where even modest efforts to insist upon their humanity is treated as politically suspect. To be met instead with generous and genuine engagement felt deeply meaningful. Moreover, to have our work read closely by writers and scholars we admire, people whose work has shaped our thinking on sport, gender, and public life is something we do not take lightly. We are grateful to Christina Kahrl, Maggie Mertens, and Libby Sharrow for the care and seriousness with which they took up the book on its own terms. 

From the beginning, one of our hopes was to write a book that was accessible. We wanted it to be useful to those not already immersed in these conversations and to those who keep finding themselves drawn into them without language, evidence, or grounding. It means a great deal that each reviewer recognized that intention and honored what mattered most to us: to keep the humanity and lives of trans athletes at the center of a conversation that erases them.  

We are especially appreciative of Christina Kahrl’s attention to the audience for the book. While writing, we were often asked to imagine the book in narrower terms: was it for cisgender women involved in sport, educators, elected officials, parents, or trans athletes themselves? Our answer was always some version of “yes.” We wanted the book to be readable across those audiences because the conversation already exceeds any one of them. Kahrl seemingly understood that expansiveness as a means to elevate the conversation with each audience in turn. 

We also appreciate her highlight of policy examples and lived experiences in the book. In our work on this project, we were struck by how few people imagine a different way forward. Kahrl recognized our notion that if we can’t see a more inclusive sports culture, it makes it harder to build it. To her point, we believe that trans athletes must be included in the conversation as their joy can be prophetic, leading us all into a future that is safer, more exuberant, and where everyone knows the feeling of collective liberation through movement. Kahrl’s return to the foundational question, “What are sports for?” felt especially generative. To love sport, we must divest from those aiming to strip trans kids of their access to play. 

  We were grateful for the clarity with which Maggie Mertens situated the book in the landscape of sports writing. She has long done the thankless work of feminist journalism. Much of what we share in Fair Game has been repeated for years in efforts to infuse better information and greater equity into this conversation. Mertens’ work has modeled the persistent attention to language that this work requires. We appreciated, then, her use of the word horrifying to refer to the attention being given to women’s sport because of society’s obsession with fairness.  

Blaming trans athletes for inequity and a lack of safety in sport is a distraction from the far more pressing threats to women’s sports. The dramatic shift between beginning interviews in 2023 and publishing in 2026 revealed the speed with which bans on trans athletes took hold. Women’s sport is fertile ground for moral panic because of the scarcity that has long structured the women’s side of a binaried sports world. Mertens rightly points to the rational refrain many people in women’s sports and feminist media have been making for years, only to be drowned out by a vocal minority drumming up fear. One of our hopes for Fair Game was that the varied and brave stories of trans athletes would stay with readers to help inform conversations and policy about trans athletes. We were honored that Mertens feels resourced by these narratives, in our joint and continued work of growing a feminist voice in sport that benefits everyone. 

Libby Sharrow’s review carefully contextualized the book in the current political conditions that shape its urgency. We have long admired their ability to connect the intimate and the institutional. Here, Sharrow expounds on that connection by noting that conversations about trans athletes are not only about sport but about who controls whom and how control is governed at the highest levels. We appreciated Sharrow’s attention to the ways the humanity and freedom of cisgender people are tied up with the humanity and freedom of trans kids. When politicians are enabled to dictate the bodily autonomy of one group, control rarely stops there.  

We are also grateful for their contextualization of capitalism– who is making money from bans, who is financing the policing of bodies, and how the increasing cost of sports should figure more seriously in conversations about fairness. We found Sharrow’s articulation of the stakes essential: this conversation is about kids’ lives as well as “reproductive rights, voting rights, and embodied sovereignty.” Alternatively, supporting trans athletes, as Sharrow says, is about play and compassion. We read their review as an inspiring invitation for more people to join in. 

We wrote Fair Game to help build a different feminist sporting community grounded in curiosity, dignity, and relationships. At their best, we believe sports teach us how to adapt, how to share a world with people we do not fully know or understand, and how to take in feedback. We are thankful to all three reviewers for providing us such inciting feedback. We hope this book contributes to a new way of being with one another (even as authors and reviewers) and we thank Christina Kahrl, Maggie Mertens, and Libby Sharrow for helping us imagine that such a community is possible and that others are willing to imagine and create it with us.