In 2017, Ezra* was a high school senior and the co-captain of his cross country team in Maryland. It was only his second year competing on the boys team, having moved over from the girls team at the beginning of his junior season. He had been a star runner on the girls varsity team his freshman year, skipping junior varsity completely, and began coming out to his friends and teammates as transgender before his sophomore season. It was then that he faced a choice: which team he would compete with for his sophomore year.
His school was accepting and he faced no institutional barriers to competing on the team that aligned with his gender thanks to living in one of the 16 states deemed “friendly” for trans athletes by TransAthlete.com, nor would he be starting testosterone for at least another year. During his freshman season, his team had suffered a devastating loss in the state championship race — so devastating, in fact, that one of his teammates broke the second place trophy in half. Ezra was seeded to be the top runner on the girls’ team his sophomore year and knew they could not win without him. The team was like his family, and he ultimately made the decision to run with them.
“My experience as a trans person has been living with a lot of conflict constantly — conflict between how I see myself and how my body looks, conflict between how other people see me and who I know myself to be. Not being able to run on the men’s team takes that conflict and it puts it in the forefront of my mind, and it puts it in the forefront of everyone else’s mind. And that might be the absolute worst thing that you can do to a high schooler, whether it’s gender-related conflict or, or any other type of core, internal conflict”
Junior year, there was no question: before the season began, Ezra started testosterone and had top surgery. Joining the boys team meant leaving the girls who had been his biggest support system behind. The first time he’d ever heard someone use his chosen name was while he was running up a hill during a girls’ race, when someone cheered, “Go, Ezra!” He’d ridden the bus to all his meets with them.
By his senior year, Ezra was co-captain of the boys’ team and the underclassmen looked up to him. In retrospect, he looks back at the decision to switch teams as not only one of the most consequential moments in his athletic career, but as a culmination of sorts in the evolution of his identity.
There are probably hundreds of student-athletes like Ezra around the country, though we don’t hear about the lion’s share of them. Lost in the debates about biology and physiology and competitive advantages that surround trans kids in sports are the stories of the ones who are out there already — playing, winning, losing, thriving. And among the already small number of stories about trans athletes, the trans boys on the field are perhaps the most sparsely represented. Read more via Inside Hook