Trans People Have Always Played Sports: Women Breaking Barriers

Trans People Have Always Played Sports: Women Breaking Barriers

This article relates to Hot Girls with Balls

In Hot Girls with Balls, author Benedict Nguyễn chooses to depict her protagonists, two star athletes who happen to both be Asian trans women, as competitors in the professional men's volleyball league rather than the women's. This choice is a gesture toward the manufactured controversy surrounding trans women competing against cisgender women in sports that has become a lightning rod for those seeking to legitimize transphobic bigotry.

Trans women make up less than 0.002% of college athletes in the United States, and 0.001% of Olympic competitors. Experts estimate fewer than 100 trans girls across the US are competing in sports on girls' teams in K-12 schools. But more importantly, even if the presence of trans women and girls in athletics was as widespread and significant as detractors suggest, research demonstrates that they have no real competitive advantage over their cis counterparts, and may in fact be disadvantaged in some key ways. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that cis women have greater lower body strength and lung function than trans women, and that trans and cis women have roughly the same levels of testosterone and hemoglobin (a protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the muscles).

Trans women athletes have been competing with cis women for decades if not centuries. One of the first well-known trans women athletes was Renée Richards, who played professional tennis and competed at the 1977 US Open. Richards was initially denied entry into the competition because she refused to take the required "gender verification test"—she sued and the New York State Supreme Court ruled in her favor, declaring the test "grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and a violation of her rights." She and her doubles partner, Betty Ann Stuart, made it to the finals, but lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove.

As trans rights become more entrenched and normalized in society (even if still under threat) and trans people feel safer coming out and pursuing their goals, openly trans athletes have become more common, though intolerance and bigotry persist.

In 2020, a trans weightlifter named Laurel Hubbard competed for New Zealand at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Though she did not medal at that competition, she did earn silver in two events at the 2017 World Championships.

In 2022, Lia Thomas became the first trans woman athlete to win an NCAA swimming competition when she came in first in the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA Division I Swimming and Diving Championships, competing for University of Pennsylvania. It was a lightning rod moment that attracted hand-wringing from transphobic critics (including a University of Kentucky swimmer who tied for fifth with Thomas in the 200-meter freestyle event and has since made herself famous spewing transphobic vitriol at children). Penn stood by its athlete and nominated Thomas for NCAA "Woman of the Year." Her swimming career was sidelined by the decision of World Aquatics (the international governing body for competitive swimming) to disqualify trans swimmers who had not transitioned before age 12. Thomas has gone on to pursue a career in law and has been a tireless advocate for trans rights.

Though the US does not have any out trans women playing professional volleyball like those in Hot Girls with Balls at the time of publication of this article, Tiffany Abreu plays competitively in Brazil for Osasco. The team recently won the 2025 Superliga title—the top volleyball championship tournament in Brazil. It was the first tournament win for Osasco since 2012.

Trans people have always played sports. In Michael Waters' book The Other Olympians, he details the lives and careers of Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston, who both became world-famous athletes in the 1930s after they came out as trans men, inspiring both interest and appreciation in the general public. Waters connects the rise of the Nazis to power with the regressive policies around gender and sexuality that have continued to plague sports into the present day.

Illustration of Tiffany Abreu, Brazilian volleyball player
Created by Larcinha, CC BY-SA 4.0

Filed under Society and Politics

This article relates to Hot Girls with Balls. It first ran in the July 2, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.