Schuyler Bailar had her eye on the Harvard University record book almost as soon as she gained admission; her high-school times in the 100-meter breast stroke were nearly as fast as the women’s all-time best at Harvard.
But during a year off after high school to deal with an eating disorder, she decided she should no longer repress feelings she’d had since she was a little girl: She was really a man trapped in a woman’s body.
With that realization, Bailar, who went on to have partial surgery and now identifies as male, faced another difficult choice this year: whether to swim as a man or a woman. NCAA rules allowed either option. Harvard’s women’s coach, Stephanie Morawski, urged Bailar to be true to himself in the pool, too — even if it meant the coach would lose a top recruit.
Bailar, who grew up in McLean, Va., was shattered at having to choose between barely making the men’s team or being a star on the women’s team. “I had worked my whole life to be on that team,” he says.
For any transgender student, the decision to “come out” can be a stressful one, pitting the desire for an authentic life against the realization that family and friends may be shocked and even respond with hostility. Transgender athletes deal with additional layers of stress, encountering a different level of competition, questions about locker-room protocol, and intense media and public scrutiny.
Transgender athletes aren’t a new phenomenon — the transgender pioneer Renée Richards joined the women’s tennis professional tour in 1977 after the New York Supreme Court intervened. But the issue is now back in the spotlight, thanks to athletes like Bailar and the Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner, whose transition to Caitlyn Jenner has been widely followed.
Even so, many colleges simply ignore the issue until they’re confronted with a specific case. In a recent USA Today poll, only 10 of 50 responding NCAA Division I universities said they had adopted formal policies regarding the inclusion of transgender athletes, as the NCAA had recommended in guidelines sent to all Division I institutions in 2011.
Governing bodies at all levels are developing wildly varying participation policies. Several youth-sports organizations, 15 state high-school athletic associations, and Nirsa, the national association that oversees collegiate recreational sports, have adopted the most inclusive stance: They allow transgender students to participate on the basis of their expressed gender identities.
Such policies are rarely enacted without controversy. After the South Dakota High School Activities Association passed an inclusive policy, a state legislator proposed instead a “visual inspection” of athletes’ genitals. “This is South Dakota,” he told the Rapid City Journal in August. “We haven’t adopted the East Coast culture.” The state association voted to uphold its new rule.
The most restrictive policy is associated with the highest level of sport, the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee allows transgender athletes to compete only if they have had gender-reassignment surgery and at least two years of hormone therapy.
Some sport-specific bodies also have highly restrictive policies: Many college rugby teams fall under college recreation departments — and Nirsa’s inclusive policy — but USA Rugby, which offers a club-team championship, currently defaults to the IOC’s policy.
“It’s a convoluted system,” says Wendy Motch, director of sports equity in recreation at the University of California at Los Angeles, who helped write the Nirsa transgender policy. “That makes it very difficult for a transgender athlete to navigate the sports arena.”
Some gender-equity advocates say the overall framework makes sense. Policies should become more restrictive as the level of competition rises, particularly for men transitioning to women, says Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a former Olympic swimmer who leads Champion Women, an advocacy organization for girls and women in sports.
In youth sports, “you want to create policies that get as many kids as possible playing,” Hogshead-Makar says. “In the Olympics, where the name of the game is immortality, it makes sense to have a more restrictive view.”
When the NCAA gathered experts to create its first policy, in 2010, many viewed the Olympic committee’s policy, with its surgery requirement, as “draconian,” says Mary Wilfert, associate director of the NCAA’s Sport Science Institute. Even so, the group knew it needed to ensure a level playing field.
The NCAA booklet on transgender inclusion is filled mostly with recommendations for encouraging participation, but it does address eligibility in its official bylaws for all divisions. Men transitioning to women who haven’t undergone sex-reassignment surgery are required to take testosterone suppressants for one year before they can compete on a women’s team. Women transitioning to men, like Bailar, the Harvard swimmer, can choose to continue to compete on a women’s team if they have not yet started taking testosterone.
“It’s the most inclusive policy in elite sports,” says Helen J. Carroll, sports project director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who co-wrote a 2010 report, “On the Team: Equal Opportunity for Transgender Student Athletes,” which heavily influenced the NCAA’s guidelines.
Bailar had undergone “top surgery” to remove his breasts, but hadn’t yet started taking testosterone, when faced last spring with the decision about which Harvard team to join. In the previous decade, at least two prominent athletes continued to compete on women’s teams after transitioning to men — Kye Allums, a George Washington University basketball player, and Keelin Godsey, a hammer thrower at Bates College who came close to qualifying for the Olympics in 2012.
When the Harvard men’s swimming coach, Kevin Tyrrell, gave Bailar a tour of the wide-open men’s locker room, with its group showers, Bailar didn’t flinch — he knew he would feel more comfortable there than in the women’s locker room.
Still, Bailar was conflicted. His success in the pool was a huge part of his identity. Swimming as a woman, Bailar would have a shot at qualifying for the NCAA championships. As a man, he would be paired with Harvard’s slowest swimmers, the walk-ons.
He decided to join the men’s team, and began practicing this month. Swimming as a woman “would have eaten me up over time,” Bailar says. “But there are days when I still grieve the loss of what I thought I was going to have.”
The NCAA doesn’t track the number of transgender athletes, says Amy Wilson, the association’s director of inclusion. But she says she’s received more calls about transgender participation than any other topic since taking the job on May 15.
All of the highly publicized examples of transgender athletes at the NCAA level involve transgender men. Wilson declined to comment when asked whether an athlete assigned male gender at birth was currently playing on a women’s team at the Division I level.
At puberty, testosterone leads to greater height and weight and bigger muscles for men — it’s the reason that sports are segregated by sex. In 2012, Sports Illustrated described the scenario of a transgender woman playing on a women’s team as “the third rail of the gender-equity debate.” Wilson’s predecessor, Karen Morrison, said at the time that it had not yet occurred in the NCAA.
It has occurred at lower levels, however. In 2012, Corey Cafferata, women’s basketball coach at Mission College, a two-year college in California, got a call from Gabrielle Ludwig, a 51-year-old transgender woman. Back in 1980, as Robert Ludwig, she had thrown down dunks while playing for a year on the men’s team at Nassau Community College, in New York.
Ludwig told Cafferata she had just had sex-reassignment surgery — and that she was 6-foot-5. “I said, ‘Hey, can you be here in 10 minutes?’ " Cafferata recalls.
‘It’s a convoluted system. That makes it very difficult for a transgender athlete to navigate the sports arena.’
The question of Ludwig’s eligibility landed on the desk of Carlyle Carter, executive director of the California Community College Athletic Association. With no formal transgender policy to consult, he defaulted to one that he thought would hold up in court: Gender would be determined by what was listed on an athlete’s birth certificate. Ludwig grudgingly paid $600 for a new birth certificate and sat out the first eight games of the 2012-13 season while waiting for it to arrive.
The team rallied around Ludwig from the first day. She started slowly, but during her second and final season averaged 18 points and 20 rebounds per game, and was named first-team all-conference.
Those stats drew the attention of a few NCAA Division I coaches, says Cafferata, but they lost interest when they learned the full story. “Is that the you-know-who?” Cafferata recalls another coach asking. “OK, we’re not interested.”
Discrimination remains a real threat for transgender athletes. “On the Team,” the 2010 report by the lesbian-rights center, emphasizes equal opportunity, the value of diversity, and the benefits that sports provide to students who be may be struggling emotionally during adolescence.
“For a transgender student-athlete, playing sports gives them a real anchor,” says Carroll, the report’s co-author.
But some transgender athletes say the policies and reports focusing on participation don’t tell the full story. For example, the NCAA’s policy encourages teams to provide private changing and showering facilities “when requested by a transgender student-athlete.” But Ludwig, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company, says her teammates felt that any policy should pay just as much attention to their needs.
They told her they were happy to share a locker room with her, since she’d had the full surgery — but that they wouldn’t have felt the same way if she still had a penis. Ludwig, who now serves the team as a volunteer coach, says she understands players’ concerns. “There is no woman alive who wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with that,” Ludwig says.
Transgender athletes also worry that the more-inclusive policies may give an unfair advantage to some athletes. Ludwig says the NCAA should rigorously monitor testosterone suppression for transgender women who haven’t gone through sex-reassignment surgery. The NCAA policy says that “ongoing monitoring” of testosterone suppression is required, but it doesn’t spell out how the monitoring should work.
“Would you quit taking the suppressants to gain an advantage before a big game?” Ludwig says. “Most everybody is on the up and up, but there need to be checks and balances in place.”
