When I was a kid, football was my favorite sport and the Denver Broncos were my favorite team. Because I was a fan and because my fashion sense has always been questionable, Denver’s bright blue and orange colors never troubled me. In summer I wore T-shirts with the fierce, rearing white bronco emblazoned across the chest, and in winter I wore a blue beanie with that same imposing equine bursting out of an orange, embroidered letter-D patch. This was all before it was made clear to me that little girls in the 1980s should wear other things. I was born biologically female, but no one told my brain that. My earliest memories are of hating dresses and long hair, and of loving Star Wars, G.I. Joe, and football. 

     At halftime during the games, my dad and I would toss my orange Nerf ball back and forth in the thick Kentucky bluegrass at my grandparents’ house, my sisters nowhere to be found. We didn’t talk much but just surrendered to the rhythm and companionship of a game of catch. Before he’d throw, he’d lick the thumb of his right hand, then grasp the ball and cock it back in slow motion before snapping his arm and following through. Sometimes he’d wave his left hand at me like he was batting away flies, motioning for me to go deep. I caught more than I dropped over the shoulder and on the run. Then I’d turn and, just as he showed me, put my fingers on the back third of the laces, step forward, and throw him a perfect spiral. Even as young as I was, I was a good athlete.

     In grade school, my friend Mike and I would play in the park across the street from my house for hours, pretending to be John Elway and Steve Watson and pretending that the Broncos might actually make it to the Super Bowl (this was the early 1980s, before their three losses in 1986, 1987, and 1989 and long before their victories in the late 1990s). If you’d asked me back then what I wanted to do more than anything when I grew up, it would have been to play professional football. 

     But how much time do we get as children to be childlike? The clock starts ticking down from the moment we’re born. There was a period, early on, when my dreams and goals were unfettered, not limited by society’s rules or my family’s fears. I can still remember that feeling in my chest—an endless inhale, full of lightness and hope. I can also recall the unexpected, sharp pain of a door slamming shut on my fingers when someone finally told me that girls don’t get to play football.

     This was the 1980s. There weren’t girls’ flag football leagues. There wasn’t even a mechanism for a girl to play football on a boys’ team. When I talked to my parents about signing up and playing anyway, I could tell it was not just a simple logistical problem. I could see my mom’s jaw tense; I caught the shared look she passed with my father. More and more, how I presented was presenting a problem. When I was younger, my short hair, dirty jeans, and obsession with sports was quirky—something a bit different from my sisters’ love of dolls and dress-up—though harmless and tolerable. But as I neared double digits, as the whispers of puberty began to round my body and deepen my voice, the fear became palpable, if not quite always identifiable. 

     It was like the Burlington Northern Railroad freight train that rumbled through my town each summer night, blowing its off-key horn at every crossing, the sad sound making its way on the breeze through the screen and the lace curtains of my open window. Far off at first—a joke one of my relatives made that I didn’t get, or a pause in a conversation as I walked in the room—almost an afterthought, so that I thought I had imagined it, after all. I would lie in the bottom bunk, listening as the crickets were slowly drowned out by the increasing decibels and the rumble of the cars, and it would become obvious it was a train, obvious there was so much force and mass behind it that it could not be stopped, that it would come barreling through, no matter what. Like that, my gender problem became evident to me in my mother’s tone of voice when she refused to buy me camouflage pants or when she lightly suggested I grow out my hair, pierce my ears, paint my nails. It became clearer each time a hushed but momentary silence fell when a stranger would mistake me for a boy.

     Getting clearance for me to play flag football or try out for the junior-high tackle football team meant having conversations with coaches, principals, and administrators. It meant accepting that it was not a phase. It meant advocating for it, for me, for a girl who looked and acted and felt like a boy. How could my parents do that when they, themselves, were so afraid of what I would become? So, their final answer: no more football. That’s when I learned dreams can be governed. That they can be wrestled into a sweater four sizes too small—tight, tight, tight across the shoulders, constricting the ribs like a python. It’s possible I’ve never taken a full breath again. 

     I stopped watching the Broncos, stopped watching football altogether. I never saw their Super Bowl wins. What I had once loved now left the faintest bitter taste on my tongue, a twinge at the base of my neck. I’m not saying I could have made it to the NFL or even that I wouldn’t have been cut from my junior-high team, based on size and skill alone. But if you’re stuck on that point, you’re missing my point. I had been measured, examined, valued, and found wanting and less than. Not because of my athletic ability (no one ever gave me a chance to fail) but simply because of my parts. It might seem like such a small thing over the course of a lifetime but, small as it was, it was a seed that sprouted shame. 

     That shame grew and grew in the thick, wet darkness of my soul. Its tendrils probed, then coiled, then slowly enveloped everything, quickening and expanding more each year. It penetrated my confidence, my body image, my relationships, my life goals, my faith in people, and my faith in myself. 

     It ended up being about more than that, of course. First, there was no more football. Next, I had to find an answer to everyone’s confusion over my gender. At thirteen, I was out of free passes to the ladies’ room. I could pretend I didn’t notice the squints, the side-eyes, the lifted eyebrows, but I could not ignore the many, many girls and women who were bluntly vocal in questioning my presence there. You do not know complete, abject humiliation until you must convince a stranger that you are, in fact, a girl. I didn’t have to do it every time I went into a public bathroom, but when it did happen, it was so acutely terrible that the fear was branded on me for life. It is something I still feel every time I push open a door marked “Women” today.

     Even when I could avoid the bathrooms, my 1980s junior-high life was a relentless saga of unbelonging. Because I was so different, I didn’t fit in anywhere: not with the jocks, the stoners, the geeks, or even the band nerds. And like a three-legged gazelle hobbling across the savanna alone, that meant I was fair game for everyone. Growing up lily-white, middle class, with well-meaning (if a little naive) parents hadn’t prepared me for the onslaught of open antagonism I faced every day. The message was consistent, relentless, and unanimous: how I was wasn’t okay; what I felt and thought, the clothes I wanted to wear, the things that called to me or interested me, how my body wanted to move and how it wanted to be perceived were all very wrong. Imagine deciding that about yourself at thirteen. Imagine the damage that might do.

     I didn’t know other queer kids. I had only a vague sense of what transgender meant. I don’t think nonbinary was a word back then. So, I floundered. I stumbled and thrashed through my days, awkward, alone, and so confused. And I lay in bed at night wishing the next morning would never come. Suicide, for me, was less about not wanting to live and more about not understanding how I could possibly fit into the world. I felt like a circus freak, the only one of my kind. That sort of existential loneliness compels action, like the last Carolina parakeet begging an onlooker to slip a gun through the bars of his cage. 

     But I was lucky. Even if they didn’t understand me, my family cared about me; they tried, in their ways, to help. I was thrown a few lifelines of kindness from one or two teachers and from an evolved classmate who became my best and only friend. I kept living, and I found other things to do. I immigrated to volleyball and basketball—sports that girls were permitted to play—and I excelled. Not without missteps and heartache and loss, I also slowly learned how to appear more feminine. And as I let go of what felt most true and right about myself, everyone I knew embraced me for it, celebrated my betrayal. It took me half a lifetime to find my way back to myself.

     Still today, so many kids don’t have that kind of providence. 

     According to The Trevor Project’s 2024 US National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously considered suicide in the past year. Their research has also shown that in states that passed anti-transgender laws aimed at minors, suicide attempts by transgender and gender-nonconforming teenagers increased by as much as 72% in the following years. 

     None of that surprises me. I have lived it; sometimes I live it still. It was one thing, for all those years, to feel so different from the people I knew, those I read about in books, and those I watched on TV and in movies, but it has become so much harder more recently to watch $215 million worth of anti-trans political ads. To understand that the vitriol calculated for political gain actually worked. That Trump’s appeal to hatred and othering found traction with millions of Americans whose only profit from his calculated bigotry was to feel their own finally sanctioned. 

     Make no mistake—national, state, and local interventions aimed at regulating gender in sports will mean life or death to some transgender and nonbinary young people, and given the recent blitzkrieg of bigoted legislation and litigation, it seems clear that their loss has been deemed acceptable to those in power. Will the rest of us stop scrolling long enough to ask why? Do women and girls truly need protection from transgender shadows lurking in their sports locker rooms? 

     For me, the paternalistic, newly acquired interest in the safety and sanctity of women’s sports championed by conservative, white, cis-het males would be funny if it weren’t so insidious. These are the same men, after all, who took umbrage when the US Women’s National Soccer Team sued for equal pay and trolled them mercilessly online. The same men who are infuriated when Taylor Swift shows up at a Kansas City Chiefs game. The same men who have explained to me, over and over during my whole life, why men are superior athletes and why watching women’s sports is beneath them. 

     Their focus on safeguarding women’s sports these days defies credulity and the experiences I’ve had over a lifetime. In high school, my basketball team won our conference and went to the state tournament two years in a row. The boys’ team finished 3–17 in my senior year. Our only fans were our parents, while theirs were the students and locals who packed the stands during home games. What bothers me most about that now is not that it happened but that I so easily accepted that drumbeat mantra—unspoken or implied at times and, at others, blatantly asserted as fact—that we deserved less because we were girls, that we were somehow inherently inferior to boys.

     Unlike the boys’ basketball team, our football team in high school was undefeated for three years; they won three state championships. The stars of the team would sit sprawled on a long, brown bench known as “the Seniors’ Bench” in the main hallway just outside the principal’s office, wearing their acid-washed jeans and blue-and-white letter jackets. Their power and authority over the rest of us were complete and never questioned. Their arrogance and cruelty were tangible; it oozed from their pores as they surveyed their fiefdom daily from that makeshift throne, roughing up tragically effeminate or underweight boys and evaluating every girl who passed, like they were bidding at a cattle auction. I remember being embarrassed, but not outraged when, as I passed them one day, they loudly opined on whether my pussy hair was red.

     Their football games were not just sporting contests; they were our high school’s social gathering spot. We would all dutifully troop to the games on Friday nights, assembling in the bleachers and autonomically arranging ourselves according to social standing. Given my change of heart about football in general, my more-than-ambiguous feelings about the football players themselves, and the fact that they steamrolled over most opponents like overfed sixth-grade bullies playing dodgeball against kindergartners, I wasn’t that interested in cheering for them. But some people were, including the most popular girl at our high school. She was petite—no more than 5’2”—beautiful, and an accomplished athlete herself. She would stand at the base of the bleachers, her back turned to the lights and the bright-green turf, visibly furious that we weren’t cheering to her standards, and scream up at those of us who were recalcitrant fans to do better.

     I hated her. Not just because of her overenthusiastic advocacy for a group whose smelly cleats I had lived under for three years. But also because she was gorgeous in the most classically feminine ways, and because she excelled athletically without her XX chromosomes or her sexuality being implicated. Whereas I felt like an imposter always on the verge of discovery, forever failing at good hair, tragically picking the wrong color eyeliner, always needing to coerce myself into miniskirts against my body’s will.

     So you might think I felt more conflicted, then, when I heard that on a fall night in the year after they graduated, the undisputed giant Bull Elk of the state’s three-peaters mistook her consumption of alcohol as her consent. But regardless of how I felt about her, I never doubted that it happened. That he could have taken what he wanted because he was male, and big, and strong, and used to getting his way; and she was small, and not as strong, and because she was a girl. I tried very hard not to think about what it would feel like to be smashed into a dorm-room bed by a boy who weighed sixty pounds more than me, to be violated against my will. To have to decide, in the moments and hours after he left, what to do next: tell someone or tell no one, take a shower or go to the police. And to have the events of the night replay over and over again in my head, wondering, looking for reasons, signs I should have seen that it was all about to go wrong.

     The details are fuzzy; at best, I was a distant observer of what happened afterward. I was occupied with the nuts and bolts of beginning my own adult life, and these were events impacting people I no longer wanted to know. But I do recall that he was charged with sexual assault and there was an alarming amount of conjecture in our social circles about whether she was telling the truth. I do not remember similar interrogations into his motives. I know the case ended with a deferred sentence and no imprisonment and that it no longer appears on that man’s record.

     I know this, too. After she washed the sugar-beet dust of our farm-town-turned-suburb off her shoulders, she went on to compete in the Olympics. But there’s no commemoration of that fact at my old high school. Her all-conference picture shares space not far from the Bull Elk’s on the “athletic wall of fame” there, but it’s the football three-peat—not her appearance on a world stage at the top of her sport—that’s celebrated on the banners of that gym. 

     After high school, my athletic endeavors ended for good, a disappointing conclusion to all my dreams of playing college sports, and far short of that old original fantasy of professional football. Still looking to compete, to achieve, to prevail, I became a divorce lawyer, where winning was measured in property and debt allocation spreadsheets and on the sick, compulsive, and possessory tug-of-war of custody battles. Here, men and women competed against each other, and it was at times easy for me to think of it all as still a game. For every time a judge told me to “speak up” or a male opposing counsel talked over or down to me in court, I paid it back in vitriolic, genderless written pleadings, where high heels and pencil skirts couldn’t impede my fingers from flying across the keyboard, where the tone and pitch of my voice or whether I was showing too much (or not enough) cleavage didn’t matter.

     There was a part of me that delighted in the construction of vicious, searing emails to soon-to-be ex-husbands at standing firm and resolute for my client in the image of a bitch female divorce attorney, despite knowing deeply that I was neither firm nor resolute, nor truly a woman. There were moments, always, when these men could be frightening. It was easy to see from the outside that they had been comfortable and accustomed to absolute power and control and that when their wives slipped free, their rage and impotence tempted them to violence. I have propped my chair against a conference room door outside a courtroom, not knowing if a husband who threatened to kill my client would try to force his way in. I have cursed said high heels and pencil skirts as I walked a client into a courthouse for a protection order hearing, knowing how much slower they make me. I have been called a cunt and a whore. I have felt my life was in danger many times over. 

     But as dark as it could get, violence kept missing me—and missing my clients—until one January two years ago, it didn’t. I had been handling the case for several months and steadfastly refusing the increasingly unreasonable demands of my client’s soon-to-be ex-husband, which infuriated him. I had also recently cut my hair and stopped wearing skirts and heels to court. Was it my imagination, or did his anger seem to intensify when he saw my revised, androgynous self for the first time on the video conference? Maybe so, maybe not; for me, the hatred has rarely been vocalized face-to-face. Much more often it seeps through people’s stares or, conversely, in their refusal to meet my eyes. When my heart rate quickens, when my breath catches in my throat, the intended message has been received, but the sender gets to disclaim responsibility and I am left questioning my senses.

     However he felt about me, he kept upping the ante with her. All of it was scary, though nothing I hadn’t seen many times before: closing the bank accounts, texting fifty times in an hour, posting rambling, taunting rants on social media. But I’d seen too many judges empower abusers by dismissing temporary protection orders, offering what translated in these men’s minds as the state sanctioning their controlling behavior because it didn’t rise to the level of “imminent physical harm.” The truth is that not much constitutes imminent physical harm until the physical harm actually occurs. Finally, though, the divorce court issued a protection order. 

     The day he was served, he violated the order. He was arrested and bonded out almost immediately. The judge gave him a personal recognizance bond—which meant that he didn’t have to pay any money out of pocket. It also meant that the court accepted the word of a man who had harassed and intimidated my client for months as sufficient currency. Within days, he had violated the protection order again and was arrested again. This time, the judge set a cash bond amount, but it wasn’t high. The ex had to come up with less than $2,000, and he bonded out again. 

     And on a dark, cold, crystalline night a few days later—the kind where the frost sparkles in the blue of the moon, mirroring the twinkling stars above—he created his own glittering landscape by shattering a glass window and invading her home. Then he violently killed someone she loved inside. 

     I had always prided myself on my cool, on my reserve, on my unwillingness to let an opposing party’s craziness impact my professionalism. But this case really messed me up. I felt responsible for not being able to keep her and her family safe. I was horrified with the fury that my intractability on the terms of the divorce had brought out in him. And it became blindingly clear that this was never a game to be won or lost, that men’s capacity for violence against women is always possible—a large, dark shape at the edge of your vision that you catch glimpses of only in the corner of your eye. But still there, always there. A monster that can fall upon you at any moment with unimaginable speed, wrath, and viciousness. My heart ached all day long, and at night I awoke from nightmares filled with violence and blood. I cried so much.

     And I was so angry. Angry at the ex, who, like so many others I had encountered in my practice, felt he was entitled to dictate the terms of his wife’s life and, when frustrated in his attempts to control her, felt justified in his violence. Angry at the judge for his ridiculous bond settings that only encouraged her assailant to continue his behavior. Angry at a broken system that undeniably favors those from a small, select, privileged class and pits the rest of us against one another, wrestling for scraps at their feet.

     All of this is to say: Who is it, really, that women should fear? Who do they need protection from? It seems so obvious that trans sports bans are a red herring, a deliberate othering by those in power of a tiny, vulnerable population without the social support or financial means to fight back. A ruse, a sleight of hand, a distraction meant to focus attention on the sickening, or—depending on who you are—thrilling spectacle of trans and nonbinary people fighting for their lives, while the spectacularly wealthy continue to stuff their suit pockets with gold. I want to stand in the middle of the long ribbon of US 287, that North-South, Canada-to-Mexico route that runs straight through my hometown as Main Street, and scream it at the top of my lungs until my voice fails me.

     Instead, I am writing this. I am wearing my “Protect Trans Kids” T-shirt in public, even though it scares me very much to do so. I am flying the Pride flag outside my house. I am going to all the marches. When fall comes, I won’t be one of the millions that tune in to watch the Broncos’ first regular season game. But maybe if it’s the right sort of Sunday afternoon, with the sun shining through the giant, green cottonwood leaves just right and, with the crickets still safe from a killing frost, my daughter and I will go outside, barefoot in the bluegrass, and have a catch. I’ll lick my thumb before I throw her the ball and she’ll clutch it against her chest, using both arms to cradle it like a newborn. Without words, and as graceful as any ballerina, she’ll grip the back third of the laces, just as I showed her when she was small. Then she’ll step forward with a strength and confidence that’s inherent, earned, and deserved, and she’ll throw me a perfect spiral.