Or?
MAYBE?
You could not be an absolute BIGOT and just acquiesce to ridiculous demands?
Um, okay? Yeah?
Living Nonbinary in a Binary Sports World
While many trans athletes have become political lightning rods, nonbinary people like the WNBA’s Layshia Clarendon are left out of the conversation. In a sex-segregated sports world, where do they fit in?
t was in the WNBA bubble—the Wubble—that New York Liberty guard Layshia Clarendon made the decision. The Wubble was a stressful experience for Clarendon. For one, they were living through a pandemic. For another, life at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., was very small. Clarendon shuffled among their villa, the gym and games, like
Groundhog Day designed for a professional athlete. They had also left their pregnant wife at home. (Clarendon alternately uses she, he and they pronouns.)
In her little time off, Clarendon became the face—and the force—behind the WNBA’s Say Her Name campaign, thinking about and talking about Black death on a near constant basis, busy with calls and webinars and brainstorming sessions. It was important work, and Clarendon felt called to do it, but it was draining, too. And there was another stressor that was draining Clarendon, one he wasn’t posting about on social media or sharing in postgame interviews: He couldn’t stop thinking about his chest.
Clarendon had no idea whether the WNBA would support their decision to have top surgery, a gender affirmation procedure that removes a person’s breasts and reshapes their chest to be flat, but they knew they would have the surgery regardless of how the league responded. The medical decision was not the struggle for Clarendon; the challenge was in figuring out whether she would be accepted by a sports world that was not designed for nonbinary trans people like her; she’d quietly updated the pronouns in her Twitter bio over the summer, but this was something different altogether. In the binary world of sports, leagues exist for men and for women. Clarendon sometimes feels like both of those things and other times feels like neither.
“It was something for me that was causing a lot of mental health issues,” Clarendon, 29, says of the worry about whether to move forward with top surgery and whether the WNBA would allow it—and what it would mean for his career if the league didn’t. “It made being in the bubble even harder than it [already] was.” It opened up a whole slate of questions that she had to consider, so after the season was over, she went to Terri Jackson, the executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA). There was no precedent for this, but Jackson was all in to support Clarendon.
It’s generally considered bad form to focus on the particulars of trans people’s bodies, but as a professional athlete, the decisions Clarendon—or any trans athlete—makes about their body are incredibly consequential. Careers can hinge on them. The questions Clarendon considered included:
What will the recovery look like and how will it impact my 2021 season? The league and my team have a right to know a lot about my body because it affects my play, but is there anything personal that the league can’t ask me about? I know I am going to publicly talk about my top surgery, but what if another player has top or bottom surgery and doesn’t want to share that with their team or the public? If the league doesn’t support me, can I be fired?
When I first spoke to Clarendon in December, a few weeks before their surgery, they were still trying to navigate these conversations with the WNBA. Luckily, they received the “full support” of commissioner Cathy Engelbert, as well as the Liberty and the WNBPA. On Jan. 29, the day that Clarendon announced her surgery on social media, coordinated statements went out from each of the league accounts, too.
It was a stark contrast to how the National Women’s Soccer League responded when Quinn, a midfielder for the OL Reign, came out as nonbinary and transgender
on Instagram in September 2020.
“I wanted to make sure that my identity was represented in my workplace, and in the public sphere,” Quinn, 25, says now of the decision to post about their identity on social media. Their teammates and coach knew, but the public did not, which meant that Quinn had to deal with being misgendered in the press—having the wrong pronouns used—and feeling invisible on a daily basis. “I really wanted to be another visible person in the sports realm, especially playing at such a high level. I wanted to help others that were looking for people like themselves in sport.”
Quinn’s Instagram post made headlines. But while their announcement was met mostly with support from the public, the NWSL's official Twitter account took weeks to acknowledge the event, and the Reign’s account took even longer. When the NWSL finally did acknowledge it, it was
a quote tweet of the BBC’s coverage of Quinn’s coming out. In Quinn’s first televised game after coming out, broadcasters got their pronouns wrong on-air.
The way the NWSL lacked explicit public support for Quinn after they came out was likely not ill-intentioned (the NWSL did not respond to multiple requests for comment). In the Reign’s case, the team did what it thought was most supportive of Quinn.
“Right now, you either fit in or you get lost. Like, you meet the NCAA or IOC standards that make you eligible to play on the men’s or women’s side, or you don’t. Or you transition and you get lost, forced to move on with your life.”
—Layshia Clarendon, New York Liberty