OutCasting; Transgender identity and issues faced by trans people in sports (Part 2 of 4)

now when i started transition i was kind of in that in between phase where i definitely can go into the women's locker room but i did not at all feel safe going into the men's locker room so you're finding facilities that had a gender neutral training facilities or a single stall restaurant it going to be changed or pool deck changed somewhat cerebral sliding area that i could get change than anything to avoid those gendered spaces within gm facility this is about casting public radio's lgbt q youth program or you don't have to be cleared to be here how testing is a production of media for the public good listener supported independent producer based in new york on my neck out testing media dot org hi i'm sydney on this issue without passing we continue our discussion of some of the issues faced by transgender people in sports for most people gender is a simple matter they our girls or boys or woman or man there's no conflict between the gender they feel they are in the

biological sex of their bodies but that's not true for everyone some people were born to a girl's body feel themselves female and some people born into a boy's body feel themselves to be female speaking very broadly the word transgender has come into common usage does grow wide range of people who self perceive gender doesn't match the sex of their bodies most of us have never new word to describe our gender identity we just take it for granted that just as the visibility of gay and bisexual people cause other people a start thinking of themselves as heterosexual or straight the growing visibility of transgender people has brought us the word says gender describe people who are not transgender most of us most of you listening to this program are crowley says gender and on this edition of out casting were talking with chris moser an athlete who self identifies as a transgender guy chris's transgender advocates educator coach and three term iron man tragically he's the founder of trans athlete dot com a resource for athletes coaches and these

traders to foster community of inclusion this is part two of a four part series in part one chris discuss going through an identity change without any woody to guide him using youtube as a tool to help his transition and has positive feelings about identifying as a trans guy you can listen to the series on our website a passing media dot org our pastures travis now continues our conversation with chris how has being an athlete affected your transition before i came out and before i really understood my identity sports is a great way for me to you certified in some ways and in training are safe or running races that you provide me time away from other people and it was also a great way for me to sort of manipulate my body and so in weightlifting and running out that was those are two ways that i tried

to make my body more stereotypical masculine right so like to have over bigger muscles or look a little more direct than i am right now or than i was at that time and i search including in running races must are doing really well in the scene the category but i do identify as female so that was the place that had to compete but it didn't really feel like it fit for me and i was just sort of starting to figure that out and i started racing ended i sent its experience of the discrimination will that harassment might be at the starring ryan lined up with other women and you look over at me and he like where you hear or you don't are you in the wrong or you in the wrong spot and in some ways that was like a victory for me i yeah i passed because a guy and another way is it was like a cave a softer of this race and people are like asking me why i'm here or so is really kind of the conflict

that moment for me i am and the conflict really came when i was doing well in in my races and being competitive person i really wanted to see how far i could go like can i win a race can either you place in top three in then i started to wonder at what cost because i was so uncomfortable in other areas of my life in work in socializing you at home then at a certain point i stop mattering you know if i if i do well in races it doesn't really matter because i'm so uncomfortable everywhere else that i go so you're the sports piece really factored in it into my decision to take testosterone cause i knew that i would have changed categories and mentally i think just by the way they were taught is that the general idea is that women are not as competitive as man and in my running race results on a necco also see that in the top woman would be somewhere in the

eighties to one hundred's over all that there were many more men who would beat a top women as i really wondered if i could be competitive while my transition categories as well so it's you know something that i really had seat come to terms with of of being serve as it as i call him the old pack athlete and that was really disappointing for me when is a transition but you know i knew that it was the right choice and i've been pleasantly surprised that it's actually if you put an effort and hardworking training unit that i'm i'm not being limited by my body i'm actually doing really well in my races competing as a man so i've heard can a broken pass that idea and the concept of that i'd be stuck as a transgender athletes in the middle of a pack and in the sport so much you've participated what kinds of policies either pertaining to

trans athlete we'll call seen general for running and for tough on is that it's governed by the us anti doping association and what that basically says is that anyone who uses testosterone is using a private it substance testosterone is a performance enhancing drug and so anyone who uses it needs to get special exemption they need to be cleared through a therapeutic use exemption in order to take it so the second that i took testosterone isis categories two the second thing is mel and i certainly didn't have any physical benefits after taking it once and those benefits in terms of like increased strength we come over time with him first to the first two years i say so the policy was that i recently had to change categories and then also that i had to get this therapeutic use exemption form filled lots of them approved to compete

as a man whether any protections from disrespect or discrimination if there are i'm not really sure of them here in new york city and protected to a certain extent and that the problem with that is is that to a certain extent it's it's the responsibility of the person who's been attacked to prove that they were attacked which basically entails reliving the entire event again so a lot of that has been here in cases where i have been harassed verbal ii for example i have really relied on folks around me to step in and intervene and i've been fortunate enough that enough folks know me an indian rum people who are afraid to say something the la times is easier for a bystander for someone else to say something then that it was for me to stand up for myself because if it felt really embarrassing for me to have to correct someone about my gender

or stand up for myself and say you know i'm a guy other people set the bad for me but a make a difference if there's a law that said you can't arrest people for their expression or identity i think it would be in the way that it would be protected should never go to court and i am all in favor of how protective laws like that but i think that there still is a lot that slips by there's harassment that happens every day there's a report of harassment that happens every day i'm like i said that that process of going through to get somebody you know that it's going to the legal process to enforce such a law is really tiring for the person who's been attacked so yeah i think in general i just more people the good people is

that it's just common sense laws of heat that we need to treat other with love to come from a place of love and that's it that's not the way that people who love each other talked to each other how do you think your experience might've been different if you're playing a different sport or a team sport i think it doesn't you have encountered more resistance and i've been with the team and the track one is a team sport by i do it as an individual as a part of the team so really have the option to opt out if i want to and i did that a lot when i was considering transition in the early parts of transition that i would choose to work on my own as opposed to be with my team one of the issues that i had was with swimming because i had to go to the gym and i couldn't really avoid that team sort of locker room environment so i had a beautiful i don't like swimming probably for a lot of different reasons or more of them is because of the

swimwear and so for someone whose body doesn't match how they feel inside wearing a bathing suit can be a really really horrendous experience so my swim training was definitely impacted because i didn't like to go into the locker room and i'd been kicked out of women's locker rooms before transition how when i started transition i was caught in this in between phase where i definitely can go into the women's locker room but i did not at all feel safe going into the men's locker room so you're finding facilities that had a gender neutral training facilities or a single stall restroom like going to change or like the pool deck changed somewhat cerebral sliding area that i could get change and yet anything to avoid those gendered spaces within gm facility travel is really interesting because cycling bad if you've ever seen cyclists and then say to her to france or something you wear

skin tight on outfits so yeah there are there were some body things that were happening for me there as well that it's really uncomfortable to find your breasts and where a skin tight outfit and work out right so you know for me to make my body match the way that i felt in my mind i was doing things like binding and then too you were physically exert myself it was a painful and hand in a lot of ways as either but i didn't do that and i would deal with my own surf self consciousness about my body and you how are people reading me how are people thinking about me when they see me you can miss can they seek certain parts of my body or i wouldn't mind and then just the units are unable to breathe he had a horrible experience and mike mike

team has been awesome i'm a member of the empire try club in newark city on the coach for them as well and i think for most of them i was the first trans person that they never met and so the work great about accepting me but i think it's part of the nature of of being on scene right is that that scene is sort of a chosen family and we support one another in our races and are training and in our outside lives and people really except they didn't quite understand initially but they did the work on their own to figure out what it meant to be trans and three best respectful questions and i really open myself up to that too because i wanted them to understand that i didn't want to have to be forced away from my team just because i wanted to be myself this is us in public radio's lgbt q youth program produced by media for the public good in new york atlanta podcasting media dot org we're talking about

the experience of trains athletes with chris mosher a transgender advocate educator coach and three time iron and cathy he's the founder of trans athlete dot com a resource for athletes coaches administrators to foster community of inclusion can you speak about the experience of trans athletes rather than yourself i really can't but i know that they're out there there's a lot of them what i see is that for trans men who play sports the biggest cases that we've had are the biggest things that we've heard about have been though to identify as trans men but have not yet taken testosterone and are playing on women's teams and so we had incidentally basketball player who identified as trans guy and was crying on women's team in division one basketball and didn't take testosterone so he was still able to compete on the women's team when he started take testosterone he stopped

competing there are a lot of cases like that where folks can compete up until a certain point and then they're going back to the idea of well i still be competitive when i switch categories m aura or will have the opportunity to keep mice which categories there are a lot of obstacles in place for trans athletes like the locker room situation so there are a lot of our trans men playing sports right now how we see a few more trans women playing sports at least that in the media like fallon fox who's a transgender mixed martial artist by and for a lot of that media attention that they get is so incredibly negative that it makes it a real challenge for any athlete to step into that in knowing that if they are passing unable to compete as the gender that they feel

they are the risks of them losing that opportunity if people find out that they are transgender is incredible and for someone who loves playing sports the idea of having that piece of your identity taken away from you is really a painful idea what you think and we don't see trends athletes positively portrayed in the media to agree to gay or lesbian athletes like greg louganis or billie jean king i just think we're not there yet i think that as a society we are moving more in that direction and i would say the last two years has been tremendous for trans visibility and a lot of that is in part from laverne cox and janet mock being such incredible advocates for for transgender folks in general and trans women of color and

you know very visible be that they have it has been amazing and doing you know the media circuit and being able to have open and honest conversations with him various folks so in general there's just a lack of understanding about what it means to be transgender are other more trains athletes participating now in sports then when you first started i believe that there are and i know this because i've i'm now a position where people have seen me or hurt my story and are contacting me through the website trans athlete dot com and are sharing their story with me so i'm getting folks from high school from colleges who are asking about policies asking to be connected to other trans folks or just telling me their story about how they are playing or how they want to play a they're nervous about it so i know that there are trends

athletes out there and in part it is when something comes across your radar as something of interest is not to see it a lot more and so thick it goes back to when i didn't have the terminology for what transgender was i didn't know any trans people i really might have known trans people and college and maybe just didn't know that i knew that an ais didn't know about their experience so as soon as i you got started on my transition i remember that's when chaz bono came out around that time and then little things started to pop up in the media and all the sudden as hearing you more more stories about trans people and not a lot of them were positive when i first day coming out was like oh you'd be a pregnant man and so like i thought part of my fear and telling other people that i was trans was that a lot of these stories that were popping up are really negative but more more now you know we're

seeing positive stories and i'm i'm noticing them a lot more because it's a topic of interest to me trans phobia is the word used like homophobia to describe discrimination or bias against trans people they can be as simple as calling someone he when she asked to be called she were using words like she melts frannie another slang that could be offensive in your life your career as an athlete we're experience as an activist have you run into that or perhaps more subtle kinds of trans phobia there's certainly been subtle trans phobia in my experience particularly in coming out and then maybe six months to year after coming out that a lot of it was based around people misidentifying of pronouns and you know i understand that transition is the transition for everyone so just in the same way that i was transitioning gender that folks around me had to serve transition there their mind state when they thought about

me and how they identified me and so i understood that for folks who had known me for a very long time it'll be hard for them to get on board with it but for anyone who respected me and was friends with me i expect about be something they would put effort into doing and i experience cases where you know in public situations people would miss identify me with pronouns and there'll be people in the room who had only ever met me is he and you know someone would call me she and i think for it yeah for the first year where i still felt kind of uncertain about whether you how how are folks perceiving me was it the same way i was perceived myself for the first year it really negatively impacted me every time that i heard that and it was sort of like being a videogame character

and every time vets someone would say she i would lose power and you know there was no way to get that back by the end of the day i would go home and just sort of collapse in this sort of you know energy just really defeated when that would happen and it happened less and less over time but i've i thought that that was a way of subtle trans phobia of people not respecting my identity another case of that will be folks who have only met me as he and didn't know that i was trans and later ran ad after knowing me for a year two years as he introduced as male never as trans as soon as they found out that i was trans call me she answered that to me was very clearly trans phobia because they had never ever had a problem with pronounced before that so that was the most impactful way i think for me and i realized that

so subtle but language is so incredibly important and for folks who don't have to think about how they identify it they might not get that they might not understand how he or she can be a make or break situation for someone's day for someone's mind state we've been talking with christmas are a transient athlete thanks so much for joining us chris chris mosher is featured in a film called just gender which looks at the realities of transgender lives let's listen to a short excerpt the earliest memories of many transgender people include a sense of something being disconnected between their inner sense of person and how they were told they should act as boys or girls most transgender people describe from a very early age feeling something wasn't right with in them something that is not about them all the time twenty four seven my

first memory of not feeling the same way as people were purporting need to be was three year for i remember bean so confused i was in a boy i don't think i have a first experience because i was felt he was just always there for them it was conscious of who i was probably around two three years old just this was the personnel supposedly and not avoid that i was trying to fit in with the rules that i was fun the sense of disconnect could be as simple as a strong internal me to be playing with or engaging in activities typically associated with children of the opposite gender my earliest memories of a sense of things being wrong or about the time i started kindergarten before that i really didn't realize there was that much difference between male female boy girl

boy get to guard i was really the first time when things were still segregated by voice to this girl's do this and i could not understand why i couldn't be with the girls were supposed to do a very confused because i didn't want to be doing what the boys were doing but first memory really that's most concrete is going to kindergarten on the very first day of school and having to wear a dress both my parents took me to school and introduced me to the kindergarten teacher and she was very grandmother liane welcoming and kind and she said and here are some little boys over here here's a little girl's over here and then you know just please come in and make yourself at home and i just said ok and i went over to the boys were pointless and trucks and interviews myself and this soul right and from that point forward it was clear to everyone around me basically that i really belonged more with the boys then with the girls isn't that i had

were these dresses around my earliest remembrances going to dress up as a woman and here is a woman carrying what always comes to mind is that way really first remembrances have nothing to do with clothing they had to do with my feeling that i would have been better off being a girl and a boy when i was about five years old i started to realize that i didn't like girl toys like barbies are dollars wanted guns you know the ages and you know stuff that boys like and at first it was ok my parents we're more than willing to you know give me stuff like that and i started to realize oh well you probably should play more with tea sets and digest all in all this stuff and i would turn them into work always eventually we've been listening to a short excerpt from the film does gender which looks at the

realities of transgender lives and it seemed that schools and corporate diversity programs among other audiences the film is available through chemo lorber films this is been part two of a four part discussion with try at the christmas cheer on the issues that transgender people face in sports you can listen to the series on our website a passing year dot org an exhibition about casting we continue our discussion because much or as he talks about early trends will be in this life or trans phobia within the lgbt q sports community the misconception that trans male athletes have an advantage in competition and experiencing his newfound privilege of being white man that's it for this edition of out passing public radio's lgbt huge huge program where you don't have to be clear to be here this program has been produced by dr passing team including youth part is inescapable as nick ok josh's david travis andrew michael cimino karen marco

chose a nice city our executive producer is mark's office if you're having trouble whether its at home or at school or just with yourself call the trevor project hotline at eight six six forty eight seven three eight six or visit them online the trevor project dot org the trevor project is an organization dedicated to lgbt q youth suicide prevention called if you have a problem even have an online chat you can use it if you don't want to talk on the phone again number is eight six six forty eight seven three eight six different isn't a reason to hate or hurt yourself you can also find a link on our site are passing media dot org under our testing lgbt q resources our testing is a production of media for the public good a listener supported independent producer based in new york and more information about our testing is available at our testing media dot org you'll find information about the show or savings for our

past episodes of the podcast testing is also on social media connect with us on twitter tumblr facebook youtube and instagram at out testing media i'm sydney thanks for glistening join us again next time for part three