Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports
Ellie Roscher & Dr. Anna Baeth (Forward by Chris Mosier)/The New Press/2026/304pp/IBSN: 9781620979785
Each of us is born into a world that is indescribably complex and ever-changing. We must make sense of it, so initially we accept what we perceive: the “evidence” of our own eyes; the pulse of our own needs; the values of our family, our community, our faith; and a growing subset of “facts.” Else how can we navigate this world? How fathom its breadth and its depths? And how, from the morass of possible choices, can we fashion a life that makes sense to us? A life in which each of us, personally – in our precious uniqueness – can grow, thrive, aspire, and contribute?
Ellie Roscher is an “educator, podcaster, coach,” and was a two-sport college athlete; Dr. Anna Baeth is a “critical feminist scholar and a cultural studies practitioner of sport”; and Chris Mosier is an athlete who came out as transgender in 2010: “[I]nitially, they didn’t know what to do with me … But I knew it would be worth it.” Indeed it was.
Mosier recalls the difficulties of being repeatedly “the first” open trans athlete and of having to explain what that meant and how to accommodate it: “Being able to compete authentically gave me joy I didn’t know was possible.… My hope is to blaze a trail through policy and lead by example so that it will be easier for every transgender athlete who comes after me.” To this end, in 2013, Mosier established the website Transathlete.com, a “leading resource for information on transgender people in sports.”
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Visibility is risky. It invites scrutiny and discomfiture; spawns misconceptions (disguised as “facts”); and may carry the threat of rejection and ultimately of hostility, attack, even “moral panic.” But the precondition for the worst of those outcomes is fear based in ignorance.
Through Fair Game, we meet twenty transgender athletes – spanning a range of sports, ages, and playing levels – who were interviewed by the authors beginning in 2023, with the intention to “share the stories of as many as possible.” By 2026, all but five of the twenty had been “banned from participating in organized sports.”
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Why? What fears, what myths, what occurrences, what “politics” – WHAT – led to this seemingly counter-productive, and certainly cruel, reversal of policy and practice?
Roscher and Baeth supply not defensible rationales, but some plausible if partial answers. So – unintentionally – did a friend of mine recently. A former high school athlete who continues to follow a fitness routine and is also an advocate for gender equality, I assumed he’d be interested in Fair Game. He was – until I began to explain some of its less obvious, and to me more surprising, revelations. He resisted, denied their possibility, and the conversation ended. Upon reflection, this did not really surprise me, as I might not even have raised the subject before reading Fair Game.
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Sex and Gender are often considered so closely related that the terms can be used interchangeably – and typically, they are used that way. But Roscher and Baeth differentiate: “Sex” is, of course, assigned at birth based on the appearance of the infant’s genitalia, then entered on its birth certificate, and the question considered closed. But the human body is far more interesting than that.
Take, for example, the common assumption that the hormone testosterone is present only in the cis-male – i.e., a person pronounced male at birth – and is centrally critical for supporting physical strength and athleticism. Or the over-emphasis on hormones in athleticism, neglecting atypical genetic advantages such as extraordinary “wingspan” and double-jointed ankles (Michael Phelps, swimmer); or bodily and training advantages in sprinting (Usain Bolt, 100- and 200-meter sprinter, but not a competitive runner at 800 meters).
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Approaching the conclusion of their path-breaking study, the authors envision a very different, positive, and possible future:
Imagination is central to activism. After decades of sex segregation, unequal funding and media coverage, and a horrendous record of harassment and abuse in sports keeping people apart, can you imagine a world where cis men, trans men, cis women, trans women, and gender expansive folks build a fairer sporting world for everyone? Can you imagine us creating the next iteration of Title IX together? Can we live our lives as if the future is already here? … Banning trans athletes is affecting us all. Our society would be a safer, more well place if more people really knew what it felt like to flow, to belong, to play, and to be free. That’s the real win.
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Reviewer Mary Biggs is a retired English professor, and has written numerous short stories, essays and articles, and a book on contemporary American poetry. Mary has also served as an editor and consultant on several literary magazines and a legendary small press, The Spirit That Moves Us, for which she co-edited two collections of new fiction and poetry.
