Standing beside a girl I met online and a friend from college, I looked down at the twenty three strangers gathered before me. These trans women, some young, some old, had come out on a brutally hot September morning in Houston, at a dusty little league field, to play baseball with me.
There was a problem, though: I had never played baseball in my life.
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Inspired both by pickup baseball games started by transgender women around the country, colloquially known as “T-Girl baseball”; my adult guy friends who play sandlot baseball; and my own love of America’s Pastime, I took a stab in the dark. “Want to come play baseball with fellow trans women in Houston? Show up on Saturday,” I posted on Instagram. I figured five or six people would pull up. Nearly two dozen came, some from Austin, others from as far as Dallas, with gloves and bats sourced from all over. Their wives, partners and friends came along with fans, tents for shade, first aid supplies and water and snacks.
Getting people together to play baseball is not really in my nature. Outside of playing soccer briefly as a kid, I didn’t play organized team sports. I insisted that I wasn’t interested, but the truth is that at that age, I did not belong in my body.
Gender dysphoria feels different to everyone. I’ve often compared it to brain fog, or feeling like your head is full of TV static. Every time I was asked to run the mile, all the times I was picked last and when I had to change in a locker room with boys, I was reminded that I was growing into a body I did not want. I buried those feelings and told myself sports weren’t for me. It was only in college when I transitioned that I learned how to exercise, how to stretch and feel at harmony with myself, how to be at peace with the idea that I could try and fail at something. I now had the body I wanted, that I deserved. It was time to take care of it.
In 2024, I was invited to play softball with some coworkers. It was embarrassing-I’d never swung a bat or fielded a ball. But it was also strangely addictive. Each time I played, I could feel myself getting a little better. When I finally hit the ball for the first time, it felt like mainlining adrenaline. It didn’t matter that I grounded out, or that I was playing slow-pitch softball. I remembered thinking of Hall of Famer Ted Williams, who at various times called hitting a baseball the “hardest thing to do in sports.” While it wasn’t quite the same, I had done what I had once found impossible: I had tried a sport and improved.
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Joining a work sports team for fun is hardly abnormal, but as a trans woman in Texas, it felt like a quiet act of revolution. It wasn’t lost on me that I was learning to love my body through sport as others like me were losing the ability to do just that. As of now, over half of all states ban transgender girls from playing school sports with women’s teams. Texas led that charge in 2021, later expanding that ban to collegiate sports.
In an election season in which one political party spent millions of dollars in Texas alone declaring that trans people like me could only ever play sports to cheat, to steal, to harm women, I started a baseball team for trans girls like me. Amidst that onslaught of ads and the stresses of election season, baseball has been a panacea.
There are a few reasons why we’re playing baseball; the simplest is that for some reason, lots of trans women really love baseball. Part of it is that so many of us played as kids. So many of my new teammates told me they haven’t picked up a bat or worn a glove since middle school or playing T-Ball. Playing T-Girl baseball has allowed them to reclaim an activity they may have loved in the abstract but hated for what it represented: a rite of passage for a boyhood they never wanted.
For others, this is the first time they’ve played an organized team sport or the first physical activity they’ve done in months. One of my fellow coaches likes to talk a lot about the psychological concept and practice of “self-actualization”: realizing one’s full potential to do stuff they didn’t think they were capable of. Every time one of my teammates gets a hit or catches a fly ball, she has found confidence. We’ve turned this into a sort of team motto:
“Women Can Do Anything.”
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But perhaps the biggest reason was seeing other teams pop into existence. A few friends of mine who live in Chicago play in the city’s two transfeminine baseball leagues. The Chicago teams were in turn inspired by a league that started in 2023 in New York City. I desperately wanted that kind of community in Houston, in Texas. But seeing a need and wanting a space are not enough to will it into existence. It was when I saw a team start up in Atlanta that I decided I would try to make something happen here.
Transgender baseball practice in Austin, Texas. (Sophia Farnsworth)
I wanted to show my fellow trans women, my sisters, that even in the South, there are places for us to hang out and make friends and be ourselves. They don’t have to move north to cities to find community. For some of these women, four hours on the baseball field a few times a month is the only time they’re called their chosen names, the only time they’re treated with dignity and respect.
Beyond showing that to others, I wanted to remind myself that I’m not alone. There are people like me in my own neighborhood, in my home state. Since that fateful September practice, many of the girls from Dallas and Austin have started their own trans girl teams and there’s a group getting started in San Antonio. Through baseball, hundreds of us are creating a community and network of care, a web of love, that transcends highways and commutes and will bind us all together, even if some of us don’t stay here.
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When we have our first game this coming Sunday, it will not just be a game of ragtag baseball with swinging strikeouts and awkward pitching and fielding errors. It will be a reminder that we’re still here, that there is a place in Texas for people like us and those who love us.
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This article originally published at On Houston’s transgender baseball team, nobody questions if I belong.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
