Thank you for being here. Bonus content related to my published work, like today’s newsletter, is usually only available to paid subscribers. But I’m making today’s interview with Rachel Miller, the editor-in-chief of SELF, free to read.
Paid subscriptions allow me to dedicate more time to this newsletter. It’s not just the time I spend writing, but the time I spend planning, researching, and reporting that is supported by upgrading.
I recently published a piece at SELF about some of the elite trans women athletes who have been banned from competing in their sports due to exclusionary policies from their international governing body. You can read my original article here.
Paid subscribers can read cyclist Austin Killips’s story, which got cut from the final version of the SELF feature, here—along with “The Best of Chelsea Wolfe: Quotes From the Cutting Room Floor.”
I have been working on stories with Rachel Miller for nearly five years now, across a variety of publications. In May 2022, Rachel became the editor-in-chief of SELF magazine, a health and fitness publication for (mostly) women. The world of health and fitness doesn’t always have the best track record when it comes to inclusive, body positive content but that’s something that Rachel has been working hard to change.
Prior to her role as EIC of SELF, Rachel worked at Buzzfeed, Vox, and VICE. She also worked in wedding media for years, spending the majority of her career in what we would consider “digital women’s media.”
Something I love about working with Rachel is that she trusts me to be the expert on the stories I write about trans athletes. Last fall, she hired me as a consultant and to write the lead feature on a package on trans youth in sports. That package, titled, “Let Them Play,” recently won the 2024 Excellence in Online Journalism Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists.
I’m really proud of the work that Rachel and I are able to do together. The editing process always feels like a collaboration and a conversation, which can be rare. Below, Rachel and I talk about why sports are camp, being a queer woman in women’s media, and how to be a health and fitness publication that rejects diet culture.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Out of Your League: What made you want to take this job, as the editor-in-chief of a health and fitness publication?
RM: I love the brand. I interned here, actually, right after college, and had been a long time reader. I had quite a few friends who had worked here in recent years. A former coworker from BuzzFeed had been editor-in-chief so I knew her and was close with her, and a lot of our our colleagues had come to work for her after BuzzFeed, so I felt like a friend of the brand going into it.
I just really liked their approach. It feels meaningfully different to me than other health brands. It's inclusive and fat-positive, which was a huge part of it, and just seems to really care about health in a meaningful way.
OOYL: I think that touches on some things I want to get into. When you think about SELF in the larger ‘women's media’ ecosystem, what role do you see it filling?
RM: What I hope for SELF is that we can be a true safe space for people who don't feel seen or spoken to by other health websites. I think that pretty much everyone else is still covering diets and weight loss. They might call it something different, but that's pretty common.
I also think we can be something a little more exciting and personal than websites that will give you the answer if you Google something and you have a question, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a place that you want to stick around. My hope is that we can bring a real authenticity and warmth to what can be a really fraught topic that can involve a lot of shame, that people can feel really embarrassed by, or just anxious and freaked out about. I hope we can be a really great source of comfort and accuracy.
You can really trust our answers. Our fact checking process is really rigorous, so that's something I'm really proud of. [Ed. note: it is perhaps the most rigorous fact-checking process I have ever been through!]. But also, you can come here and know you're not going to accidentally be made to feel bad, is my hope. We try really hard to build that into everything we do.
I think inclusivity in all ways is important. When we think about talking about dermatology, for example—one small edit that we give a lot is when people talk about redness appearing on your skin if you're writing about an infection or something, is it going to look red for everyone, even if you have darker skin? Like, that's just a small thing. But I think over time, people start to notice it.
We also try to be really inclusive when it comes to pronouns. We always use the singular they. We've had a workshop with my team from the Trans Journalists Association about how to specifically do health reporting because when so many studies are very gendered, it's not always clear. Or when the study is saying ‘women,’ what do they mean by that? So we talked specifically about how to handle that in our writing, how to make it clear to our audience who we're talking to, to make distinctions between sex and gender, and to really build that into everything we're doing.
OOYL: As I'm hearing you talk about the hope that this content will be warm and authentic—I've written service journalism for you at other publications— and now that you say that, I can see that was something that was part of working with you elsewhere, too. I see it in the content that SELF is putting out now, but I hadn't necessarily connected that to you before.
When it comes to women's sports, how does that fit into what you're doing at SELF? As someone who writes predominantly about women's sports, I think women's publications and women's media tend to really struggle with women's sports and where to put it. Obviously you’re a health and fitness publication and there's some overlap, but at the same time, it's not exactly in line. Where do you see women's sports coverage fitting in?
RM: I came into a SELF that had been covering sports in some capacity over the years, like putting athletes on covers during big sporting events like the Olympics or the women’s World Cup, so it's been part of the brand. But I think you're right to say that it is hard for women's media to figure out what the ‘in’ is, because if you're not a sports-specific publication, it's figuring out what sports people care about and what they're what they're going to click on. We're not going to post scores. That's not what we do. And so it's figuring out, ‘okay, what is our lens on this?’
I've talked to our fitness director about this, and we're really thinking about the athlete as a whole person and where sports intersects with progressive and feminist issues. I think that's what's really interesting—where sports intersects with equal pay or maternity leave or Black maternal mortality. We're talking about athletes and their mental health, or other aspects of the culture. That's where we start.
I'm interested in sports as part of culture—what they tell us about culture, how they can be at the forefront of culture, how they can represent you, how they can connect you with interesting people who you might not have known about otherwise. And because women's sports aren't covered as much, we can often find a really cool story. We don't have a ‘sports’ person on staff, but in working with people like you who have your finger on the pulse of this—I felt like we had that at VICE, too. I remember when you came to me with this story about the broadcasters getting the [Black players’] names wrong, like, that was a great story. That felt very ‘VICE’ to me, although SELF could run a version of that, too.
I think people also are really inspired by athletes, and so figuring out how to present that is an exciting challenge that we're still figuring out.
OOYL: A few years ago I did a very, very deep dive into the history of women's sports media and how womenSports magazine evolved into Women’s Sports and Fitness, which evolved into just fitness coverage and folded in on itself. There's a lot of reasons for that that usually have to do with sexism1. But at the same time, I think it is an interesting question for a publication like yours to tease out sports coverage and fitness coverage and where they intersect, but also where they're different.
RM: I would guess that a lot of our readers played sports in high school, and I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind. I think they are interested in the topic of sports as it relates to self-image and confidence and how it makes you feel.
I'm also interested in sports at every age. We did some videos during the National Senior Games, which I thought was really fun. I would love to do more content around people continuing to play sports as they get older, or discovering sports as they get older, or trying new sports as they get older. I think there's a lot of leagues and teams who are doing that. I think that's a really SELF story to me, because it's just really about finding a way to do fitness and move your body that feels really like good to you.
OOYL: I want to ask specifically about queering women's sports coverage at SELF. We've worked on several things together. You had Ali Krieger on the cover, and obviously she's a great athlete, regardless, but is that something that you think about, and is that an important lens to bring to this coverage?
RM: I really felt like during the process when your book came out and you were on the podcast I was hosting at the time, we talked a lot about—and you've written about this a lot of different ways—but how the queerness of women's sports has been hiding in plain sight for years. That feels like something that can easily be corrected. Once you know it's there, it's everywhere, it's inescapable. So in a sense, it feels like that is almost the elephant in the room with a lot of other sports coverage, that women's sports are just so gay—and it feels harder to not acknowledge that. And why wouldn't you want to acknowledge it?
I mean, I know why some people aren't comfortable acknowledging it, because if they're straight, they might feel weird about it or not know how, or they might not be seeing it. But I think my experience of women's sports has changed so much since coming out and in such a good way, in a positive way. It is such a great place to see lots of queer women having a great time and living their lives. And so if that's what we're trying to capture in our sports coverage—women who are cool and doing interesting things and have interesting, progressive values, who are trying to push things forward within their sport or within the culture—it makes sense that there would be that intersection with queerness.
But I think on a personal level, I'm just drawn to queer athletes. I want to root for people who are openly queer and proud to be queer, who are maybe challenging gender norms in their presentation. So much of sports coverage—or women's sports coverage—over the years has had this, again, elephant in the room of ‘we're covering the thin blonde women who look a certain way, very femme.’ I'm sure you probably know more about this than I do, but it feels like you can be a female athlete if you still look normatively feminine. That's kind of the implication. It's important for us as a brand that is challenging these body norms to also think about gender presentation as part of that. They're intimately connected in a lot of different ways, but I think that's really important and I'm excited to be able to do that.
And it's also like, it can just be fun. We published a story about teammates dating each other [that you wrote]. And thinking about the story that [you and I] did at VICE during the Olympics [in 2021] that was like, ‘here's how to root for everybody gay.’ It can just be really fun and joyful. We're trying to capture the joy of sports. We did this story last summer about LezVolley, the Cherry Grove volleyball tournament2 that was just like, ‘Look at everyone playing volleyball on the beach. Like, can you think of anything better? And it also happens to be gay.’ There's just nothing really like that out there.
It seems like we have a big opportunity, as a Conde Nast brand, to bring that high level of production with a cover or the photo shoot, which I think is super exciting.
OOYL: I loved the Ali Krieger cover and photo shoot, and I especially loved the cover line: “Ali Krieger is so fine.” It felt both explicitly gay, like we were explicitly viewing Ali through the gay female gaze by acknowledging that she is FOOOOOOINE, but it’s also a nod to what was going on in her life at the time—how she was coping with a high-profile divorce.
RM: When we are thinking about the fans of women's sports, as well, it feels like a missed opportunity if you're not thinking of them as gay or speaking to them as gay people, because that's who's going to a lot of these events. So I'm trying to think about that a little bit more actively. Not pandering, but like, let's lean into that. Let's create content for people who care about this. I think it can reach a wider audience, but I don't think we need to be afraid to make content that's explicitly gay or not being afraid to “look gay.”
The Ali cover is one I'm really proud of for many reasons, but I think visually, that's what I've been trying to do since I started. Fitness and wellness and health is so campy. We can really lean into that and have fun with it. I thought that we really were able to do that with her, because she was really down and it made it really easy. Part of queer culture is that camp, and that can separate SELF from our competitors who don't necessarily have that lens on things or don't want to look “too gay” or are more concerned with the “feminine.” Femininity and masculinity can be fun, but I don't want them to limit us in what we can do and show.
There's a lot of people—even straight people—who just don't feel welcomed by the traditional imagery of fitness, health, all of it. We can provide that and also do something that hopefully feels fresh and different.
OOYL: You also are quite trans inclusive in the way you're defining ‘women’ and ‘women's sports.’ We did the youth sports package together, as well as the piece pegged to the exclusion of trans women around elite sports. I think we tend to see one specific kind of trans sports coverage. It's clear to me that you think of trans women and trans athletes as part of who SELF should be covering. How are you thinking about the trans stories that you want to tell that maybe go beyond the same few narratives that we’re used to seeing?
RM: I think a lot of that has been working with you, because you are a sports journalist who is paying really close attention. ‘Let Them Play’ was a great example of this. We came to you and said, ‘we're going to pay you as a consultant to tell us what you think this should be. This topic is important to us, we have some general ideas, but we want you to help us shape the story.’
With [your] other stories, it came from me going to you at the beginning of the year and saying, ‘What do you want to write this year?’ So just developing a relationship with somebody who you trust, or following journalists who you trust and seeing what they're interested in, can help you break out of telling the same old story. That's how we got ‘Let Them Play’ to where it was, where you said, ‘let's tell a story about trans kids playing sports and it's no big deal,’ which I wouldn't have thought of like that. We needed you to do that for us.
In general, having beat reporters goes a long way. Trans sports is a beat, and you're on it. In terms of freelancers, you're the one I think of most because there's other people who I follow that are staff writers other places, so that's helped us develop this relationship. But I would love to get more pitches in this realm. It doesn't have to be from trans writers either, though, like, that's a nice bonus. But cis reporters can also pitch these stories, so I think that's really important. And the more that we do, the more that we can do because we develop expertise, people can come back for it, we can sort of own this.
I think the other thing with journalism is that you want to tell the stories other people aren't telling. Even if you take the important politics out of it—which I don't—but if you did, it's still like, ‘do you want to have something that other people haven't done before? Do you want it to do something new?’ Well, here's an opportunity.
We're not really interested in the same old, ‘should they be allowed to play?’ We're moving on, we’re done with that conversation. It’s been asked and answered. So now it becomes, ‘okay, let's talk about what exclusion does, what inclusion can look like.’ I think also just normalizing the existence of trans athletes as we think about our athlete coverage is also important, just making that part of what we do.
OOYL: I know you touched on this a little bit, about being a queer woman yourself and that identity coming into play when you talk about why this coverage is important. But I was thinking about you in the wider context of women’s media. I've read Gabrielle Korn’s memoir, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, about being the first lesbian editor-in-chief at a women's magazine in 2017. I think there are a lot more queer women writing at women's magazines than we've ever seen before, but in leadership roles, and particularly, editor-in-chief roles, I don't even know how many other women besides you and Gabrielle have been in that position. What do you think that you bring to the role that is necessary for women's media, in general, or SELF in particular?
RM: I think what an EIC should be and should do varies by brand and it varies by media company, but to my mind—and at Conde Nast now, specifically—we think a lot about culture and pushing culture forward and creating culture, and I think queer people have always been at the forefront of that. If you want to create something that feels new and different, you have to be willing to transgress some norms and not do things the same way. Even if you think about aesthetically, through the lens of fashion, so many people with great taste, or people we all look at and say, ‘wow, they have great fashion,’ are willing to look a little gay. Either they are gay or they're willing to cross gender lines in a meaningful way.
I feel like that's a good way of explaining what that can do for a media brand. Aside from progressive ideals, which you'd hope you get with a queer person, but isn't necessarily a given, I think taste-wise, aesthetically, culturally, being gay opens you up to coolness. [Whether they know it or not], people want to see that—that's kind of the point, the aspirational aspect of it. I don't know that people always think of gay people as being aspirational, which is a bummer, but then when you think about where [so much of culture] actually comes from, how it disseminates—sort of the Cerulean sweater of it all—so often that is coming from queer people.
OOYL: The one thing I want to circle back to is diet culture, fitness culture, and anti-fatness. These things are rampant in women's media—health media in general—but also in sports culture. In athletics, we know how rampant eating disorders are, particularly among female athletes. Can you talk about what a fat-positive lens on fitness and wellness and health looks like for SELF?
RM: It looks like, when we're editing health stories like we don't treat “obesity” as a symptom or a negative outcome or even a health problem to be solved. We don't equate weight with health. We talk a lot about other ways to measure health. We, as a brand, believe that diets don't work, and if they don't work then the whole thing falls apart there. We've been more actively doing things about fat-positivity and inclusivity and body image in the past two years.
I think imagery is super important. So that is, like, our stock photos. We try to make sure that we're not only showing skinny white women, but the thing that I'm really proud of in the fitness space is our “Everyday Athletes” collection. We post a lot of original workouts and so we have our own assets that we use for these that we shoot at the beginning of the year. We do a big batch shoot of tons and tons of fitness moves that we're going to want to use throughout the year. And we cast those with people that we're choosing ourselves, so we can explicitly make sure we're casting fat people. So you can see fat people doing a bicep curl, or doing yoga stretches, and it's a range of people and identities.
I feel really proud of of these images because I do think it really normalizes that fitness can be for everyone. I don't want to say we don't have room for growth in that area. I think we could be doing a lot more to show people with visible disabilities3, but I think that's somewhere we can get in the next year or so. I feel proud of how we talk to people and how we talk about workouts. Also, rest has been a big theme since I've been here. I'm just like, ‘do less, you don't have to go so hard.’ And that's a long way from where SELF used to be when I was first reading it in the 2010s.