what a trans journalist can bring to trans stories

cis people just can't (usually) see what we see

Starting today, behind-the-scenes content about my work published elsewhere will be behind a paywall. Below is the behind-the-scenes story of a feature I wrote for The Nation about how the national governing body for the sport of climbing blindsided athletes by secretly putting a new trans policy in place—and the absolute chaos that has ensued in the sport since. That story took two months of reporting and began as a little Q&A for this newsletter, then snowballed into a major feature about an NGB. I believe it is some of the most important reporting I have ever done. To access this newsletter in full, upgrade to a paid subscription.

I’m still in the process of moving off Substack; if you want to pay for a subscription but don’t want to give money to Substack, feel free to use my Venmo or PayPal. Just reply to this email and let me know you’ve sent it so I can add your email to my paid list!

---

On Friday, my nearly two-month-long investigation into how USA Climbing passed one of the most restrictive trans policies in sports—only to face so much backlash from the community that they had to scrap the policy within weeks of debuting it—was published at The Nation. I spoke to over a dozen sources both inside of USAC and within the world of climbing to piece this together.

As I write in the opening of the story, “The internal machinations of a relatively niche sport like climbing might seem unimportant to some people, but the fact that this controversy has exploded shows just how intense the pressure has become to diminish the ability of trans people to participate equally in nearly every corner of society, including every sport imaginable.”

From the piece:

The mess that USAC has found itself in is one that many other sports are or will be facing as they try to navigate the cultural and political pressures of anti-trans sentiment and bad-faith actors lobbying to exclude trans athletes from competition. One only has to look to the lawsuits being faced by other governing bodies like those that oversee swimming, powerlifting, and disc golf to see that many of the trans athletes who have been harmed by governing bodies indiscriminately passing exclusionary policies are fighting back through whatever means necessary…

On December 21, [USAC President and CEO Marc] Norman sent a letter to gym owners hoping to cull talk of a USAC boycott. The letter apologized for the position the [Trans Athlete Participation Policy] put gym owners in and acknowledged that USAC’s first attempt at a gender inclusion policy was “unsuccessful.” The letter also hoped to garner support for USAC by telling gym owners about the new National Training Center (NTC) they were planning to build in Salt Lake City, Utah. The NTC would host major national and international events, provide elite athletes with dedicated training spaces, and promised to “reinvest” any income generated back “into the sport nationwide.”

The letter backfired. It turned out that gyms weren’t all that hyped that the USAC was going to own a commercial facility to use exclusively for its big-ticket events. Not only that, the location of the NTC in Utah—which has banned gender-affirming care for minors, bars trans youth athletes from competing in categories that match their gender identity, and just passed one of the most extreme bathroom bills in the country—only underscored how out of touch the USAC seemed when it came to trans participating in climbing.

This story does not get into the weeds about what a good policy should look like—not a single sport can agree on an answer to that, so arguing it is futile. Instead, I decided to write about the process of how the USAC Trans Athlete Participation Policy got passed in the first place because that tells us so much more. So how did this story come about in the first place?