Starre Vartan is a science journalist and the creator of “The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body.”
When Harrison Browne was on the ice, there was solely pace, intuition and the acquainted rhythm of skates reducing throughout frozen floor.
Long earlier than he grew to become the first overtly transgender skilled hockey participant and earlier than he wrote a guide, created a brief movie or had a supporting function in the Canadian TV collection “Heated Rivalry,” Browne was merely “Brownie” in the locker room. It was a nickname that, for a time, gave him cowl.
“Hockey was the one place where I could turn my brain off,” stated Browne, who coauthored “Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes.” (The paperback version might be launched on May 26.) “The one space where my body wasn’t the enemy. All that mattered was how fast my feet moved.”
“I could just say, ‘Hey, I’m the same Brownie — can you use he/him pronouns?’” he recalled. “And my teammates were like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”
On the ladies’s hockey crew at the University of Maine, that acceptance arrived years earlier than Browne publicly got here out. “I was living a double life,” he stated. “I was Harrison in the locker room. But when I stepped out in public — my name on the roster wasn’t Harrison. I was announced with she/her pronouns. It became a bigger disconnect.”
The pressure grew more durable to disregard. Having skilled what it felt wish to be seen — even in a restricted house — he finally discovered he might not return into the closet each time he performed.
“I had that taste of being myself in the locker room,” Browne stated. “And I just knew: This is what I need.”
When Browne got here out as a person publicly in 2016 whereas taking part in for the now-defunct skilled ladies’s hockey crew Buffalo Beauts, he grew to become the first overtly transgender athlete in skilled crew sports.
In the decade since, transgender athletes have turn out to be the focus of an escalating world debate over equity, biology and the that means of sports itself. The politics round athletics for youngsters, adults {and professional} leagues have shifted after which shifted once more. But at the coronary heart of all the depth are a small variety of athletes who simply need to play the sports they love.
Researchers and athletes each say that the public dialog has outpaced — and incessantly misrepresented — the science, leaving athletes resembling Browne to hold the weight of a query much more advanced than a sizzling take.
By the time Browne started writing “Let Us Play” together with his sister, journalist Rachel Browne, the public debates about trans athletes have been ramping up. “We were seeing this wave of anti-trans legislation really take off,” he stated.
Such a ferocious response to a small group of individuals doing one thing perceived as damaging has all the indicators of an ethical panic, Browne stated. After the first wave of toilet payments failed (since then, extra have handed), politicians and others used this rhetoric to “get people whipped up over trans people — which distracts from broader issues that are more complicated to deal with — healthcare, poverty, human rights,” he stated.
The antipathy to trans folks in sports has centered on a single concept: that hormones — notably testosterone — decide athletic future.
From an athlete’s viewpoint, Browne sees that focus as each reductive and deceptive. “When we focus so solely on one hormone,” he stated, “we’re overlooking the real barriers to fairness in sport.”
Training, entry to teaching, vitamin, socioeconomic standing — these components form athletic outcomes much more persistently than any single organic variable, he argued.
“Sports have never been fair,” Browne stated. “If they were, everyone would be the same height and have the same access to resources, but that’s just not reality.”
More than that, he worries that lowering athletes to physiology “dehumanizes people,” he stated. “You’re just talking about their bodies — not their lives.”
A rising physique of analysis exhibits, as Browne stated, that the relationship between biology and efficiency is way extra advanced than one hormone making a efficiency benefit or drawback.
“The single biggest misconception is that testosterone is some kind of permanent performance-enhancing drug, and once you’ve been exposed to it, the advantages are locked in forever,” Ada Cheung, an endocrinologist and trans well being professional at Australia’s University of Melbourne, wrote in an e-mail.
“People hear ‘male puberty’ and assume it creates an irreversible athletic superpower,” Cheung stated. “But that’s not what the science shows.”
Gender-affirming hormone remedy, she defined, does reshape the physique in measurable methods. In trans ladies, testosterone suppression and estrogen remedy result in will increase in fats mass and reduces in lean muscle.
In trans males like Browne, testosterone produces the reverse impact — will increase in lean muscle and reduces in fats mass — although to not the similar extent seen in cisgender males; they find yourself someplace in-between. The results on efficiency aren’t clear and range by particular person.
“The reality is far more nuanced than the ‘once male, always advantaged’ narrative that dominates public discussion,” Cheung stated.
A February meta-analysis printed in the British Journal of Sports Medicine — spanning 52 research and greater than 6,400 individuals — discovered that after one to 3 years of hormone remedy, trans ladies confirmed no important variations from cisgender ladies in upper- or lower-body energy or cardio health. While some variations in absolute lean mass remained, they didn’t translate into measurable efficiency benefits.
The newest analysis displays the nuance that Cheung described.
Earlier work, together with Cheung’s review in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, reached comparable conclusions: Over time, key indicators of trans ladies’s efficiency shift towards these of cisgender ladies following hormone remedy.
Even at the molecular stage, the physique seems to reply dynamically to hormonal change. A 2025 study in Nature Medicine discovered that feminizing hormone remedy altered lots of of circulating proteins in transgender ladies, reshaping their organic profile towards that of cisgender ladies throughout programs tied to metabolism, immunity and cardiovascular well being. Similar findings have been shown in trans men.
This analysis repeatedly means that the physiological results of hormone remedy are ongoing and have an effect on quite a lot of the physique’s programs. Over time, each trans males resembling Browne and trans ladies who’re athletes carry out extra like cisgender women and men.
That’s why it wasn’t an enormous shock to researchers {that a} nonbinary and trans man crew got here in third in the males’s class at a recent Ironman competition in Oceanside, California.
Important questions stay. Much of the present analysis is observational, with comparatively small pattern sizes, few longitudinal research and solely restricted information on elite athletes or sport-specific outcomes.
“The direction of the evidence is consistent,” Cheung stated. “But we do need better-designed studies, particularly in athletic populations.”
Importantly, Cheung wrote, physique composition alone doesn’t decide efficiency.
“People see that trans women may retain somewhat higher lean mass and jump straight to ‘unfair advantage,’” she stated. “But absolute lean mass alone doesn’t dictate what your body can actually do.” Just like a much bigger lady doesn’t essentially outperform a smaller one.
Fat mass, endurance, hemoglobin ranges, cardiovascular health, coaching, ability and entry to assets all play roles in figuring out athletic efficiency and attainable benefit or drawback, Cheung stated. “The relationship between muscle and performance is much more complex than a simple more-muscle-equals-more-power equation,” she stated.
Transgender athletes are underrepresented in elite sports — a incontrovertible fact that challenges the concepts of simple, widespread dominance. While extra analysis is finished and the points are debated, nonbinary, intersex and trans athletes will live on and play the sports they love.
Representation issues: For youthful athletes arising behind him, Browne’s visibility provided one thing many had by no means seen earlier than: a path.
Carly “CJ” Jackson, a nonbinary skilled hockey participant for the Seattle Torrent who seems in Browne’s movie “Pink Light,” first encountered his story from afar. “Seeing him come out — it gave me space to accept myself for who I am,” Jackson stated.
Years later, their lives would intersect in sudden methods. Browne and Jackson had each performed for the similar groups — at the University of Maine and later professionally — simply years aside, their careers operating in parallel earlier than lastly assembly on set.
“I think about the impact Harrison had on my life,” Jackson stated. “And I’m just one person. There are so many people he’ll never meet.”
For many transgender athletes, the debate over equity is inseparable from a extra primary query: Who will get to belong in sports in any respect?
“Sports are where people build friendships, learn teamwork, and become healthier,” stated Alex Schmider, senior director of leisure at GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy and media-monitoring group, in an e-mail. “Trans people play sports for the same reasons as everyone else — and denying those benefits is unnecessary and cruel.”
Schmider argues that the present wave of restrictions does greater than restrict participation.
“Politically motivated bans on trans athletes not only hurt them,” he stated, “but also send inaccurate and harmful messages about who belongs.”
Changing hearts and minds
In latest years, Browne has turned to storytelling — showing in the breakout collection “Heated Rivalry” and writing and producing his brief movie, “Pink Light” — as a approach to reshape how transgender lives are understood. (“Heated Rivalry” streams in the United States on HBO Max, which is owned by NCS’s father or mother firm, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
“Most people say they don’t know someone who is transgender in their personal life,” Schmider stated. “So often their first introduction is through characters on television or in films.”
Stories such “Heated Rivalry,” he added, succeed in half as a result of they depict athletes not as symbols however as teammates — bonded by a shared love of sport.
“When every player and fan can be themselves,” Schmider stated, “everyone wins.”
Policy appears to be going in the other way as that imaginative and prescient.
The International Olympic Committee’s 2021 framework moved towards a extra evidence-based, sport-specific method to transgender inclusion. But the most recent guidelines in March 2026 have as a substitute put in a blanket testing regime — however only for women’s sports.
Over greater than 20 years in which trans ladies have been eligible to compete at the Olympic stage, just one has participated: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who didn’t end her occasion.
“How is that grounds for a blanket ban?” Browne stated. “There’s absolutely zero proof — and yet we’re seeing policies move in that direction.”
Rachel Browne, Harrison’s sister and coauthor of “Let Us Play,” stated she worries about the secondary results.
“So many sports try to align themselves with Olympic policy,” she stated. “And that trickles down to amateur and youth levels — spaces where people should be freer to just play.”
Many athletes say that the thrill of the win isn’t as necessary to them as the camaraderie and relationships with their crew members. Sports are a human expertise and expression.
“It’s where you build friendships. It’s where you learn who you are,” Harrison Browne stated. “Everybody deserves that escape.”
Maybe as a substitute of being inflexible and binary, athletics might be one thing extra expansive, and extra human, each Browne and Jackson talked about when fascinated about the future.
“Sports are art. They’re self-expression,” Jackson stated. “And to deny that is to diminish what’s possible.”