Hope Tracks: A Short Story About Transgender Athletes

Mikaela Brewer
Aug 6, 2024
8 min read

by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North

**A person wearing a pink hat & the trans flag draped across their shoulders. They’re holding a sign at a rally, which reads, “LGB with the T"**

I’d heard it all before. But what I didn’t expect was to hear it from Sam. My brother. My identical twin brother.

It was early September, but the kitchen was cold as if it too were shocked from sleep. Sam and I were up at 5:30 a.m. as we usually were the Saturday before Labour Day, slurping up overnight oats topped with blackberries from our backyard bush. It was time for our annual ‘get the soreness over as fast as possible’ run before fall training and indoor track season. We usually took a few weeks off running in August to reset, so the first few runs back were a bit stiff, rusty, and lactic acid-ridden. Sam had followed the usual routine, but for me, it’d been a much longer break—at least since I’d practiced with our club and team. I’d transitioned this year. Named Leo Bale and assigned male at birth, I finally felt most like myself: Lena.

Sam and I were talking about senior year and I’d veered into hyping up our race schedule. I was nervous, anxious, and excited, and chattering away accordingly. It’d been a whole year since my race spikes felt the stick-snap on the red rubber loop. I couldn’t wait. But Sam’s face was blank beneath his bedhead of black curls.

“Lena, could we talk about something else?” Sam switched on the radio above the old blue microwave, a matching set with Nana’s typewriter perched on the windowsill. Why a microwave and a typewriter came as a matching powder blue set I’ll never know, but Sam’s clear discomfort made me feel like these small machines represented the two of us: suddenly distantly related. Filling the space and silence was the hum of morning traffic updates for the few people commuting—or planning to run the roads—on a Saturday morning.

“Oh. Sure. Why?” I recognized the smell of trash under the sink. It was garbage day.

“Nothing. I just struggle with this.”

“With what?”

Sam gulped before speaking. “I love you. I do. And I support you. You know that. But you running track this year is hard. I don’t think it’s fair for the girls on the team or who you’ll compete against. I mean, Bella runs the same events as you and she won’t be the best anymore.”

Bella is Sam’s partner, but I wasn’t even thinking about her. I’d missed most of track season last year to focus on transitioning—to follow all the protocol so that I could compete my senior year alongside my brother. I was stunned. And now I needed to offer education—from drained heart chambers and filled brain wells—which Sam could have researched himself.

“Okay. Can we back up just a little bit?” I took a deep breath and cleared the blackberry residue from my teeth with my tongue. My fingertips pressed into the cool glass jar of soaked oats to calm my nervous system. “Can I share some things with you? Some things I’ve learned about all of this?” I knew I could have walked away in this moment. It already hurt. But I couldn’t because looking into Sam’s sage green eyes would always feel like looking into my own.

“I’ll listen but I don’t think you’ll change my mind.”

I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of the night, now desperately trying to return to the dream where Sam hadn’t said these things. But he believed them, and I wasn’t sure which was worse—showing his cards now or hiding them against his chest all year.

“We’re not a threat to female athletes, Sam. I know there’s ample dialogue about protecting women, but it’s a guise—excluding trans women doesn’t protect women. We are women, not biological men or biologically male. Sex isn’t binary, it’s bimodal.”

“Okay, but I don’t understand how you can’t see it. Lena, you have an obvious biological advantage.”

“Sam, research actually shows the opposite. And we’re required to suppress testosterone to compete in the women’s category! So my testosterone levels are lowered to those of cis women.”

“You’re so talented though. Bella won’t have a chance! And that’s not fair.”

“Men are always praised for being talented or skilled. If women are ‘too much’ of any of these things it’s labelled unfair or we assume they’re a man. What about my height? I’m 6’7” running the 400—much taller than the average man competing in that event. Should I have been excluded then, too? Trans people playing sports isn’t the threat to fairness. You know what the threats are because we’ve been talking with Bella about the misogynoir that Black women face.”

“I know, Lena. Socioeconomic disparities, racism, misogyny. Bella never learned to swim. Her mom couldn’t drive her to other sports practices. So she ran. And if she wins this year, she has a scholarship. Don’t you see you might take that from her? I’m trying to protect her.”

“From what? From who?”

Sam was silent. His gaze fell.

“From me, huh?”

Still nothing.

“I don’t think it’s about whether she wins, Sam. I’m not taking her work or training away from her. I truly don’t know how I’ll perform this year given how different my body feels! And though I don’t know if ‘protecting’ is quite the right word, there are so many other things we could be talking about protecting Bella from. The police? I’m thinking of Sonya Massey’s story just the other day.”

Sam shook his head. “Lena, that’s not what I’m talking about.”

What hurt most was that he was trying so hard to be ‘polite’ about this, as if politeness could deflect rigidity.

“Could you think about something for me?” I slipped my phone from my pocket and pulled up a post I’d saved on Instagram. “I’m going to read you a quote from one of my favourite people, Schuyler Bailar:

“People often forget that in order to exclude trans women, you must police all bodies in the women’s category. ANY girl or woman can be accused of being transgender. At what point is a girl “too good,” “too masculine,” or “too tall,” or “too strong,” or “too fast” to be accused of being trans? The attempt to exclude trans women is legal enforcement of the policing of ALL women’s bodies. And this disproportionately affects those of colour, especially Black women and girls who already suffer anti-Blackness and misogyny (misogynoir) and are often portrayed as not woman enough due to white supremacy. Ask yourself: Who is woman enough? The inclusion of trans girls in girls’ sport does not threaten girls’ sport. Instead, the exclusion of trans girls leads to the destruction of girls’ sport through the enforcement of misogynistic and racist standards of girls’ bodies.””

When I looked up from my phone, Sam had left. And it was quiet. There wasn’t much news or traffic on Saturday, but I couldn’t hear any music, either.

Had I imagined this whole conversation? Was I that afraid? Overreacting? I wasn’t sure if Sam had even been here.

But then I knew he had because he’d left his jar and spoon in the sink with a thick film of bloated chia seeds on the bottom. I’d forgotten that he loved overnight oats, but only without chia.

•••

I laid in my bed and cried all day, suddenly untrusting and tired of the cycle of protesting and celebrating. Sam hadn’t run without me because I’d listened for the front door. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He was probably gaming, on-brand with this level up in gaslighting.

Joy any f***ing way. I had to find it. But where?

I re-read an article by my favourite runner, Cal Calamia, in which they wrote:

“To be a trans athlete is to bear the burden of proof that you deserve to play. It is to physically and emotionally fight for your right to even show up. It is to be courageous. For many of us, especially trans women, there is no triumph in these battles.”

I let my phone fall from my hand to the carpet, and rolled over. Rest. Resistance. Reacquainting myself with my heart.

And something magical happened, like the feeling fiction writers must get when they’re no longer in control of their characters or what happens next. I fell asleep, surrendering without stopping.

In my dream, it was race day—late evening when the floodlights first set the red lanes on fire. The sky was a cotton candy dome, as if someone had taken a wet paintbrush and spread the trans flag like watercolour across the entire sky without diluting it, beyond its three-by-five-foot rectangle.

My people crowded the stadium with signs, love, and energy, though their faces were blurry; I couldn’t tell who they were. I’d be lying if I didn’t hope one of them was Sam or would be Sam one day.

As I set my blocks, I made eye contact with a barn owl, gently perched on the step stool where the start pistol lay in its final moments of unaccompaniment. My heart sloshed. Last year, I’d written a paper on barn owls across cultures and was now reminded of their wisdom to trust my intuition.

But what did my intuition tell me here? What was it surfacing in my spirit?

First, Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s words, “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things” and the knowledge that birds do dream—of songs, flight, and rehearsing both. Humans do the same—working through problems, practicing, learning, and visualizing in our sleep what has not yet happened.

What if we can “practice the possible into the real” or “dream ourselves into reality”?

And this, I remembered, is hope, as glowing mushrooms sprouted between the lanes of the track, taking over the white paint.

But I wanted to give up.

In lane one, the start/finish line began stretching away in front of me, as if both starting and finishing were now further away. On my hands and knees, my spikes were trapped in the padded rubber of a loop that I didn’t make. I forgot what change meant in every tense, fearful of never being finished fighting. I was afraid that only emergencies bring masses, afraid that celebration cannot coexist with continuing onward, afraid that small successes don’t, in fact, open doors to change, and afraid that I (and we) won’t remember transformation as it happens—the foundational middle 200 metres of the 400.

Why didn’t I give up? Why, in this dream, was I still climbing into my blocks?

I moved up to lane four, the finish line now behind me where I couldn’t see it—uncertain. I will not be peripheral or invisible.

I don’t know what will happen now. But there is space to run. To start, run, pace, kick, finish and do it all again and again and again—love and live in continuous cycles. Not linearly.

So I will run. And I will run aware that continuing to run is both a victory and an action on the track of hope.

I pushed hard off the blocks and flew because if a bird’s dreams come true, then mine will too.