Sawyer Totten’s self-described “happy place” is outdoors, usually skiing in Vermont in the freezing cold. For the past four years, the Burlington High School senior has competed in Nordic skiing in the winter and run cross-country in the fall.
“The sports teams I’ve been on have just been super fun, and I’ve made a lot of friends,” he said.
Some 40 miles away in East Montpelier, Eli Muller has also spent recent years developing his love of field hockey on the U-32 Middle and High School sidelines, where his mom coached.
Without a boys team to play on, the junior is now varsity captain on the girls team at Montpelier High School.
“Sports has always been my escape and where I feel like I’m the most confident, and it’s like, I can look at how I play, and I’m like, that’s something I think I’m good at. … I’m happiest when I’m playing field hockey,” Muller said.
Beyond their love of the community and competition afforded by high school sports, Totten and Muller share another commonality. As student-athletes navigating gender transitions, they’ve seen how sports can provide an outlet for what they’re experiencing and have watched warily at the progression of anti-transgender youth sports legislation in other states, including South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky and more.
Among them is Utah’s House Bill 11, which bans transgender girls from competing in school sports. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Spencer Cox, but the Utah Legislature overrode his veto late last month.
The debate around that bill was particularly upsetting to Totten.
“There’s only four trans students who can compete in (Utah), and that bill really attacks just four people and their families,” he said in an interview late last month.
Muller feels too that the focus on transgender women playing sports ignores larger issues within the field of women’s sports, such as equal pay, eating disorders and sexual abuse.
“There’s no difference between a trans athlete and a cis athlete other than the fact that we were born on the wrong body, and some of us are taking hormones or we’ve started hormones, and we’re now going through puberty that we should have gone through in the first place,” Totten said. “But I work just as hard, sometimes twice as hard, as my teammates to get to where I was.”
Many of these bills are continuations of anti-transgender legislation from 2021, according to a USA Today article on nationwide anti-transgender legislation, where there were “roughly 80 proposals in 2021, for instance, aimed at preventing transgender youth from playing in school sports consistent with the gender identity of their choice.”
No such bills have been introduced in Vermont, where the Vermont Principals’ Association — the governing body for school sports — says students can play on the team that matches the gender for which they are enrolled at a school. But the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ civil rights group, says the national rhetoric in and of itself is damaging.
“Merely introducing anti-transgender bills and peddling anti-transgender rhetoric has already had a damaging impact, leading to LGBTQ+ youth resources being surreptitiously removed from a government website, 11-year-old kids literally having trouble sleeping and a school district banning graphic novels with a transgender character after a parent’s complaint,” the group said last month.
Dana Kaplan, executive director Outright Vermont, which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ+ people in the state, said studies from the nonpartisan Center for American Progress show that transgender students in states with fully inclusive athletic policies were 14 percentage points less likely to have considered suicide in the past year than students in states with no guidance.
“To play on a sports team is to find belonging,” Kaplan said, recalling his own experiences playing sports, such as softball and baseball, that he called “some of the most formative times of my life … learning dedication and discipline, teamwork and leadership.”
In Muller’s case, his coach was the first non-family member he came out to as transgender, he said. Throughout this past year, his team has been “really supportive” and his newer coach has continued to advocate for him and consistently used his correct pronouns, he said.
Totten, too, had a similarly positive experience with his teammates and his Nordic skiing coach.
“Some of (my teammates) just probably didn’t even know, Some of them who didn’t know really didn’t have an issue with it,” he said.
At the end of this past season, Totten’s Nordic coach presented him an award for courage for being the only openly transgender Nordic skier that Totten is aware of in Vermont. His coach works in medicine and really understood Totten’s transition, according to Totten’s father, Shay Totten. Sawyer Totten’s family also worked with Burlington High’s former principal to turn a referee’s empty office into a gender-neutral changing room at the school.
Yet Totten, who had chest masculinization surgery at the end of his freshman year, eventually stopped participating in his second sport, cross-country, halfway through the season due to issues around wearing a binder, which is a gender-affirming undergarment that compresses one’s chest. The University of Vermont Medical Center’s Transgender Youth Program advises against binding for more than eight to 12 hours at a time.
“I was binding so much that it was hurting my back, and I remember a few races vividly where I was in tears for the majority of my race, but I refused to quit,” Sawyer Totten said. Shay Totten remembers one race where at the end Sawyer physically collapsed into his arms.
The pain from binding while competing has become a constant for Muller as well. Binding is the only way he feels comfortable enough to “even leave my room,” he said, but it strains his ability to compete and sometimes leaves him in pain if he wears a binder on the field.
Participating in sports — a highly gendered activity — while transgender has also been at times frustrating and overwhelming for Muller. He occasionally has been asked to be subbed off the field in tears after coaches and referees repeatedly use gendered terms such as “ladies or girls.”
To counteract that, Muller, his coach and co-captain devised a strategy to suggest to refs and opponents before the game that both sides use gender-neutral terms such as “folks,” “y’all” or even simply referring to teams by the colors of their jerseys.
In the future, Muller hopes sports will adapt and become more gender-neutral.
“It doesn’t make sense that we divide sports — we’re all people, especially with little kids sports when they’re divided,” he said.
Although Muller would prefer to play on a boys field hockey team, he currently doesn’t have that option. He has not been able to find any high school male field hockey teams in Vermont or even college teams in the U.S.
While Muller still wants to play in college, he isn’t planning on playing professionally due to gender restrictions. Instead, he wants to play club or drop-in games.
Totten also does not plan to play competitively in college. His father sees sports as important regardless of athletic ability, for building community.
“It’s another support network,” Shay Totten said. “As a parent … you want your kid to find those communities where they have support no matter where they go.”
Both Totten and Muller see parallels between their experiences in Vermont to the transphobia in states passing these bills.
“I think everyone has this preconceived idea of what Vermont is like or just like a really inclusive and welcoming … place,” Totten said. “Well, trans athletes all deal with the same thing. It doesn’t really matter what state you’re in. We all deal with being an athlete and being trans at the same time.”
Even though Muller’s experience transitioning has been positive, he’s still experienced slurs targeted at him in Montpelier. He hopes that sports can continue to provide a safe community.
“It takes our mind up for what else was going on,” he said. “Because I can have a really bad day but the second I get on my skis, all I’m focusing on is my technique and what I’m doing, and it gives us a place to be ourselves.”
