The Transgender Games

By Dominick Romeo

Growing up in Hell’s Kitchen was a unique experience. It’s the center of culture and fashion, with countless restaurants from all over the world, and an endless stream of tourists who can’t stop visiting. 

You knew everyone in your neighborhood, and they knew you. This included your friends and your neighbors, the drug dealers down the block, and the pimps and the prostitutes who worked 9th Avenue. 

Some of those sex workers were transgender but we looked out for each other anyway. And if someone bothered them– we would bother you. And if someone bothered us– they would bother you back. Because in a very unusual way, they were like family to us. When some of the transgender workers started to disappear in our neighborhood, we became concerned. We learned later that many of them had been murdered after being picked up by some john, never to be seen again. NYPD at the time didn’t seem interested in solving these cases, and I’m sure many of them are still unsolved today. 

As a result of this I became an advocate for the transgender community at a very young age. I worked on City Council members’ campaigns in the past and made sure that transgender rights were on their platforms 20 years before this became popular. I made sure that Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center was inclusive of the transgender community, under Kelsey Louis’ leadership, after hearing complaints from my transgender friends who felt left out. I also reported many gay bars in the past who purposely prevented transgenders from entering their businesses because, based on their IDs, their pictures were in male form. 

Watching the debate on transgenders in sports has been hurtful to see. On one hand, there are those on the right who seek to ban this, and on the other hand, there are those on the left who are trying their darndest to convince us that biological women are just as strong as transgenders in female sports. But if you remove any bias you have towards the transgender community and focus on the fact that they are a group of people who simply want to play sports, I feel this issue can be resolved. 

Just about everyone wants to play sports when they are young. I tried my best to play sports too, but I threw like a girl and couldn’t shoot a puck around a pole for the life of me. I just wasn’t good at sports – but I wanted to play anyway – because that’s what most of my friends were doing at the time. Because at the end of the day this comes down to wanting to fit in and everyone can relate to that.

Expand Unisex Sports in Public Schools

My legislation would expand unisex sports like baseball, volleyball, and basketball, in public schools through high school. While in high school it would place our transgender community into their own category, and biological women in theirs. So if a transgender male to female wins first place in a women’s sport, and biological women win second, third and fourth place, and another transgender male athlete wins fifth place, the biological women who came in second, third and fourth places, would win the trophy for first, second, and third place, and the transgender male to female who came in first, and fifth place, would win the trophy for first and second place, in the transgender category. 

This works well for individual sports like track and field and swimming, but what about group sports?

There are roughly 1.6 million people who identify as transgender today. That’s only .47 percent of txhe population. Looking at those numbers, it becomes clear that there aren’t enough transgenders to form a team of their own.

You need at least 10 people to play on a basketball or a baseball team. That’s 20 players to play against each other. But not everyone in the transgender community likes to play sports either – so what do we do here?

Tristate Transgender Games

Once they win their competition, each transgender woman and man can then compete with other transgenders, in New York, move on to New Jersey, and then to Pennsylvania. By doing so they could build relationships with each other and drafting them to teams in each state would enable them to reach the numbers to complete a team. 

A committee for Transgender Sports, self-governed, would need to be formed. They don’t need our help here, what they need is our support! This would help gather members across the country, and can encourage sponsorship from our LGBT community, and from gay-owned businesses like Stonewall and Housing Works.

Watching leadership mislead us by trying to convince our community that there was something being taken away from us, while completely ignoring the fact that we are sanctioning depriving biological women of trophies is incredibly unfair. 

But if you extract other people’s opinions and remove the discomfort or hatred that some on the right may have– this becomes about a group of people who simply want to play sports, and we should do everything in our power to make that happen.

My legislation is the lowest hanging fruit. Having City Council expand unisex sports in public schools can easily be passed and will provide our transgender community a pathway towards their dreams. 

I beg the leadership in our LGBT community to stop playing games with our transgender men and women. They’ve been through much more than we have, and it’s not fair to mislead them for purposes of stirring up our base.

As I write this, I am reminded of an email I received from the late Larry Kramer. A year before he passed, he responded to an email/letter where I thanked him for his decades of work by thanking me for my activism.

Within his email to me he wrote, “never stop fighting – keep going…” I won’t Larry, I promise.