March 7, 2025: Hockey Histories: Team Trans

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On two complicated and equally important ways to contextualize a groundbreaking hockey team.

In early 2019, following a game in New York City between the Boston Pride Hockey and New York City Gay Hockey Association teams, New York team member Aidan Cleary and Boston team president Greg Sargent began conversations that led to the creation of the Boston-based Team Trans, the first all-transgender hockey team in the U.S. After recruiting players from around the country, including both the first openly transgender athlete in any professional U.S. team sport (National Women’s Hockey League player Harrison Browne) and the first in Canadian professional sports (Canadian Women’s Hockey League player Jessica Platt), Team Trans began practicing in Cambridge, MA in November 2019. Not long after they began playing games in both the Boston area and as a barnstorming team; the Covid pandemic delayed those efforts for a time, but in subsequent years the team has both resumed its games and spawned a second chapter, Team Trans Twin Cities based out of Minneapolis.

I want to be clear that nothing I’ll say in these next two paragraphs minimizes the importance of nor the inspiration from Team Trans. But there are both historical and contemporary contexts for the team, and they each offer complicated lenses through which to AmericanStudy them. On the historical side, to anyone with a knowledge of American sports histories (and doubly so to an AmericanStudier who just spent a whole podcast thinking about baseball histories) the idea of a barnstorming team based around a particular identity community has to echo what many of the Negro Leagues teams and players did across the first half of the 20^th century. I made the case in that podcast for the social and cultural as well as sports significance of barnstorming, and Team Trans can likewise both reflect local roots and help connect them to communities across the country and beyond. But at the same time, there’s no doubt that at least a good percentage of those barnstorming Negro Leaguers would have wanted to play in the major leagues if that had been possible (and would have infinitely improved those major leagues in the process); and while professional hockey isn’t overtly segregated in the way that professional baseball was, this current barnstorming team does reflect similar exclusions.

Moreover, there’s a very specific form of current sports exclusions that we can’t separate from Team Trans (even though it was formed years before this incredibly frustrating trend truly began): attempts to keep transgender athletes out of organized sports. That exclusionary effort dominated the recent election season to a ridiculous degree, and produced one of the last year’s most nonsensical sports stories: the stream of college volleyball teams refusing to play against San Jose State because of the presence of an allegedly trans athlete, despite that athlete having been on the team for multiple prior years with no issues nor forfeits. My number one goal for any athlete and any sport is that the individuals have the chance to play in whatever ways work for them, and again, I’m not trying to dismiss the importance nor the inspiration of Team Trans. But I do worry a bit that transgender athletes self-segregating in this way will only further the idea that, especially when there isn’t the possibility for entire teams, individual trans athletes shouldn’t be part of overarching, organized teams and sports.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?