Taking care to avoid the team-picking system of our schoolyard memories, Lilah Maravi divided us into two sides of about 20. It was a pleasant Sunday in June—Father’s Day—and we had gathered at our usual spot for our Pride month game. After a spontaneous game of catch in a Brooklyn park in 2023, Lilah had started this monthly pickup series with a Field of Dreams-esque compulsion to get trans women together to play baseball.
That might sound counterintuitive. Many of us were unathletic youths, and many of us make significant efforts to distance ourselves from an image of masculinity. Add in transphobic campaigns to exclude us from women’s and girls sports, and it leaves few opportunities for trans women to enjoy being on a field. It was going to be up to people like Lilah and her friends to make it possible for baseball to be for us.
The first game, in April 2023 at East River Park, drew not quite enough players for two full teams. Since then, we’ve moved fields (I’m leaving out where and when exactly, but if you want to play with us, you can find us) and found that way more girls wanted to play baseball than we had expected. At least once a month from April to October, as many as 50 players take turns on the diamond as friends chat, cheer, and grill hot dogs on the sidelines.
With new teams set informally each time, it’s not really a league or a club. We just call it “trans girl baseball.” This time, one side named itself the Nixon 5, after our new NBA champions. The other, after our presidentially named catcher, was the Reagan 7. I’d be pitching second and batting fourth for Reagan’s side.
The Nixon 5 led off the game with two home runs, which didn’t worry me—without a fence, a hard-hit ball past the outfielders is usually good for a home run. They took a 5–0 lead going into the bottom of the first (we cap a half-inning’s scoring at a five-run lead), but I knew we’d hit back.
As our No. 3 hitter bagged a triple with a bat she had swung in high school, I spotted her last name engraved on another bat, a black 34–30 Louisville Slugger. Before it, where her deadname would have been, she had scratched out the letters to leave a scar in the pale wood beneath. I picked it up, gave it a few swings, and stepped up to the plate in the cleanup spot.
I swung at the first strike I saw, and—I’m not going to feign modesty—launched an absolute missile. With a crack that echoed in my mind’s ear for days, the shot rocketed deep into left. Of course I bat-flipped on my way out of the box. I already knew I’d reach home standing up.
My turn on the mound, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly dominant. I’m fine with that: In earlier seasons, our games were heavy on the three true outcomes. I remember slews of walks, capable pitchers dominating first-time hitters, and competent hitters launching balls past first-time fielders. We’ve collectively gotten better at pitching, hitting, and fielding since then, so we’re proud that we can muster strong team performances, offensively as well as defensively.
That’s what I told myself when I left a curveball hanging and the hitter drilled it to center for a home run, summoning flashbacks of my travel-ball pitching career. I managed to close out the inning with a satisfying strikeout, giving up only three runs on a few hits—not too much for a game where both teams scored in the double digits.
When I was a kid, I loved playing sports—baseball, especially. And like many women, I have my father to thank for that.
Before I joined a club team, I played on PONY baseball teams he coached from tee-ball to middle school. He had learned baseball as a boy, an immigrant from Indonesia playing stickball in early-’70s Brooklyn. Connecting with his country and peers through sports instilled in him the value of athletics. He hoped to pass that on to me, telling me again and again to find some organized physical activity to make my own. For my father, sports provided discipline, structure, and, most importantly, fellowship.
I don’t remember him explicitly invoking masculinity—he also coached my cis sister’s soccer teams—but my impending manhood, the birthright I was expected by implication to eagerly pursue, still loomed on the fringes of my consciousness. It was around the time of puberty that, even as I was learning what my growing body could do, I felt increasingly alienated from it. Baseball only drew me closer to the awful specter on the horizon. I started playing on a club team, and as my coaches refined my techniques of swinging, throwing, and ballplayer mannerisms, I saw instruction toward becoming a man. I grew uneasy in this pursuit of masculinity for reasons I couldn’t identify. As far as I knew, it could have just been that I didn’t want to grow up, or that I didn’t want to do the workouts. But I was scared to find out. Something that evaded description, that slipped around the edges of thought, felt wrong.
I dropped baseball when I got to high school. I found new athletic (and artistic) pursuits through competitive marching band—as well as queer friends who prompted me into conversations I didn’t know I needed to have—and didn’t pick up a bat or glove for years.
That first game in 2023 marked a turning point: an early moment of new connection with others like me, and a reconnection with myself. Until then, I had no trans women in my life. My own transition was haphazard, self-sabotaging, self-loathing. But on that field, I saw the sport I grew up playing integrated with the vibrant, actualized transgender life I sought for myself.
When I picked up a glove and ball alongside women I now call my friends, the kid I once was began to reconcile with the woman I wanted to be. I found that—even as I resented its form, even as I tormented myself with its slow changes—my body still knew what to do. I discovered that I was in the same body I always had been, and it did not hate me back.
It didn’t all come back right away. Pitching is hard, and hitting is even harder. But in some ways, there’s less pressure to perform when we’re all challenging ourselves—for example, by playing baseball rather than slow-pitch softball. The struggle is part of the appeal, and a casual baseball game is way harder to pull off than a casual softball game. We get to fail, laugh about it together, and try again. Here, you’re free to throw like a girl. Here, if you want, there can be a little crying in baseball.
By transitioning, everyone on the field has already chosen a more difficult, more fulfilling way of living. Gender dysphoria—the feeling that transition erodes—felt like being stuck in a lifelong hitting slump that only I had noticed. When I started transitioning, I knew I was taking the right steps, but each one mortified me. The first dozen times I attempted makeup or shopped for clothes felt like desperate tweaks to my swing: It didn’t improve anything, and I only felt like I looked more ridiculous. Breaking out of the slump requires accepting that you might whiff and stepping up to the plate anyway. That first time your eyeliner is symmetrical, or a bra fits right, or a stranger calls you “ma’am”—that’s a line drive up the middle.
Cis women who play baseball are also choosing a more difficult path. In youth sports, they’re usually pushed toward softball and away from baseball. Over the past decade, women, especially at the collegiate level, have been chipping away at the “grass ceiling” of the traditionally male baseball world, so it’s not like they’re depending upon a few dozen New York transsexuals to finally break into sports traditionally reserved for men. (That’s not what we’re trying to accomplish, anyway.) But if we can show trans women—with all of our baggage—that baseball can be for us, then maybe that can expand the experiences of womanhood for all women, too.
Lilah chose to bring us together around baseball because of its common presence in the male upbringings that trans women endure. She grew up more of a baseball fan than a baseball player (she describes herself today as a solid contact hitter), but she thought playing the sport could help us collectively work through some complicated feelings. Many of us played baseball growing up before we realized who we really were. Maybe we could have some fun returning to reclaim a sport of our youth.
“No matter how much any of us might have loved to play sports when we were”—she paused—“younger,” Lilah told me, “we never really got to experience it as ourselves, in the full presence of our own body.”
In a later inning of this June’s game, I was at shortstop when the hitter, Evelyn, drove a hard ground ball to my right. My body leapt into the play faster than my thoughts could keep up. I dashed five steps toward third, cutting off the grounder with a backhand glove stab, and felt the ball lodge in the pocket I had broken in under my childhood mattress. I made the transfer to my right throwing hand, turned back toward first, planted my right foot, pushed off, and threw hard. I barely even looked at Clara Hall at first base. As the ball flew across the diamond, my only thought was please. When Clara’s glove popped, and Evelyn was a step away from the bag, I exhaled—out.
Clara’s dad pushed her to pursue sports despite her lack of interest and ability, she told me after the game. She played on her high school football team, but as a kicker (“Just about the gayest thing you can do in a football game,” she said). Transitioning brought her in realignment with her body, “and not just in the sense of, like, ‘I look the way that I want to look,’” Clara told me. She felt more coordinated, more physically capable. Until she found trans girl baseball a couple years ago, she hadn’t been able to use her body in those new ways. “Running around with friends playing the game has been kind of a huge thing for me,” Clara said. “It’s been really special.”
Chelsea Neeler, wearing a green jersey with her name on the back, told me she grew up playing Little League and rooting for the Red Sox. She still takes Opening Day off work. This June game was her first time playing since a college club team kept her around for her knuckleball “as the team pet.” In the years since, she endured neck, spine, shoulder, and knee injuries between the military, a rock band, and a haunted house. That Sunday, she led off for the Reagan 7 with a home run. “I am old, and I know I’m gonna feel like shit tomorrow,” Chelsea, 41, told me after the game. (I, 26, wouldn’t call 41 “old.”) “But for three or four innings,” she said, “I was 21 all over again.”
Elle Yung, playing her first game with us, realized she didn’t like how her body looked in her uniform after dropping baseball for track and field in high school. She began socially transitioning, supported by her team and coach. New York City and state policies would have allowed her to compete in the girls division, but—knowing the scrutiny, discrimination, and harassment she could face if she started winning as a girl—she chose to keep competing with the boys even as she started living as a girl.
Still, Elle credits transitioning in her senior year of high school—“both amazing and terrifying,” she said—with lifting her mental burdens, allowing her to qualify twice for national meets and attract interest from NCAA programs. She was recruited to Brandeis University, which met her criteria for trans-inclusive policies, and planned to train with the men’s team for a year while recovering from an injury. She’d compete on the women’s team as a sophomore.
Then, in February 2025, NCAA president Charlie Baker eagerly capitulated to a Donald Trump executive order, enacting policies to ban trans women from college sports. As I was writing this, the Supreme Court upheld bans on trans women and girls competing in women’s and girls sports.
Elle’s transferring to Ontario’s Western University this fall to continue her track career as a sophomore. Canada’s NCAA-equivalent U Sports body permits collegiate athletes to choose the gender they compete under—though the 2018 policy announcement was taken down from the organization’s website in 2024, according to captures in the Wayback Machine.
I could write pages more on how the idea of trans people in sports was astroturfed to national concern following the general failure of the bathroom bills in order to animate a project of marginalizing and ultimately eradicating trans life. I’m not going to, because the thrill of trans girl baseball comes from feeling like it happens in a different world than all that.
Elle had quit baseball after a brief stint on her junior varsity baseball team that she said was her first experience with enforced gender norms. She missed playing, though—“I was like, ‘Damn, I wish I could just swing the bat again’”—and her therapist suggested she try trans girl baseball. It’s one of the best things to have happened to her, she said.
“I’m able to be myself with no barriers,” Elle said. “I’m giving myself the experience I wish I had for the first 17 years of my life.”
After the game—we won, by the way, 14–13—some of us who hadn’t had enough baseball got right back out on the field for some batting practice before the sun went down. Afterward, I helped Lilah carry the club’s ragtag gear to Taylor Mazzocchi’s car. We only just got our first batting helmets in May, donated by Taylor’s father after he saw us playing without them last year.
“We have troublesome relationships with our parents, most of us,” said Taylor, sporting a Raidel Martínez Yomiuri Giants jersey. “I like to think that my dad supporting this—if somebody gets some positivity out of that, that’s kind of cool.”
The shared gloves, which Lilah bought in lots from eBay, are mostly in youth sizes. Those cheap wooden bats she bought the morning of our first-ever game broke in the first couple seasons—now, we use bats that girls who played in high school bring to share.
Trans girl baseball elaborates on predecessor IRL meetups like trans picnics and barbecues, Lilah told me (pausing to check on an award-winning author who just slid into first base), because we add a little competition and a little exercise. Only as much as you want to, of course—we welcome all skill levels. But even if you just play the outfield, you’re still touching grass. For Lilah, any activity that involves moving her body has improved her relationship with it.
She built trans girl baseball, and the trans girls did come. What she didn’t expect was for women around the country to start building baseball communities of their own. Last year, a Chicago league inspired by our ragtag affair played its first season, and this year, girls started running games in the DC area and Pittsburgh. I know of efforts underway to organize games in Philadelphia, Detroit, Charlotte, Richmond, Ohio, southern California, the Bay Area, and even the Netherlands.
After we packed up that Father’s Day, I walked home and showered. I changed out of dusty athletic shorts and into a long black bodycon dress; I bandaged the shin I had shredded sliding into second base to break up a double play.
Later that night, we would meet back up at a neighborhood bar for our regular after-baseball hangout. We would drink, smoke, and play pool; there would be talking, kissing, and laughing. We would say our goodnights and plan to see each other again soon: for dinner the next night, at the rave the next weekend, or on the diamond the next month.
First, though—after putting away my glove with a ball in the pocket like he taught me—I called my dad.