'Fair Play' tackles what a fair trans-inclusive sports policy could look like
Katie Barnes' book, "Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates," examines the rapidly evolving conversation around transgender inclusion in sports.
Katie Barnes, an ESPN writer who conducted one of the first and only in-depth on-camera interviews with transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, has finally answered the question people have asked them for years: What does a fair and trans-inclusive athlete policy look like?
Barnes, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, has covered transgender athletes for seven years and women’s sports for eight. During that time, they have never publicly shared their own opinions about policies governing trans athletes’ participation and what they believe would ensure fairness for everyone involved.
However, as they wrote articles about Thomas, who set off an international firestorm when she began winning women’s swimming events in December 2021, Barnes said something happened to them that had never happened before in their career: People began questioning their ability to report fairly and accurately on trans people, assuming they were biased simply because they are nonbinary.
“Most of it was being done in bad faith,” they said. “It really rubbed me the wrong way.”
At the same time, Barnes was “consistently being asked by people who I respect and people who I was meeting, what I thought as somebody who has been in the space for a long time.”
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