Kye Allums, Transgender Athlete

b. October 23, 1989

“I had to come out because it was too hard not being myself.”

Kye Allums is the first openly transgender athlete to play NCAA Division I college basketball. Allums was a star shooting guard on the George Washington University (GWU) women’s basketball team.

Born Kyler Kelcian Allums in Daytona Beach, Florida, he was the oldest of four children. Nicknamed Kay-Kay, Allums was a self-described tomboy, who identifed as male from childhood. “I’ve always felt most comfortable dressing like a boy, but my mom would take all of my clothes and force me to wear girl clothes,” he says. Allums would put boys’ clothes in his backpack and change before going to school, then change back before he got home. He says it was the only way he could go to school.

Allums received a basketball scholarship to GWU. In his freshman year, he played in 11 games for the Colonials and missed the final 20 due to injury. As a sophomore, he started 20 of 26 games.

That same year, Allums began to distance himself from Kay-Kay and opened up to some of his teammates. “I do not like being called a girl. I’m a guy in a girl’s body,” he said. Thereafter, he told his head coach Mike Bozeman. Allums says his teammates, coach and family have all been supportive. 

Allums was advised not to begin taking male hormones or undergo gender reassignment surgery while remaining on the women’s team. If he did, he would risk losing his scholarship and ending his college basketball career. Allums says he’s undecided about when he will continue his transition.

After suffering a total of eight concussions and not starting any games his junior year, Allums announced he would not be returning to the Colonials for his senior season. “I alone came to this decision and I thank the athletic department for respecting my wishes,” he said.                        

In 2011, Allums began telling his story at speaking engagements and other forums. “It meant a lot to me to help and affect others in a positive way,” he says about sharing his experience with young people struggling with similar issues.

As for his future, Allums says, “I’ll just be trying to make some kind of difference in the world and look forward to my life.”

LGBT History month

Bibliography

• "Allums to leave women's team - Sports." The GW Hatchet. 27 May 2011.
•  Associated Press. "YouTube - GW Transgender Player Deals With Wave of Publicity."  YouTube. 17 May 2011.
• Beiser, H. Darr, "Transgender Male Kye Allums on the Women's Team at GW” USATODAY.com. 17 May 2011.
• "Kye Allums, Transgender George Washington University Basketball Player, Takes The Court." The Huffington Post. 17 May 2011.
• "Kye Allums: First Transgender Man Playing NCAA Women's Basketball." Outsports.com. 17 May 2011.
• "Kye Allums, Division I Athlete, Tells Us How Being Transgender Feels” Lemondrop.com. 17 May 2011.
• "Player Bio: Kye Allums" GEORGE WASHINGTON OFFICIAL ATHLETIC SITE.  27 May 2011.
• "Transgender Player Leaving George Washington University Women's Basketball Team - by John Atchison." Helium.com. 27 May 2011.
• "Transgender Women's Basketball Player Kye Allums of George Washington Discusses Concussion-marred Season.”  ESPN. 17 May 2011.

Website

• GW Sports Profile

Renée Richards, Transgender Athlete

Transgender Pioneer
b. August 19, 1934

I made the fateful decision to go and fight the legal battle to be able to play as a woman and stay in the public eye and become this symbol.

Dr. Renée Richards became a transgender icon in 1977 when she won a lawsuit against the United States Tennis Association. Richards sued the Association for its refusal to let her compete in the U.S. Open women's division following male-to-female gender reassignment surgery. In a landmark decision, the New York Supreme Court ruled in Richards's favor.

Richards started playing tennis at an early age. Ranked among the top-10 eastern national juniors, she won the Eastern Private Schools' Interscholastic singles title at age 15. She captained her high school tennis team at the Horace Mann School in New York City and Yale University's men's tennis team in 1954.

In 1959, Richards graduated from University of Rochester Medical School. After serving in the Navy as Lieutenant Commander, she pursued a career in ophthalmology and eye surgery while continuing to compete in tennis tournaments.

At the height of her tennis career, Richards ranked 20th in the nation. In her first tennis tournament as a female, she reached the semifinals in the U.S. Open women's doubles competition. Following retirement, Richards coached tennis star Martina Navratilova. In 2000, the U.S. Tennis Association inducted Richards into its Hall of Fame.

Richards has published two autobiographies: "Second Serve Renée" (1986), also a TV-movie, and "No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life" (2007). She is a renowned eye surgeon and professor of ophthalmology at the New York University School of Medicine.

Bibliography

“The Second Half of My Life.” NPR: Talk of the Nation. February 8, 2007

Fee, Elizabeth, Theodore M. Brown and Janet Taylor. "One Size Does Not Fit All in the Transgender Community." Journal of Public Health, 93.6. June 2003

Selected Works

No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life (2007)

Second Serve (1986)

18 October:Martina Navratilova, Tennis Champion

b. October 18, 1956

Martina Navratilova has won 168 singles tennis titles, more than any other tennis player in history, male or female. She has won 58 Grand Slam tournaments, including a record nine Wimbledon singles titles.

"The moment I stepped onto that crunchy red clay, felt the grit under my sneakers, felt the joy of smacking a ball over the net, I knew I was in the right place."

Navratilova knew from an early age that she wanted to be a tennis player. At 16, she turned pro and two years later, she defected from her native Czechoslovakia to the United States. In 1981 she became an American citizen.

Queer in Sport: Graeme Obree

b  11 September 1965

Cycling champion Graeme Obree says he’s gay

Scottish cycling champion Graeme Obree has revealed that he is gay – and that he tried to kill himself twice as he struggled to accept his sexual orientation.

The 45-year-old, known as the Flying Scotsman, has twice won the world individual pursuit title and has also twice broken the world hour record.

He told the Scottish Sun that his suicide attempts were linked to his sexual orientation.

“I was brought up thinking you’d be better dead than gay,” he said. “I must have known I was gay and it was so unacceptable.

“I was brought up by a war generation – they grew up when gay people were put in jail. Being homosexual was so unthinkable that you just wouldn’t be gay. I’d no inkling about anything, I just closed down.

“People say, ‘How can you be gay and be married and have kids and not know it?’

“But when I went to my psychologist she reckoned I had the emotional age of about 13 because I’d just closed down.”

Obree, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, said he came out to his wife and family in 2005 after seeing a psychologist. He has now divorced his wife.

He said: “It did create a bit of tension. My parents had to come to terms with the whole gay thing, it’s been a journey for them.

“It was difficult and there were lots of tears. It wasn’t easy. But the relationship with my parents has been improved by it.

“We talked about it and discussed things and we’re a lot happier.”

-Pink News, UK

Out in Sport: Basketball Exec Rick Welts Steps Out of the Closet

Gay men and women exist in every field of human activity, but in some fields are less visible than in others, In male team sports in particular, the culture is hostile to openly gay sexuality, so the pressures are strong to remain closeted. The closet, though, has costs of its own, as Rick Welts, executive director of the Phoenix Suns basketball team learnt twice. First, on the death of his long-term partner, he was forced to carry his grief alone and in silence. Later, he lost a second partner who tired of sharing the closet with him. 

Now, he has come out publicly as described in a story from the New York Times. This is an extract:

Although he had opened up to his supportive parents and to his younger, only sibling, Nancy, Mr. Welts feared that if he made his homosexuality public, it would impede his rising sports career.

“It wasn’t talked about,” he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable subject. And it wasn’t my imagination. I was there.”

But this privacy came at great cost. In March 1994, his longtime partner, Arnie, died from complications related to AIDS, and Mr. Welts compartmentalized his grief, taking only a day or two off from work. His secretary explained to others that a good friend of his had died. Although she and Arnie had talked many times over the years, she and her boss had never discussed who, exactly, Arnie was.

Around 7:30 on the morning after Arnie’s death, Mr. Welts’s home telephone rang. “It was Stern,” he recalled. “And I totally lost it on the phone. You know. Uncle Dave. Comforting.”

Even then, homosexuality was never discussed — directly.

For weeks, Mr. Welts walked around the office, numb, unable to mourn his partner fully, or to share the anxiety of the weeklong wait for the results of an H.I.V. test, which came back negative.

Sometime later, he began opening the envelopes of checks written in Arnie’s memory to the University of Washington, and here was one for $10,000, from David and Dianne Stern, of Scarsdale, N.Y. In thanking Mr. Stern, Mr. Welts said they “did the guy thing,” communicating only through asides and silent stipulations.

“This was a loss that Rick had to suffer entirely on his own,” Mr. Stern said, reiterating that he was following Mr. Welts’s lead. “It’s just an indication of how screwed up all this is.”

When Mr. Welts left the N.B.A. in 1999, he was the league’s admired No. 3 man: executive vice president, chief marketing officer and president of N.B.A. Properties. By 2002, he was the president of the Suns who still kept his sexuality private — a decision that at times seemed wise, as when, in 2007, the former N.B.A. player John Amaechi announced that he was gay, prompting the former N.B.A. star Tim Hardaway to say that, as a rule, he hated gay people.

But again Mr. Welts paid a price. Two years ago, a 14-year relationship ended badly, in part because his partner finally rejected the shadow life that Mr. Welts required. “My high profile in this community, and my need to have him be invisible,” Mr. Welts said, with clear regret. “That ultimately became something we couldn’t overcome.”

 - NYTimes.com.