The culture war against trans people is perhaps most clearly, and spectacularly, manifested within sport. Gender policing has a long history in athletics – Michael Waters’ book The Other Olympians traces gender testing in sport back to Nazi Germany – but the stakes have dangerously escalated in the past few years: trans women have been banned from competing as women by many sports federations (resulting in their exclusion from the 2024 Olympics), mass harassment campaigns are being perpetrated against trans college athletes, and 25 US states now prohibit trans children from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. And just yesterday (January 14), House Republicans pushed through sweeping legislation to block trans girls from school sports.
Negative press coverage of trans athletes relies on depriving them of interiority: they are treated as boogeymen, infiltrators of ‘legitimate’ sport, rather than athletes in their own right. The documentary Changing the Game (streaming from January 17) seeks to give agency, and interiority, back to the young trans athletes who are being demonised. The film follows three American high school trans athletes: Mack Beggs (a trans boy who has been forced into competing against girls), Sarah Rose Huckman (a trans girl fighting New Hampshire guidance that prevents her from competing), and Andraya Yearwood (a trans girl competing on a girls’ team). Through a season of sport, we follow these teenagers’ lives, their communities, and their advocacy, and we see the day-to-day human impact of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation – as well as the movement working to fight it.
Ahead of Changing the Game’s release on UK streaming services, Dazed talked to director Michael Barnett about the process of making the documentary, the politicisation of trans youth, and the uncertain future of sport.
What drew you to wanting to make a documentary specifically about trans high school athletes? What was it about both parts of that focus – trans kids and athletics – that compelled you?
Michael Barnett: I didn’t start out aiming to focus on athletics; I didn’t even start out planning to make a film. I was doing a deep dive on trans youth because one of my oldest, dearest family friends had a young child who was transitioning, and they shared that news with me. And even though I’m a progressively-minded human being, my instinctive response was, ‘wow, but they’re so young’. And they were like, ‘bless your heart, wrong answer’. So, I went on a research journey so that I could advocate for the kid and so I could gain my own tools to navigate this experience. I had no experience with trans youth whatsoever. I live in LA, I have trans friends, but I hadn’t asked them about their lives and their journey. And most of the trans people I knew were in a fearful place when they were kids, they weren’t out, they hadn’t transitioned.
So while I was doing research on this, I went to this conference in Seattle called Gender Odyssey, and that’s where I met Mack Beggs, before the firestorm of media had started around him. And I just thought that the way he was navigating everything was the most compelling challenge to my nonexistent knowledge – everything that he was going through. So I just started chatting with him, and then I spent a year going out to Texas, no cameras, to talk to him. Then I reached out to our producer, Alex Schmider, the director of trans media representation at GLAAD, and we started talking about a film and what it could look like, and what coalition of filmmakers we could build who could address my blind spots. I’ve made a bunch of movies now, but for this one I showed up with a deep desire to listen instead of to be heard. It started from this place of personal growth for me.
The film focuses on Andraya, a track runner; Sarah Rose, a skier; and Mack, a wrestler. I noticed those are all individual rather than team sports. Was that a coincidence, or was it easier to form the film’s narratives with solo competitors?
Michael Barnett: When we started looking for teens who were publicly out and wanted to be under the spotlight, there weren’t many. There still aren’t. We cast an inclusively wide net; we were using these incredible Facebook groups founded by Chris Mosier, a trans man Olympian, that were for trans youth athletes and their supportive parents. We had this coalition of all the right people to try to find the right stories, and there were probably less than a dozen kids that year across all of America. We started filming with six or seven kids: there was a gymnast, a couple of other skiers – there was a softball player, actually, they were the only team sport athlete. Then we stopped filming with some of them for sensitivity and mental health reasons, we didn’t want to make things more vulnerable for them. So the film formed around Andraya, Sarah and Mack, who are so strong and resilient, and that really shines through.
We get to see the athletes’ performances and achievements, but there’s a consistent focus on seeing them in their communities, with their loved ones. We also get a particular spotlight on some of the athletes’ conservative relatives, and how their conservatism doesn’t keep them from supporting their kids. I felt conflicted about that as a viewer, but I can see the necessity of portraying and reaching people who aren’t progressive.
Michael Barnett: We wanted to depoliticise these kids’ journey through the eyes of their parents. We didn’t want to be subtle about it. We talked about this ad nauseam during production: this is not a political journey, we have made it one, all of us. The whole point of this movie is to be, like, 101 – to be an entry point for people to start to have empathy for this community. Some of these people are religious, conservative Republicans who love and support their children. It’s that simple. I want that to linger for people who don’t understand and who need this topic to be cleared of a specific politic. I think for people who are a little more nuanced and knowledgeable about this topic, it may be frustrating and redundant to have this repeated so often, but for others, it’s necessary. We’re just preaching to the choir if the film doesn’t find a really broad audience – and it has. Disney bought the film, it’s on Hulu, it’s screened in countless public high schools.
I really appreciated that Changing the Game doesn’t get distracted by debates about fairness. The authorities and administrations in the film who create obviously unreasonable situations – like forcing Mack into a women’s wrestling division – don’t care about fairness; they’re prioritising refusing to integrate trans kids into sport.
Michael Barnett: We get really myopic with conversations about trans kids and trans athletes, we get so hyperfocused on fairness. I like to zoom out. These are just people, and children, who are vulnerable, who don’t need to be othered, who need love and support, who are already going through something really complicated and internal. Sports in general provide some of the safest spaces for kids: you get community, friendship, discipline, physical health, mental health, skills that can take you past sports in finding community, in becoming a leader. These are tools that are so valuable for life, they can shape the rest of your life in really positive ways.
Yes, and throughout the film, pundits express that trans children shouldn’t be allowed those benefits – that ‘letting’ kids transition is already allowing them too much licence, and that letting them also have a social and public life, public achievements, opportunities for personal development, even to potentially beat out cis children for those things, is unacceptably decadent. It feels like they want to punish trans kids who attempt to access any form of prestige.
Michael Barnett: It just doesn’t sit right with me that this is supposed to be a right for everyone, except for this one community.
The film was originally released on Hulu in 2021 and is arguably even more relevant now, given the increasing legislative and social backlash against trans athletes. Do you think this persecution is just going to continue indefinitely, or that something’s going to have to give?
Michael Barnett: I’ve pondered this a lot. If we talk about a march towards equality, about civil rights, the same oxygen for everybody, the same space for everybody – if we’ve hit the wall of what that means, if we’re out of progress, that’s so sad to me. If this is as much as we can give as humans, if we want to legislate trans people out of existence because our minds are not expansive enough to understand what true inclusion looks like, I think that’s really sad and terrifying. But many people have a deeper knowledge now, if for no other reason than the hypervisibility of the trans community in the past few years. Hopefully the conversation can evolve.
Changing the Game is released on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies and TV, and YouTube Movies on 17 January.
