Introduction

Most policing of gender categorization in sport concerns a human unit of one, judged as suitable or not to compete within a gender-segregated category of female or male. Since 2018, I’ve been maneuvering as an athlete within a human unit of two, as part of a gender nonconforming pairs team with my figure skating pairs partner Anna Kellar. We are two white queer adult skaters, “adult” being an organizational classification within skating (not related to XXX content) besides referring to a life stage after childhood. Anna is trans nonbinary. I identify pretty comfortably within the category female assigned to me at birth.

We met at an ice rink in Portland, Maine, at group lessons for adult skaters at our level, which is characterized by single versions of the jumps that advanced skaters may rotate multiple times—Double loop! Triple toe! Quad salchow! as you might have heard sports announcers exclaim—along with modest advances in spinning, fancy footwork, and those aspects of skating, sometimes flatly called “skating skills,” that really captivate me as a skater and fan. Controlled edges, smooth turns, the power in the push: everything that can enhance movement to music and the thrill of maneuvering on knives as if they have always been extensions of your feet.

We first teamed up to perform a number in 2019 at an annual benefit called Out on Ice. The event primarily involved public skating, with local queer and trans organizations sharing the take from ticket sales. One of the organizers, who had noticed the previous year that some of us in the crowd could do figure-skating tricks, asked me to coordinate a little entertainment for the upcoming event. I happily agreed to do so. I’m not an avid competitor—and yes, there is a competition track for adult skaters, from age twenty-one through the category, then still in my future, that skaters affectionately call “sixty-six ’til death.” But I love performing in the ice shows that rinks with skating schools put on, like a recital, to showcase their students. So, I rounded up Anna and four other queer skaters for a group number, among them a local teen skating star, soon to join Disney On Ice, who agreed to do a solo, too.

It occurred to me that it would be fun to include some pairs skating, and I really wanted to get in on that myself. Figure skating has two disciplines for duets, pairs and ice dance. Pairs is the one with the overhead lifts and throw jumps, in which one person propels the other toward a more powerful jump than they could do on their own. I had fond memories of learning the rudiments of being thrown for an adult number in an ice show. When my partner and I got the timing right, somewhat haphazardly given minimal training, I felt like I was soaring through the air.

I invited Anna to pair up with me. By then, we’d become friends, and learned that we had a lot in common, including a similar frustration with the sport that nonetheless compelled us as athletes and fans. Despite some modernizations, and great work underway to make things different, figure skating remained so archaic that in 2018 people still competed as “Men” or “Ladies,” too often judged by aesthetic norms that favor aristocratic whiteness, along with some racialized exoticism, especially Orientalism, and a gender presentation that might plausibly suggest heterosexuality to people who associate that with gender conformity. Although we would hardly be the first to do so, Anna and I would queer up pairs skating simply by skating together. Rules for competition require a pair to consist of one female and one male skater—or, more precisely, of two skaters registered in those gender categories. Even my brief ice-show pairs moments had occurred in that configuration, despite the typical predominance of women that might have suggested other pairings to the choreographer.

Anna said yes! Little had I known that pairs was their favorite skating discipline, which despite skating some as a kid, they never had a chance to try. Few skaters do, and Anna, tall at an early age for kids gender-assigned female, and for kids in general, was not in the running when people tried to create boy/girl pairs eligible to compete, especially given the rules assigning the details by gender, too. Boys lift and throw girls, not the other way around.

With six weeks until the benefit, I approached a local coach I worked with already, who had skated pairs herself and coached several pairs teams. She happily took us on, taught us some basics, and choreographed a program (the skating term for a routine skated to music) for us to perform at the benefit. After considering a few songs, we settled on skating to the 1981 pop duet “Leather and Lace,” sung by Stevie Nicks, of the group Fleetwood Mac, and Don Henley, then formerly of the Eagles. I’d thrown it into the mix for the hot fetish materials in the title and a bit of genderfuck, with Nicks, the one in lace, explaining that she’s not as fragile as the guy thinks she is. Plus, I figured that a lot of people in the audience already knew the song, still in rotation on the radio, and would easily get a butch/femme kind of vibe from our performance.

I could narrate what followed like the aftermath of a great first date, except without the sex and romance that is traditionally considered to credentialize certain two-person partnerships as the most important ones in anyone’s life: worthy of ceremonies, all kinds of validation, and, sometimes, the support of the state. Happy with our first run, we did a repeat, performing the number a few months later at our rink’s spring ice show. We then decided to explore a longer-term relationship, gradually investing more time, resources, and soul, with expanding ideas of what we could do and be together.

Like many queer partners, we wanted to break open and bust into the institutions that excluded us from full participation. In our case, those included US Figure Skating (USFS) and the International Skating Union (ISU), the governing bodies that restrict competitive pairs in virtually all circumstances to male/female teams and that divide solo competitors into binary, gender-segregated categories. Those rules aren’t surprising. Besides suiting this conservative sport, they reflect ideas across and about sport. These include the common gendering of athleticism itself as male and the frequent characterization of “female athlete” as a person who meets certain standards of femaleness, most securely signaled by nontransness and white femininity, and who needs protection from competing against purported others.

Those beliefs, in turn, depend on gender binarism. “Binarism” is a term I use, along with “binarizing,” to underscore that gender binaries are not natural but require active creation and reinforcement. Gender binarism is the dominant sorting of people into male and female as if those categories can accurately or sufficiently collect all people—or at least all people worthy of recognition and respect. That may sound harsh, but it’s a value implicit, and continually validated, in every sport requiring people to compete in categories of male or female, in every statistic about men versus women, in every “welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” in every “he or she,” or even “s/he.” Sometimes policing, sometimes habit, that’s all still binarism, with categories always also dependent on matters such race, sexuality, economic status, ethnicity, national belonging/unbelonging, ability, and age.

Anna and I are both activists, Anna by trade, and experienced researchers, me by trade. Anna currently works on democracy/voting rights. I have a professor job in which I periodically teach a course called Queer and Trans Sports Studies. We both write about skating. Anna is a sports journalist and active participant in skating fandom. I’ve written articles in academic and nonacademic venues as well as a 2012 book of short essays called Red Nails, Black Skates. That writing is based partly on my own skating or, put academically, on participant-observation research. We set out from these histories and skill sets to gain the knowledge and fellow travelers we needed to accomplish our goals. We also amped up our training. We hoped that if we learned everything we needed to test our way into the lowest adult level, called Adult Bronze—including, most challenging to us, the pairs lift—we could either sign up for a test and hope no one would stop us, or, by then, be better equipped for the fight.

Along the way, as with most partnerships, we got to know more about each other. I learned, for example, that while “Leather and Lace” did indeed grab a lot of our audience the way I expected, Anna had never heard it before. Not surprising since they are three decades younger that I am, with a different listening history, not to mention a different relationship to delivery systems like the radio. More important, I came to pay better attention to something that I’m embarrassed to say I breezed by at the beginning: that while a butch/femme performance vocabulary plopped me right into a role that broadly corresponded to my gender, and sometimes erotic, identity, it did not do the same for Anna. To the contrary, playing butch to my femme threatened to misgender them. Not that we always want to perform ourselves—or to be broadly legible!—but that cost of butch/femme legibility really matters, especially considering the gendered roles that pairs wanted to assign us.

We also passed some relationship milestones and tests that we, and perhaps you, have encountered in other partnerships. Did we want (enough of) the same things? Could we travel together? Communicate well and address miscommunication? Bring good humor and adaptability to initially incompatible habits? (What, for example, do we each think that “our ice session starts at 10:30 a.m.” requires?) Could we articulate and respect risk thresholds? Try to avoid hurting ourselves and each other? (That’s a big part of training in pairs where, to begin with, blades can entangle and one person gets lifted into the air while pressing down hard near the other’s vulnerable wrists.) Accept that we will both get hurt sometimes anyway, maybe a lot? Navigate our partnership within the complexities and demands of our relationships with other people—including those who, especially during the Covid pandemic, might reasonably want a say about our close physical contact?

And, as with so many interrelationships—of friends, families, lovers, teams, classmates, colleagues, all kinds of clusters formed in love, sex, politics, support, and mutual aid—events of 2020 changed our trajectory. The Covid lockdown in March ended our pairs training for a year, until vaccinations, or at least the part of training where we touch and breathe on each other. In the meantime, we refocused. We healed recent injuries, in my case a knee sprain newly acquired during off-ice lift practice, as well as the wear and tear that often goes unattended, or is exacerbated, due to the lure of the ice or that dubious idealization, in many sports, of pushing through injury as a marker of toughness and dedication. We joined off-ice zoom classes, some from other coasts and countries, that improved our training regimens permanently. We found in-person skating opportunities, at driving distances that newly felt more reasonable, when they emerged earlier than in Portland, especially with Ice Dance International (IDI), which expanded its educational program once grounded in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, we became more integrated within the growing movement to transform our sport—a movement galvanized in part by broader social movements like the uprising against anti-Black violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We followed the solidarity statements and diversity, equity, and inclusion plans presented by national governing bodies to a mix of hope, anger, and skepticism. We wrote more articles, got interviewed for others, and participated in some video panels and podcasts. Anna started a podcast of their own, called The Future of Figure Skating. We met founders of groups like the Figure Skating Diversity and Inclusion Alliance (FSDIA) and the Open Ice Collective, as well as others working, in quiet or splashy ways, for local, national, and international change. And we continued to skate, sometimes with those changemakers. We learned a lot from that, too.

Skating Away from the Binary invites you to think with me toward dismantling gender binarism within figure skating and beyond. If you showed up primarily for the skating, welcome and fear not. You’ll read plenty about it. That’s a big reason I’m here, too. As you’ve already discerned, I live with a bad case of the condition often described these days, to get at the component of heartbreak, as loving something that doesn’t love you back. I train in solo and pairs skating. I coach group lessons and take some myself. When my home rink has a labor shortage, I serve occasionally as a skate guard, the person who hands out rental skates for public skating and monitors for injuries and reckless behavior. I organize my full-time job around skating more than I ought to admit in print, even if some of it counts as research. I offer this book toward the collective project of turning figure skating into a sport that loves all of us back, enabling people at any level to skate with joy and authenticity in the skins, bodies, and identities we inhabit. If you’re not involved in that project yet, I want to recruit you.

But/and I also have a larger purpose that, I argue, should occupy all of us (and this is the only time you will encounter the academic convention “I argue” in the book, so please take it as the sledgehammer/spotlight device I mean it to be): fighting the longstanding and escalating assaults on the lives of trans and gender nonconforming people. This might seem an over-lofty, self-delusional goal to attach to studying a meagerly populated discipline in a sport struggling to regain popularity. But here is why and what I think my project can contribute.

Over the past few years—even before becoming part of a vicious Republican platform in the 2024 US presidential elections and the subject of an illegal White House edict in February 2025—exclusion from sport has become an increasingly effective tool in the multipronged attempt to deny trans people legitimacy, care, participation in public life, and living itself. As CJ Jones and Travers put it in their 2023 introduction to the Sports Issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, policing sport fits well into contemporary anti-trans agendas: “Coming on the heels of the US bathroom bills of the mid 2010s,” which sought to force trans people to use bathrooms according to gender assigned at birth, “anti-trans policies in the sociocultural realm of sports [seem] to deliver what the bathroom controversy only promised: urgent policing and surveillance of gender-suspicious bodies—down to the last molecule of testosterone—in rigidly gendered spaces” (93). At the same time, such policies have also garnered the support of people who oppose other anti-trans measures, people who might never, for instance, want to ban books like Gender Queer: A Memoir from school libraries, criminalize the delivery of gender-affirming health care for trans young people, or question whether trans women fully count as women in other circumstances. We need to know more about why.

Pairs skating can illuminate quite a lot about the appeal of such policing. Its male/female setup emerges from a bundle of beliefs that underpin all kinds of gender segregation in sport and is kindred to other questionable measuring practices such as para sport team formation and race-based attribution of brain and brawn. Pairs skating is also instructive about the numerous ways that gender-binarizing—especially one key ingredient, racialized heteronormativity—is reinforced through regulation, representation, and training. Another integral aspect of this binarizing sorts athleticism and artistry into masculine and feminine categories, respectively. Baked into the practice and performance of pairs skating, that binarization also obscures the strength involved in other movement practices, like ballet, that are categorized as artistic thus nonathletic and feminine.

Despite its traditionalism, however, figure skating is also instructive as a sport being transformed through critically engaged praxis and institutional change. One development promises to transform pairs dramatically. In December 2022, Skate Canada announced the erasure of gender requirements for pairs and dance teams competing at any level within Canada, bringing immediate attention and imagination to alternatives. Besides the ingredients of gender binarism and the obstacles to dismantling it, Skating Away from the Binary considers the potentials and pleasures of moving otherwise, including the intimacies and pleasures of physical partnering. This book bears witness throughout to one such possible pleasure, sustained thought-partnering: in practice sessions (try something, reflect, maybe tweak, try again); in conversations (before and after skating, over a meal, on the road); and in sharing the work we produce independently, with Anna’s podcasts, tips, fan work, and feedback everywhere influential.

You’ll find ahead a series of short pieces, roughly proceeding from problems to pleasures. Many present relatively straightforward elaborations or propositions. Others take a different form: lingering on terminology, sharing a dream, or offering a few exercises to help you situate yourself, understand issues more, and brainstorm about working collectively for change.