And Now for Our Next Acts

I’ve focused a lot in this book on systemic forces contributing to gender binarism in sport. Racism, sexism, and antiqueer, antitrans, antifeminine bias. Inequitable access to education, healthcare, training, economic stability, overall wellbeing. Complicated stakes in winning. Racist, colonialist, and ableist human hierarchies. The lure of testosterone as an explanatory justification for gender segregation. In various toxic concoctions, all contribute to the entrenchment of binarizing and trans-hostile policies in sport. While some supporters of those restrictions reject other trans-hostile policies, and the white nationalist and evangelical movements that are often quietly or openly behind them (Gill-Peterson 2021; Wilchins 2023), those exclusionary movements in sport travel hand in hand with denials of health care, education, culture, history, pleasure, well-being, and life, disproportionately distributed by matters such as race and economic status. The nonstop onslaught of hostile actions (institutional, governmental, individual)—amped up from terrible since I began writing this book—daily make this increasingly obvious.

Yet it’s super-important that the crushing weight of big-picture forces has never represented the whole picture. Tina Chen, scholar and member of the Skate Canada EDIA committee that proposed and successfully advocated for open-gender partnering, points out that in figure skating, for example, some skaters we now revere as outliers of the past had broad success in their time. British skater John Curry and Canadian Toller Cranston, two white skaters known in different ways for grace and artistry beyond straight-guy masculine norms, won numerous national titles and international medals in the 1970s, as well as mainstream appeal (Chen 2023). One of Cranston’s TV specials was distributed in sixty-seven countries. We need to view some current restrictiveness, then, as relatively recent, or renewed, suppression rather than evidence of unrelenting backwardness that we only now push our way out of. Anna puts some of the coexisting contradictions of the sport another way: “How can this sport be so queer and so painfully straight at the same time?”

Figure skating’s movements for change, like so many liberation movements, also builds on the insufficiently acknowledged work of Black and Brown people who have long been at the forefront of change. Take Rudy Galindo, who won the 1996 US Men’s Championship and has had a long professional career as an out Latinx skater and coach. Or the glorious, underscored skaters in women’s events who failed to act femininely delicate, like I’m-doing-an-illegal-backflip-anyway-and-fuck-your-racist-judging-system Surya Bonaly, international medalist for France. Or Canadian national competitor Elladj Baldé, cofounder of the Figure Skating Diversity and Inclusion Alliance and the Skate Global Foundation. His performances on TikTok and Instagram defy racism through music and movement that model the freedom of skating with authenticity for the joy of it.

Happily, it could take whole other books to detail people of the past and present who have ignored and pushed back against norms, who have tried something different, made moves and movements, coalitions and transformation. The pace of change work is accelerating, both in and away from the spotlight. As the editors of the Slingshot Collective’s 2024 Organizer put it about resistance more broadly, while systemic injustice can seem “unstoppable and permanent,” folks are nonetheless “pushing back everywhere—not doing what we’re supposed to do.”

Working at change on many levels is crucial for numerous reasons. I offer three. First, changes in systems, beliefs, and practices depend on each other, meaning that sometimes we make change by trying it out. Jinsun Yang offers a great example of how this interdependence works. An activist, scholar, and athlete, Yang participates in organizing the Korean “Queer Women Games” (QWG), an event with team sports for people of all sexualities and genders. No participant has to report or prove their gender or sexual identities, a policy that, besides avoiding policing, increases access for athletes who cannot safely advertise these identities (interview with the author, July 4, 2023). The QWG also avoided gender segregation in competition rosters. While athletes could field single-gender teams, they could not control who they competed against.

Yang’s interviews with participants in the first, 2018 Games reveal how shifts in practice can generate shifts in thinking. Once athletes discovered that the results did not always match their presumptions about who had advantage—that teams of apparently cisgender men did not always win—they had more capacity to recognize the “diverse factors other than sex difference that decide fairness and athletic prowess” (Yang 2023, 128). Experiencing made for believing.

Second, as Anna and I keep learning more about through training, the devil is often in the details. Do skaters perfect the Kilian dance hold, with the taller skater’s arm around the other’s back, so that “the boy can put the girl wherever he wants?” Or so that the two skaters can work together to generate speed, execute choreography, and avoid dangerous blade entanglements? We’ve heard both of those, sometimes from the same coaches, when our presence jogs them to remember that standard directions misgender Anna.

Those moments of recognition generate opportunities to brainstorm collectively for better practices, which can involve more than switching out the language or actions. On this topic, I keep thinking about very different points that I witnessed two professional skaters make through the same pantomime of being jerked in an unexpected direction by their partner. To a champion ice dancer, speaking at an academic conference in 2023, that dramatized how the training women received to be pretty and docile, subordinated to a strong male prince, supported manhandling. Another elite-level woman ice dancer in the room concurred, describing a recent rehearsal for a group number in a professional ice show where the choreographer paired the skaters up male/female and instructed, “Guys, now caress your girl.” They all did so without hesitation. You can recognize how the boy “putting the girl wherever he wants” can contribute to that mindset.

A few weeks later, during a lesson, our coach, doing a humorous version of the same jerk, called it the kind of thing one often witnesses between pairs as a (counterintuitive) byproduct of learning to move in sync. Partners need to develop enough trust, they told us, so that either can initiate action rather than waiting for permission, thus avoiding the microhesitations that can mess with coordinated timing. By that point we’d each been told, for different maneuvers, to initiate decisively, and had long-developed habits of consensual physical interaction, backed up by ethics and training developed in nonskating contexts. The overall power dynamics of the people involved, then, contribute to making the meaning of taking charge. Shifting the meaning can also open up the movement. We’ve observed high-level partnered skaters demonstrate all kinds of lead/follow, in-front/behind switch-ups that we have been excited to start learning.

Third, most simply, it’s important to work at all levels because there’s work to do at all levels, and so many ways to participate. I can’t personally, like Kaitlin Weaver, work on shifting gender traditionalism through appointments to high-level ISU committees or, like Kirsten Moore-Towers, begin to familiarize skating audiences with ungendered terms like “the lifting partner,” instead of “the man,” while commentating at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships in 2025. Nor can I demonstrate the fabulous future for high-level open-gender duos like those world medalists who teamed up to experiment after Skate Canada stripped gender criteria from its definition of skating partners. When US and French international dance medalists Madison Hubbell and Gabriella Papadakis tried out ice-dance partnering together, their videos went so viral that even nonskating friends who hate sports were sending them to me (in Barrington 2023).

But I can work to be ready for whoever shows up to my group lessons. As I’ve learned over time, those lessons can include people with widely ranging expectations regarding gender and sexuality: Beginning adults who fear being pummeled by the rigid gender roles they’ve seen on TV, and/or dream of a pairs future with their off-ice queer partner. The kid who is being beaten at home for violating traditional gender norms that their parents think skating can reinforce, and, conversely, the queer or trans kid brought by parents who think skating is where the gays go and hope to find to find a welcoming atmosphere. People who, consciously or not, will get their gender-saturated habits tweaked in the physical practice of skating. For me, that’s the common female-trained habit of jutting my hip to the side, which messes with one of the earliest skills in any skating curriculum, gliding forward on one foot, plus just about everything that comes after. For others, it might be the masculine-associated habit of standing with legs apart, which makes it hard to gather your energy and push forward with both ankles bent.

Then add, among those same and, indeed, all people: Skaters confused, cranky, open, or relieved, when they get a little farther along, to learn that two common turns in skating have been renamed from Mohawk and Choctaw to C-step and S-step, abandoning settler-colonial misnames of Indigenous people for names based on the shapes that blades doing those turns (sort of) make on the ice (Danyliuk 2020; Stevens 2018). Plus, skaters coming from histories of being welcomed or discouraged in other movement genres based on racist stereotypes about who should practice them. Plus, people, neurodivergent and neurotypical in diverse ways, with varied learning styles—tell me; show me; put my limbs (with enthusiastic, explicit permission) where they should go—and with bodies affected by their histories in the world, both personal and epigenetic (physically inherited). As Aurora Levins Morales puts it:

There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth. What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality. (2013, 9)

While we can’t know what’s going on for everyone we encounter in terms of identities, histories, advantages, challenges—which people should also be free to surface or conceal—I’m better prepared if I’ve sought some strategies beforehand. One text I’ve been using as a guide is Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People, a disability-justice primer produced by the “disability justice based performance project” Sins Invalid (2019). I’ve also been really influenced by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, coeditors of We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (2020), who emphasize that liberation does not just involve aid in subsisting/surviving, but also an aesthetic and political commitment to the idea that abundance and pleasure should belong to us all (Osworth 2021).

So, maybe one weekend while I’m at the rink, you’ll be down the road cheering on that trans runner being heckled in their high-school cross-country race. Or learning, brainstorming, and collaborating in other contexts. Or trying out some new moves of your own. Clare Croft writes in Queer Dance that, from the “slide of a hand across a hipbone,” to the choreography of protest in ACT-UP die-ins, bodies do not merely enact transformations conceived in the mind but are “sites to imagine, practice, cultivate, and enact social change” (2017, 14). For both the worse and the better, the struggles and possibilities multiply daily.