Coaching Sports Beyond the Binary

Even as the headlines keep returning to trans athletes—who gets to play, who gets excluded, and who gets to decide—there’s another story unfolding on fields and courts across the country. A quieter one. A more human one. A story about belonging. Beyond the legislation and the debates, there are real kids just trying to play the sports they love—and real coaches shaping what those spaces feel like. Today’s guest is Kaig Lightner, a trans soccer coach and founder of Portland Community Football Club—a club that is reimagining youth sports by centering access, equity, and radical inclusion. His teams aren’t divided by gender. They’re built around skill, community, and the belief that every kid deserves a place to belong. In this conversation, we explore what it means to coach beyond the binary, to challenge the systems that keep so many kids out of the game, and to imagine a future where sports aren’t a battleground for identity—but a place where every young person can thrive. Because maybe the real question isn’t whether trans athletes belong–it’s what becomes possible when we finally act like they do.

Special Guest: Kaig Lightner

Kaig Lightner (he/him) is a coach, educator, and inclusion strategist with over two decades of experience at the intersection of youth sports, social work, and LGBTQ+ advocacy. As a USSF National ‘C’ Level licensed soccer coach with 30 years of coaching experience and a social worker since 2005, Kaig brings a unique lens to his work—one that blends technical coaching knowledge with a deep understanding of systemic oppression and its impact on marginalized communities. In 2013, Kaig founded Portland Community Football Club, a nonprofit soccer club providing access to competitive soccer for low-income, immigrant, refugee and LGBTQ+ youth. His approach to leadership is grounded in trauma-informed care, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to breaking down complex concepts—whether in the classroom, on the field, or in workshops focused on gender inclusion and equity. Kaig has been speaking publicly about LGBTQ+ inclusion in sports since 2006, drawing from his lived experience as a queer, trans man to educate others about the limitations of binary gender systems and the importance of inclusive environments. In 2017 he founded Quantum Gender to provide professional consulting and education on these topics. He is also a former graduate-level social work professor and the creator of the YouTube series Intoxicating Privilege, which explores the intersections of race, gender, and privilege through a personal and reflective lens.

Links from the Show: 

• Find Portland Community Football Club
• Join Mama Dragons today

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons, a podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Even as the headlines keep returning to trans athletes—who gets to play, who gets excluded, and who gets to decide—there’s another story unfolding on fields and courts across the country: a quieter one, a more human one a story about belonging because beyond the legislation and the debates, there are real kids just trying to play the sports they love. And real coaches shaping what those spaces feel like. Today we’re talking about what it looks like to build something different in the world of sports from the ground up. Our guest with us is Kaig Lightner, a trans soccer coach and founder of Portland Community Football Club in Portland—a club that is reimagining youth sports by centering access, equity, and radical inclusion. His teams aren’t divided by gender. They’re built around skill, and community, and the belief that every kid deserves a place to play and belong. Years ago, Kaig gathered his players after practice and told them something deeply personal: that he is transgender. He didn’t know how they would respond. But what happened next was beautiful and powerful. That moment tells us something important, not just about kids, but about what’s possible when adults create spaces rooted in trust and community instead of fear. So today, Kaig and I are exploring what it means to coach beyond the binary of gender, to challenge the systems that keep so many kids out of sports, and to imagine a future where sports are no longer a battleground for identity but a place where every young person can thrive. Kaig, Welcome to In the Den’ it is so good to have you with us.

KAIG: It’s so nice to be here. Thanks for the invite.

SARA: I have loved reading your story. It’s so beautiful. And it goes back years. So you’ve really been in this a long time. But I want you to start by taking us back to that moment when you came out to your team because that’s a really beautiful moment in your story. What were you carrying into that conversation and what surprised you about how it all played out?

KAIG: I love that question. And as soon as you asked it, I just had a head to toe vibration in my body just remembering back to that moment because it’s now been ten years, almost I think, since that happened. It’s a good story, actually. And I think it’s worth telling the whole story of how I got to that moment because it doesn’t just happen for those of us who decide to make such a big proclamation, especially in the world of coaching kids. So leading up to that moment, first of all, I had not been out to anyone at the soccer club. It’s a club that I had founded. I was right at the center of all the things that were happening there. And I just chose to just not share that piece about me. It didn’t seem important. It didn’t seem relevant at the time. And it also didn’t feel totally safe, just in a general context didn’t feel safe, not necessarily with the people I was working with. But then I went to a soccer conference in Washington DC and I met up with some folks. There were also a few people, two or three people in that whole conference that were also out, queer coaches in the coaching world. And I knew them for a while. And they just assumed I was out and said, “Oh, well you’re definitely out to all of your kids at the club, right?” And I said, “Oh no. I haven’t said a thing.” And they said, “You have to. Kaig, you have to. This is a moment. This is an opportunity for you to be a role model, to be an example, to be somebody who is speaking directly to youth who are also experiencing discrimination of all kinds, of all kinds of identities. And you can show them that you’re a confident, successful, happy, queer trans person.” And I thought, "Oh, well that feels like a lot of pressure. But, okay. I’ll think about it.” And on the plane ride home from DC, I thought about it non-stop. And I thought, “Yeah, I think this is right. I think this is the time for me to do this. I’ve got enough trust and relationship with the kids and the families there. And if there are people there who don’t like it, I guess they’re not meant to be with us. Because this is a core tenet of my values and who I am as a person, why wouldn’t I share this with these kids?” And also, I had come to a point of getting to know and connect with these athletes on such a deep level where they were sharing personal things about themselves with me, about their stories of all kinds of ways. And I wasn’t able to share my story. I wasn’t able to share who I really am. And that felt disingenuous. That felt not authentic to me. So I got home on a Sunday night. I decided the next day, it was Monday practice time, I’m going to do it. And so I showed up to the field on that Monday. I handed my phone over to one of my coaches – who’s still coaching for the club 10-years later – And I said, “Hey, I am going to come out to the club, to the kids.” And she was like, “That’s great. I love it.” I think she was the only coach I was out to. And so she recorded it for me. And I said, in my mind I thought, “Well, this recording will be just for the kids who aren’t here, just for the families who can’t make it.” I did not intend for it to be for the entire world, which is what it ended up being for. It ended up, we put it on our Facebook page, and it went viral and it went everywhere.

SARA: Wow.

KAIG: And suddenly, I was getting contacted from everybody. So that’s how it led up to that moment. But you also asked me what was surprising in that moment. And what was surprising was a couple of things. One, how I was nervous to begin with, which didn’t surprise me, but as soon as I said the words, as soon as I said, “I’m a transgender person,” I just relaxed. And I saw the kids' faces kind of scrunch, and some kind of like, “What’s that?” And then, if anyone watches the video you’ll see, one of the kids just asks me when I open if up for like, “Does anyone have any questions?” And he just asks, “How old are you?” And I loved it because that is such a kid-centered question of like, this is all I’m really interested in, or this is the only thing that I can think of, or whatever it was. But it also was just, I think, a comment of, “Okay. Great. Thanks for telling us. Let’s go play soccer.” I mean, that’s really how it went. It was just a transition from I just told you this massive, huge thing that I’ve been holding for years and years and years, and now it’s like, let’s just go play. I think that moment of, this is who we are as people, we are just here interacting and caring and connecting with each other through this sport, that’s when it was a solidifying for me in being a founder of a different kind of soccer club and now being an out, trans person that it’s the sport and it’s the power of the connection of that sport that really supersedes and overlays everything else that could possibly be. And the last thing that I’ll say about it is that the other thing that was surprising to me is that the club is primarily made up of a lot a Latino families and community. And they were the first people to come to me and say, “We see you. We love you. We’re so glad you’re here. We’re so glad that you’re coaching our kids. And we see our common threads of struggle in the world of oppression.” And I thought that was beautiful and surprising.

SARA: That is beautiful. And so you founded this community football club specifically to serve working-class, immigrant communities, under-served communities, the kinds of communities where kids don’t often have opportunities to access high-quality sports and coaching. So I want to hear that origin story. But I’m curious, also, what was the calculus for you in deciding to not come out and make your identity part of it from the beginning?

KAIG: Yeah. Well, I’ll start with that question and then I can kind of come back to the idea of the club. I think that I decided not to have it be a part of the origins of the club because I think it was a mix of, I didn’t feel entirely – safe feels like too extreme of a word. I didn’t feel like I was going to be under threat if I was out – I just felt like it was going to take focus away from this being an organization that was not specific to serving trans youth or to serving LGBTQ youth. I didn’t create it to serve, actually, any one particular population of kids. I wanted it to center and be most intentional for the kids who are left out the most. But it also was intended to be, “You’re a kid whose family can pay for soccer, but you actually don’t really like the highly-competitive, over-taxing, over-competitive, unhealthy competitive nature…”

SARA: All your Saturdays occupied.

KAIG: Yeah. “Where every waking hour of your life and your parent’s life and your family’s life is this one sport.” I wanted it to also be a place where kids from those populations of communities could also find a home, but that they weren’t the ones that we were specifically catering towards.

SARA: Got it.

KAIG: We were opening it up first for everyone else who has all the barriers. And when you do that, when you open up, when you remove barriers for the people who are most vulnerable or most disadvantaged, or most undervalued and overlooked, then you actually open it up for everybody. And it has an origin and a foundation of true inclusion. And so I knew if I came at it from, “I’m an out, queer, trans person who’s starting this club,” people would focus in on that and be like, “Oh, you’re serving queer and trans kids.” Because that happened over the years, right after I was out. Then people would find out about me and the first thing they’d think of was like, “Well, what are the queer and trans kids doing? How are they doing in your club?” And I’m like, “Well, they’re fine. But I actually don’t know who those kids are because we’re not asking that information. We’re serving everybody.” And so I think it was more about that. I think it was more about how can we create this truly unique web of inclusion for people from all communities.

SARA: Yeah. I think it’s beautiful. Your fees are very low, low barrier.

KAIG: And the fees are now nothing. And to be clear, I’m not running. I’m not the head of the club anymore. I stepped down from running the club in 2024 for various reasons of just like 11 years of running a non-profit is good. I felt like it’s time for me to hand it off. And we went back and forth on do we charge fees? Do we not charge fees? That’s a complicated matrix of decisions to make. But ultimately, the club has now shifted to an entirely zero cost and just donation-based basically. If anyone wants to donate some money towards their kids playing, great. But not required.

SARA: Wow. That’s incredible.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: And one of the other unique features of your club, of course that I read about, is that you moved away from gender-segregated teams. Can you talk a little bit about the vision for that and then how that works in practice?

KAIG: Yeah. And I’ll tell you all how it started and it’s now moved towards we do have a couple of girl-specific teams which is great, and I’m going to get to why that’s so great. It was not an intentional decision when I started the club. It was not something that I set out as part of the sort of baseline structure of "we're going to try this new, radical thing of having gender-mixed teams.” It was purely out of necessity. When we started, we didn’t have a lot of kids. We had 50, 75 kids. And we were trying to fill rosters to give kids the opportunity to play. And instead of looking at a problem that maybe other people would see as a problem of, “We only have five girls for this team and four boys for this team" or whatever it may be, and seeing “Well we can’t blend them.” That’s kind of the standard decision of, “Well, I guess we’re not going to play then.” I didn’t go down that road because I didn’t see that as an issue. I was just like, “We’ve got ten kids. We need eleven. Let’s find one more. And they’re all about the same playing level? Great. You’re on a team. Let’s put you together.” And also on top of that, because of my personal lived experience because of also my work with kids for so long and just knowing how girls are typically treated in mix-gender teams, they don’t get the ball. They’re put down. There’s a whole slew of negative things that can happen and do happen to girls on mix-gender teams. I was very focused on paying attention to that, either the kids that I was specifically coaching or I was keeping an ear out for groups around me. We all played and practiced together all the time and still do. So I would just listen for the things that I knew were going to come up. And those were typically boys saying, “She’s not very good. Why is she here? I can’t believe I’m playing with girls.” All of those comments, I would just listen for those and I would just step in and interrupt and say, “Hey. Let’s talk about that. What do you mean? Tell me more about why you just said that.” And as soon as you get a kid to try to explain something like that, they immediately are like, “Well, I, I, I didn’t mean it. That’s not what I...” And I was like, “Yeah. That’s why we want to talk about it. And let’s end this assumption that that person whose gender, or gender expression who’s different than yours, plays any differently than you.” And slowly those conversations just kept happening. Coaches started having those conversations. We also, because of the kind of club we are and because of who we were serving, we also were attracting coaches who were looking for something different. So we were also bringing in coaches from queer and trans identities, but also immigrant and refugee identities and communities. And so we were able to, I think, more – not easily – but we were able to step into, “Let’s talk about diversity and oppression and discrimination right off the bat.” There wasn’t a whole lot of, we’ve got to educate everybody around us. So because of all those, because of that environment, we were able to be successful in having mix-gender teams. And as the kids continued to play together and got older, the boys had a reckoning and were like, “Oh. These girls are really good. I’ve got to work my butt off to compete against them on my own team to keep playing.” And they really had a moment, a lot of them had a moment of like, some kids said to me, “I honestly didn’t know girls could play soccer.” So it was so multi-layered. It has so many different amazing benefits. And for the kids who identify as girls who had been put down or overlooked or also who were really good players and had never really been pushed to play at a higher level, they got to play at a higher level and not for any other reason than we just had the opportunity for them. And they got to play against faster players. Sometimes that happens when you play boys and girls together. Not every boy is super fast and super big and strong. And not every girl is small and tiny and petite and weak. All of these assumptions, all of these labels, all of these ideas that we have about gender and sport are so contrived. And as soon as you let go of them and just put kids in a situation where they just get to play together with good support around them, they’re amazing. They thrive. They do things you’d never believe they could do. So we just kept going. We just kept going with that’s our way of playing. And then as the club got bigger and more kids came along, and just in the last, I think, year or two even as I’ve kind of transitioned out of the role, we’ve had enough kids where we can have a dedicated girls team on a couple of different age groups. But when we do that, we still say “This is for anyone who identifies as a girl. This is not specific to only cisgender girls. This is not about what’s on your birth certificate. This is about your identity and who you are and where you feel comfortable.” And so that’s the case for all of our teams: “Play where it matches your identity, your skill level, your drive, how hard you want to play, how far do you want to go in the game. We will find a place for you that fits that part of you.”

SARA: Are you getting any pushback from organizational structures with club soccer and other teams you’re playing? We’re watching that play out in college athletics, right, with the volleyball teams and people refusing to play teams where there are trans students. How do you see it playing out in your world? I assume in Portland, maybe, it’s a little better.

KAIG: Gosh, it’s such a complicated question because, in Portland there is a greater acceptance than compared to maybe some other more conservative places. But Portland is not just by and large just accepting of everything and everybody. Right? It’s not as progressive, it’s not as open and accepting to every identity as it seems to be. And one of the examples is that one of the kids who is an out trans kid – and I only know of two at this point in the club who are out, but that doesn’t say anything about everybody’s identity – but one of the kids who is out, and the reason I know they’re out is because their parents specifically sought us out and found us because in their neighborhood club, for their recreational club, they tried to have their transgender daughter whose sex at birth was assigned male, they tried to have her play on the girls team in their neighborhood club. And that neighborhood club said, “Sorry. It’s against our by-laws. We cannot have this kid play for the girls team because there’s an ‘M’ on the birth certificate.” And the parents were like, “Well. That’s not going to work for us because our kid needs to play with a different set of kids that they feel comfortable with. And this is where our kid wants to play.” And so they found us just through an internet search of trying to find a club that would be open and accepting. And so when they came into the club, this was now a handful of years ago, when they came into the club, I got to talk with them and hear about this experience and hear this story. And so that’s happening in Portland where there is a club out there who’s still saying No. And they’re not the only ones. There’s clubs all around the city who are like, “No. These are the rules.” And it’s a layer of rules. It’s like, “These are our club rules, but that’s because the State Association says these are the rules and then that’s because the US Soccer says these are the rules and then that’s because the International Olympic Committee says these are the rules.” It’s all trickling down from the very, very, very top. And it’s impacting kids real-time on the ground, like you’re saying. And so the push-back has not been anything like what we are seeing in high school and college athletics. But it’s also because our kids aren’t making headlines. They’re just coming out to play soccer. And our community of the club is very accepting and inclusive and welcoming. So we keep it that way.

SARA: That’s helpful to hear and beautiful to know. And I know that some of us probably look at Portland as the great big blue ocean out there.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: I mean, for some of us, it is who are not in blue oceans.

KAIG: Right. Yeah.

SARA: I’m curious if you, you know you said no gender segregation was by necessity at first and now you’ve made a commitment to it for the sake of maximum inclusivity. How have your parents responded over the years, and your families?

KAIG: You know, it’s almost like I have no stories to tell you about that because there’s been nothing. There’s been no questions about it. And it’s hard for me to say exactly why that is. There’s some guesses that I can make. I think part of it is because I came out. And I think part of it is that it became a clear indication of our value system that this is an organization that is going to accept players of all identities, gender identities and sexuality identities. And also, for a long time – it’s no longer this way – but for a long time, at the top of our website, every web page said, “We are the first youth soccer club to be openly accepting of LGBTQ Youth, coaches, parents, families.” And I did that really intentionally right after I came out because I realized “Hey, it’s out there now. No putting that toothpaste back in the tube. So why don’t we just make it really obvious to anyone who’s searching for this that this is who we are?” Because often you come across organizations, clubs, businesses that say, “Oh yeah. Yeah. We’re accepting of queer and trans folks.” But you’ve got to dig through so many website pages and get down to their this-and-that anti-discrimination clause to find it, and it’s in some small paragraph. I’m like, “Well that doesn’t make me feel like you are actually inclusive of us.” And so I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to be an organization that was clear, upfront. “If this is who you’re searching for, you found us. If this is who you think shouldn’t exist, go somewhere else. Go play somewhere else. There’s plenty of other places to play. There’s plenty of other places to go. If this isn’t the place you believe, if you want to not align with these values, this is not for you.” And so I wanted that to be really clear for both sides. So I think because of those various steps, we ended up with the people coming to us who were already like, “Yeah. This is what we want.” Or “It doesn’t matter to us if there are trans kids here. Great. I just want a great place for my kids to play.” My kids get to see coaches like them, from immigrant and refugee communities, communities of color, communities that are experiencing poverty, experiencing low income. All of those life experiences are left out of so many youth sports because of how exclusive they are. So when parents found us, they were ecstatic that their kids got to play with other kids who looked like them and play for coaches who looked like them and had experiences like they do. And they could just come and relax and just be themselves and just guard’s down. Right?

SARA: Yeah.

KAIG: And I think when that happened, we also didn’t have this pushback of like, “Oh, we can’t have those people here.” It’s like this is for everybody. This is a family. We’re all here for each other.

SARA: Yeah. Well, you have this baseline value of inclusion no matter what, regardless of what the barriers are in anyone’s life. Talk about that a little bit?

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: I know you do everything you can to just support, well it’s free, but also uniforms, and equipment, and family support, even as far as family support. Tell us more about all of that.

KAIG: Yeah, that also, that family support that – what is now the Family Services Program – that also came out of necessity. I will say, it came out of necessity but it was in the beginning when I crafted this idea in my mind it was always in the back of my mind of I wanted to create an organization, a soccer club, that was a hub of sport and service. And I didn’t know how that would happen. I just knew it was possible because I knew when you put people together in a sporting environment where they are connecting around a sport that they all love, beautiful things happen. People connect. People learn about each other. People have difficult conversations. There’s trust that’s built. There’s community that’s built. And as soon as you start doing that, and as soon as humans start really connecting with one another, especially humans that are up against struggles in our society, you start to learn about those struggles. And you start to learn about what’s going on and what are the things that are challenging for various people in their lives. And I knew that was going to happen. And so I didn’t want to create a container where that was going to happen with nothing to support people when that started happening. And lo and behold, within the first year or two, that started happening. Families started coming to me saying, “Hey. My kid’s struggling with grades.” Or “We’re struggling to pay rent.” Or “My husband, or wife, just lost their job.” It was just what happens when you start to build trust with people. And also my background is in social work. So I was bringing . . .

SARA: That explains a lot.

KAIG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always forget that part.

SARA: I’m reading about language and cultural barriers and transportation barriers and life.

KAIG: Right.

SARA: And I’m like, “Oh, there you are.” There’s the social worker.

KAIG: Exactly. The social work framework – and my focus was on community-based social work. I wasn’t doing clinical therapy social work – so my focus was in, “What does it look like to address systems and how systems impact people in this framework of social work?” And that’s what I went to school for and just had a framework in my mind around. And I knew enough about how systems like people accessing SNAP, like food stamps, and health care, and dealing with educational challenges for their kids. I knew how those systems were oppressive. I knew how those systems were unbelievably hard to navigate, especially if you don’t speak English as your first language, and especially if you’re experiencing racism and economic discrimination. It’s just an uphill battle. And so I knew enough about that to know that the families we’re reaching out to are going to have those struggles. And so when they come to us with those struggles, what can we do as a small, little soccer club to help just be at least an ally to walk next to them or – I kind of don’t like the word ‘ally’. I like the word ‘accomplice’ or I like the word ‘co-conspirator’ or ‘neighbor’ or ‘friend’ or ‘support system’. How could we be that for them, even if it was just an ear to talk to? And for the first few years, it was just me listening to families of what’s going on. And then I brought somebody, one of the moms who came in as one of the new families. I quickly saw her as somebody who, A: she’s bilingual. B: she’s the mom of three kids – four kids now – and could connect with families around these similar issues. And so then she and I started having conversations with families. And I started doing the work of like, “What are the resources that we can try to pull on? What are the phone calls I can make? How can I help families connect?” And then COVID hit. And when COVID hit, and we stopped playing soccer, we looked around at our little club at the time of 100-ish kids and our tiny little budget and we said, “What can we do?” Well, we’re not playing soccer. So that person who had been working with me for a little bit, Carolina, she said, “Families are telling me that they can’t get food. And they’re losing jobs. And food stamps don’t cover it.” She’s like, “Why don’t we start doing food boxes?” And I said, “Great. Let’s do food boxes.” So there was a lot of food in the system at that time. There was just this abundance of food and money during COVID. And so we accessed a lot of food in the system that was up for donation and we started feeding people twice a month. And that turned into what is now a full-on food pantry that is twice a month feeding, I think we’re up to 50+ families, which is well over 100 people, well over 100 people. And it just started from, we take care of our community. We’re going to figure it out.

SARA: That’s amazing. It’s making me think about, I don’t know, maybe in the last decade there’s been so much conversation and a lot of riding around these third spaces, right?

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: These communities outside of work and school and our home life where people are coming together to find community. And yours being that kind of space that starts as soccer, but actually is really bigger than that.

KAIG: Absolutely. And that is the power of – I say the power of sport. But that could be the power of art. That could be the power of music. It’s whatever brings humans together around a shared love and passion and dedication to something, the same thing can evolve.

SARA: It’s really clear that your social work background really gave you a particular framework for approaching community and fully serving the folks that are in the club. How has being a trans coach shaped the way that you understand leadership and trust and community?

KAIG: I think there’s a few different answers to that question because I think it varies based on if I’m looking at leadership or community. When I think about community, coming from my experience as a trans person, I think about the community that I have as other queer folks, as other trans folks, as other people who have similar experiences to me, especially other trans people. The experience of being a trans person is incredible. It’s an amazing, unbelievable, life-altering experience that comes with so much heartache and so much turmoil and so much trauma, potentially, and also so much beauty. And if the right supports exist, so much of an ability to find yourself, to be truly like, “This is who I am at a core.” And I think that is such a unique thing to have as a human. It’s really challenging for us humans to discover who we are. And so when I think about the community of other trans people that I know, they’re the only other people who know this experience. I have amazing community outside of that experience who are amazing, awesome, wonderful people, including my partner. But they can never know. They can never understand what the little nuances and the little idiosyncrasies of what it feels like to be a trans person. And so when I think about that kind of community, that also applies to people who are immigrants, who may be immigrants from all over the world. But I’ve talked to enough people who are immigrants from all over the world who all have some sort of commonality of, “We know what it means to be an immigrant in this country. Whether we’re from the same country or not, we know these certain things.” And so when I think about building community, I think about those things of like, how do you connect with somebody and how important is it when you maybe feel very alone and feel very isolated because of the world around doesn’t seem to be made for you, how important it is to find other people who also feel that way? That was part of my motivation and part of my thinking around, how do we have a soccer club where people can find each other? And I knew that the sport itself would bring people together. But it had to be the right container. When it comes to leadership, it’s challenging. I’m right in the middle of a leadership program right now actually where I’m surrounded by other incredible, amazing leaders who are queer, who are trans, who are straight, like everything, all kinds of identities, all kinds of life experiences. And I think what I’ve learned through that program specifically, but also from just over the years of leadership, is that it ebbs and flows. You’re never one, for me at least, I’m never going to be, I’ve discovered, just one kind of leader all the time. I’m going to be a leader in this kind of space. And then in this kind of space I might be a different leader. Maybe in one space I’m really outspoken and I’m who people are hearing from. And in another space, I’m quiet and I’m listening and I’m absorbing and I’m learning and I’m making meaning of things of like, “What is this experience that I’m having right now? How does this apply to what I’m doing in my leadership role?” I think that’s what leadership is, is it’s the constant acceptance that it will change and that you will have to adjust and flow and be flexible in it. And I think that’s why leadership is so challenging and is not for everyone. And that’s okay.

SARA: Wow. That answer really resonates. I’ve never heard anyone describe leadership in those terms before.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: That is really powerful. What do you pay attention to differently because of your own experience in both your transgender identity but in navigating gendered spaces?

KAIG: Well, it’s evolved over the years, of course. Before I transitioned, before I had facial hair and a lower voice and just kind of could move as what was perceived as an average white, straight man. Before all that, what I would pay attention to was everything. I was constantly on the lookout for what slur was going to be thrown at me, what sort of side eye was going to be given towards me, who was going to tell me I didn’t belong, who was going to ask me some question, what kind of pronouns were people going to use? It was a constant, vigilant attention towards everybody else around me, and very little about myself. I was very disembodied. A lot of trans folks talk about that, right? That’s the body dysphoria and just this disconnection, this disassociation with your body, which I would say, in full transparency and just to be a bit vulnerable, I still struggle with. That’s still a deeply, that’s a rut that was created in my psyche, in my connection between mind and body when I was a young, young, young kid that I didn’t have – I had family support that was amazing – but I didn’t have a social world around me that allowed me to be fully myself and to connect my mind and body until I was into my 20s. So you think about 20+ years of just, for my own sense of putting one foot in front of the other and waking up in the morning, I have to disconnect my mind and body, that’s a long time. That’s a deep rut that gets created. And so I’m still trying to, I guess, fill that rut in and heal it. But it’s far more healed than it used to be. So that’s what I used to pay attention to then. Now that I have this outward expression that I can just move through the world with no concerns, really, now I pay attention to how much space am I taking up, how much talking space, physical space? Am I the only white person in a space? Am I the only perceived man in a space? Am I with all other men and how is that showing up for me physically? How do I feel? Once you lift the veil of gender as a binary construct, once you stop looking at it as a binary construct, for me, you can’t unsee it. So everything is a gendered lens for me. Sometimes it’s really fun and exciting and like fascinating to me. And sometimes it’s exhausting and I just want to not. I just want to turn it off.

SARA: Well sure. I mean, you have the interesting space of experience and maybe perceiving the way in which culture genders everything.

KAIG: Yes.

SARA: From both spaces. And that must just be a really interesting kind of – that’s a lot of input.

KAIG: It is a lot of input. And that, I have solely been focused on that, or primarily focused on that input, for a really long time. And over the last, I’d say five to ten years, I’ve also been doing the best that I can to overlay what my white privilege looks like with all that input and what the structure of white supremacy and racial, structural discrimination and oppression look like and how that is impacting my queer and trans direct friends and neighbors but also the at-large the diaspora of queer and trans folks of color, but also how important it is that I have to be – and I think this is a requirement of everyone who experiences white privilege, particularly men – you have to be diligent. You have to be recognizing as much as possible, when those privileges are showing up. And so I think that piece of it, in benefiting from white male privilege in a way that I never thought about, when I was thinking about transitioning, when I was thinking about this big life-altering decision of, “Am I going to take testosterone? Am I going to do all these steps? Am I going to have top surgery?” All I was thinking about was, how do I make my body feel better? How do I get out of this constant anxious loop and feel like I can just be a whole person? I did not even look down the road of, Oh, I might actually just be assumed to be a white, straight man, and what comes with that, and all the privileges that come with that, and all the responsibility that comes with that. It’s a lot of responsibility to be paying attention to the structural systems in our society who people who look like me benefit greatly from.

SARA: Yeah.

KAIG: And are also disadvantaged in some ways in terms of when it comes to gender, socialized men are not given the opportunity to be emotional, to be vulnerable, to have connection in the way that socialized females do, often. And it is tearing men apart as well. But it is very hard for our society to recognize that and give some grace to that–for good reason, because there’s been a lot of damage that’s been done by patriarchy.

SARA:Yes.

KAIG: So we are at an apex right now. We are at a crucial moment in our society of, will we choose to look at all of these systems differently, and will we choose to un-layer them and give them nuance and give them the time and space that they deserve to talk about and learn from each other? Or will we just dig in and say, “Nope. Men are like this. Women are like this. People of this color are like that. People of that color are like that. People who own this kind of car are like that.” I mean, we are so binaried at this moment, in every possible way, that if we continue to go down this path, it could be the end. It could be the end of us. It could be the end of us as human beings. And I don’t think that’s our future. I don’t think that’s our path. I think our path is having conversation and being humans together. And I think sport is one of the best ways to do that.

SARA: Yeah. You mentioned it a little bit. I’m curious if you’d be willing to share a little bit more of your own journey of self-discovery, of discovering your true self and coming out.

KAIG: My self-discovery, well, I had two coming outs. So I came out as a gay person. I used the term ‘gay’ when I came out to my parents in my early 20’s – I think I had just turned 20 or around there – That was the first step. That was my first reckoning. I realized when I was in junior high that I was attracted to other girls. And I was like, “Okay. I guess I’m kind of a girl. I’m attracted to other girls.” You know, I couldn’t really suss out the gender part of that at that moment. But I was like, “Oh yeah. This is real. I am not a straight girl. I am not falling in line with the expectations of being a straight, cisgender girl.” Even though I didn't have any of those languages. So that was junior high. And at that time I remember distinctly thinking, “Well, I’ll just never tell anyone. This’ll be my secret. I will just be forever hidden.” And it’s kind of funny and not funny to think about it at the time. But I really truly thought, there’s no way I could ever say this to anybody. And then, of course, realized, “Okay. I have to come out at some point.” And so I came out first as gay. That was difficult and nerve-wracking, but my parents are amazing people and accepted me whole-heartedly and wrapped their arms around me, both metaphorically and literally. And then, about six/seven years after that, I came out as trans. And coming out the second time as trans definitely I felt more like this is what I know I want to do and this has to happen. And so that was the conversation with my parents of like, “I have to change my pronouns. I have to start testosterone. If I don’t, my mental health is going to suffer significantly.” And so that journey was not a straight path in any way. It was a winding, weaving, up and down kind of path. But having a supportive family who was unconditionally loving me and having sports to play, those two things, they made it possible for me to be here. They made it possible for me to be a successful, happy, grounded, stable person. And I know you have a lot of parents that listen to this podcast and a lot of folks who are trying to navigate the world of having a trans or a queer-identified person in their life. And just keep loving them. Just keep showing up for those kids. Just keep telling them they are so wonderful and amazing just as they are. And they may just be like, “I don’t want to hear from you.” Because that’s what I would say to my mom. “Mom. Stop it. I know you believe that. My friends don’t see that.” But just keep saying it because it gets in. It seeps in and it makes its way into the emotions and the psyche and the fabric of your child or your young persons in your life. And it makes all the difference. It makes an incredible amount of difference.

SARA: Thank you for that pep talk. Many parents will appreciate that pep talk, identify with the kids who don’t want to hear it from us anymore. So that was a really lovely story. I want to reach back now and come back to the conversation of trans athletes and trans kids and people in sports because we continue to hear more and more in the national conversation. It doesn’t seem to go away. And it seems to be getting more complicated with more barriers and more rules that are being thrown up against – and laws – trans athletes being able to equally participate. And so much of the conversation is framed around fairness and these myths of fairness and safety. What do you think is misunderstood in that framing?

KAIG: Oh, so much. So much that’s misunderstood. First of all, it is important for everyone to just remember that there have been trans kids playing sports, and trans people, trans adults, playing sports forever. Forever. This is not a new thing. This is not like trans kids are cropping up out of the ground somehow. This is just the latest thing to hone in on, to put a white hot spotlight on, to try to create divisiveness, to try to pull people apart, keep everybody in their camps, so that we’re not coming together and really learning from each other. This is by design by one political party. They have been researching this for years. As soon as gay marriage became the law of the land and a certain stripe of the polictical spectrum was like, “Oh crap. We lost that one. What is our next thing that we can get people rallied around to try to discriminate and try to quiet and push down a community?” And it was this. And they did research on words, on language, on concepts that people would get fired up around. And it was around gender and kids. And so here we are. So that’s the first thing, I think, for everyone to just keep in their mind because that then impacts how everything is talked about. And everything in this realm around transgender athletes, whether they’re kids or college kids or professionals, is painted with such broad strokes. It’s talked about in absolute generalities of “If you have testosterone in your body you are bigger, faster, stronger always.” It doesn’t matter what sport you play, how old you are, nothing. Nothing else is considered. It’s just like this is fact, this is science. But what is challenging about this is that, yes of course, testosterone – I watched my own body change with more muscle structure, with my face structure changed. Testosterone absolutely, 100% transformed my body from what it was when it was more estrogen than it was testosterone. But it did not mean that I suddenly became an athlete who could go out and kick a soccer ball as hard as a college woman or a professional female soccer player. It’s not a magic cure to “Now you’re now the biggest, fastest, strongest person on the planet.” So this lack of nuance, this lack of understanding individual bodies, sports, environments, who gets access to training and resources. There is just so much that goes into the context of an athlete. But because of the desire for the political right of the spectrum to create this narrative of hate and divisiveness and fear, the only way to do that is to make things simple. You just make it simple. You just make it binary. You just say “This is unfair!” And what really drives me crazy about this debate is that a lot of the very public people who talk about this say, “Title IX was intended to create fairness. And it was intended to create this opportunity for women and girls to play.” Which is true, but women and girls got about this much of the pie, like a 25% of the pie of sport. And men and boys still got the rest. And that is still true. And there are still so many efforts to try to get more women and girls to play and what are all the barriers to just women and girls playing in general. If you were truly behind that statement of “We want to keep sports accessible and inclusive of women and girls,” you’d be paying attention to that part of it, not trying to exclude very small percentages of people. And what it has now moved towards is these horrific ways of judging and verifying women’s bodies, girls and women’s bodies.

SARA: Yeah.

KAIG: And that is unacceptable and it’s going to impact cisgender girls and women also. And that’s not being talked about or paid attention to.

SARA: Yeah, no. Not nearly enough. You know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about your football club whose baseline is about inclusivity and belonging.

KAIG: Yep.

SARA: Right? And that is a very different frame in a sports club than what we usually hear, especially what’s supported in our culture as winning at all costs.

KAIG: Yep.

SARA: And coming at the, “What is the barrier to winning” as opposed to, “What are the barriers to playing, belonging, improving?”

KAIG: Yes.

SARA: And that’s a whole different kind of conversation that gets lost in this, that’s as if we put our kids in sports in order to learn how to win at all costs.

KAIG: And that winning at all costs, I mean it’s always been there in American sports, right? We’re a very competitive, individualistic country. And so that’s always been a thread. But it has increased in temperature over the last 30 to 40 years. I’m 45 and I started to see it increase when I was a young kid, but really step up in the expectation of performance, of early specialization, of this is your pathway to college. And the system of youth sport in our country has no regulating body. There’s no centralized regulating body. So it’s just everybody do what they will. Everybody figure out, everybody create their own systems, create their own regulations, their own rules from governing bodies down to little tiny organizations. And that influence of unhealthy competition has really impacted kids' experiences in sports. And I think that the combination of that uptick in unhealthy competition, overlayed with this idea of fairness and certain bodies need to be policed in a certain way because it’s unfair, because now my child can’t compete, they’re all one and the same. It’s all a part of the same complicated puzzle and web that is going on in youth sport these days. And I am now, since I’m not running the soccer club anymore, I’m now looking at larger coalition building around systems change within the Portland area specifically to start, but I’m also part of national conversations. And there are people having success on local levels in cities and states in trying to change these systems and trying to impart more rational, reasonable ideas around play and creating more opportunity for kids to just play. Just go out and have fun. You’re really good at your sport, okay let’s find a place for you to go. But you want to just have fun and play? Great, let’s just go have fun and play.

SARA: When you’re in your coaching self, when you’re on the field as a coach or you’re working with other coaches in the club, how do you talk to your players – in particular I’m thinking about this conversation of that balance between leaving it all out on the field and the power and the energy that it takes for the win, and the belonging and the community. And what are the kinds of things you’re telling your kids when you’re out there?

KAIG: It’s funny you ask me that. I was just thinking of this this morning because I’m back to coaching at the soccer club. So I’m actively coaching. And I’m coaching a middle school group that is a mixed gender group. So I’ve got fifth and sixth graders, girls and boys, from varying communities of culture and languages. And it’s middle schoolers. They’re a squirrely group. They come together and they are just having a good time, and they’re socializing. And that is primarily why kids play sport is to socialize. And I was just thinking of this, just this morning, I was thinking, “Okay. I want the kids to have a good time. That’s my primary goal is to have fun, be connected to each other. But they also want to win. It’s fun to win. It’s not fun to lose, especially if you lose by a lot.” So my thought as I’m going to training tonight, I thought, “Okay, the conversation I want to have with them is, ‘How many of you like to win?’” All the hands will go up, right? And then connecting that to, “If you come here just to socialize, just to hang out with your friends, that is so great. But if that’s all we do, we’re not going to get very good at soccer. It’s going to take us a long time. We’re going to struggle to get better at this sport and we’re going to struggle to win some games.” And so I think trying to connect those two pieces for kids of, “I’m not trying to take away your fun. I’m not trying to take away this place that I know means so much to you because maybe this is the one time of the day where you feel seen, where you feel connected. Maybe. It might be. I don’t want to take that away. And also, it’s fun to win. It’s fun to get better.” I think that’s more what it is for me. I love to win. I’m actually a notoriously losing coach. I lose a lot of games. I’ve coached for 30 years. I can count far easier the games that I’ve won than the games that I’ve lost because I love to win and I’m a super competitive person, but as a coach what I love way more is watching an individual kid or a group of kids as a team, get better. And to see their love and their passion grow for the game and to see their confidence be protected and their confidence to be just infused, right? It’s already there, but it just needs a little infusion. So that’s how I talk about it. I think that’s how a lot of our coaches talk about it. And what’s so great about the coaches at the club is that so many of the coaches are coming from also their own experiences of racism, discrimination, homophobia, whatever it may be because we have such a diverse group of coaches. And so they can also bring that shared experience of, “This is a special place. And also, this is soccer. You’re here to learn. Let’s play. Let’s work hard. Let’s be competitive in a healthy way.”

SARA: I love hearing that because I just reflect on this sort of cultural stereotype if not maybe still the norm of coaches who just really beat the fun out of it sometimes with their players.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: They want so much for players to be serious and skill building and push, push, push. And we watch that happen in young people. We watch them lose a love of the game or the sport or whatever that activity is because it’s been pushed too far to the excel at all costs and missed the, “What does it give you?”

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: “How does it feed you?”

KAIG: The dropout rate of kids in this age group that I’m working in right now is tremendous. It’s in the 60 to 70% of kids drop out at this age.

SARA: Wow.

KAIG: A lot of times because of that. There’s other factors too, but that one is really significant. And a lot of coaches don’t realize that they’re the source of it. They think that what they’re doing is getting kids to be better players, but they’re often pushing kids out. And a lot of it comes from male coaching. A strong undercurrent of masculinity and "This is how we coach. We coach hard. We’re demanding. We’re yelling.” It’s not all – there’s some female coaches out there that do it too.

SARA: Yes.

KAIG: But it comes from an expectation of this is what a coach looks like and so to push back on that is really important.

SARA: I’ll just affirm that personally and anecdotally. I have a young high-school, cisgender son who has played sports and luckily had some great coaches and stuff. But I watched so many coaches in the teams and the games over the years just exhibit some really frustrating behavior towards their players and lots of yelling and lots of shaming. And you’re sitting there as a parent, I’m sitting there at the score-keeping table, and I feel so badly and it’s not even my kid.

KAIG: Right. You just feel badly for the experience of those young people. Yeah.

SARA: It doesn’t feel good.

KAIG: That is a symptom of a lack of regulation around coaching in our country, different from other countries who have regulatory bodies where every coach has to go through the same kind of training and you know as a parent, in those countries – european countries, various countries – that, my kids’ coach has gone through this training and if a coach misbehaves and behaves the way that you’re describing, there’s recourse. There’s something to be done. There’s not a whole lot to be done in this country when coaches behave badly like that.

SARA: Oh, I didn’t know that.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: Wow. That is really interesting.

KAIG: Yep.

SARA: When you look ahead, when you look into your crystal ball into the hopeful future. . .

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: . . . what do you hope is different in athletics and youth sports in particular 10, 15, 20 years from now?

KAIG: A lot of things. But I think first and foremost, I hope that there’s just a lot more opportunity to just go have fun and play, that recreational level sports makes a resurgence. I mean, it’s still out there but it’s harder and harder to find that that level of play is accessible and that it’s community based. That it goes back to that we reinvent ourselves again to once again be a place where kids can play in their neighborhood. And they don’t have to travel all over the place. And we just go back to the simple, fun, throw a ball out, throw a net out, whatever the sport may be. That’s my hope, is that it can go back to that. I think that what needs to come with that is also a recognition – I guess I don’t want to say back to that – because what I really want it to be is let’s get that fundamental play within our system again, but with a far greater sophisticated lens of inclusion because when play was available in a more recreational way over the last many, many decades, that didn’t mean that everybody still got to play. That still was leaving kids out. There was still areas and neighborhoods and communities that didn’t have a field, that didn’t have a basketball court, or it wasn’t safe for the kids to go out and play. So let’s create opportunity with the recognition that just creating opportunity doesn’t mean that everybody gets to play.

SARA: I love that. With the success that you’ve experienced with the Portland Community Football Club, are there folks coming to you to help them plant similar kinds of football clubs or sports clubs in other places?

KAIG: You know, over the years there’s definitely been people who’ve reached out and said, “How do you do the gender-mixed teams? Tell me about that particular piece?” Or “How do you create something where kids don’t have to pay?” It’s been less about people saying, “I want to create something exactly like that.” And more like, “I’ve already got something going or I’m thinking about getting something going and I want to do these little bits of pieces as you have.” For a long time, me and other folks at the club, talked about, “Do we have a model here that we could replicate across other areas? Do we create chapters?” There was a lot of conversation about that. And I think ultimately what ended up happening was we came back to the conclusion of, we have something really special here. It’s special because of where it is and the people who are a part of it. And it can’t be recreated. But little parts of it can be used in other places. There’s no proprietary nature about creating inclusive sport. And what I’ve also learned over, now the last couple years of being part of national conversations, is that there are lots of other organizations around the country doing very similar kind of work. It just looks a little bit in their community and they’re doing it a little bit different. But there is a ground-swell of organizations small and large that are really paying attention to this issue and are starting to create some new legislation, some larger systems change work – State of California, State of Illinois come to mind first of all. They’re doing some stuff at the state level to start to really change these barriers, to really address the barriers – so it can go from super, hyper local to state level and maybe 20 years from now, we’ll have a regulatory body coming from our federal government.

SARA: Oh, wouldn’t that be amazing, and maybe some coaching body as well.

KAIG: Yes. All of it underneath the “Sports Ministry” is what I like to think of it.

SARA: Maybe we’ll see more mixed gender sports in professional places.

KAIG: It’s possible.

SARA: That would be really cool to see.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: What keeps you, Kaig, hopeful in these times especially when there’s so much divisiveness and so much hate that’s just kind of broiling everywhere?

KAIG: It’s a few things. It’s, one, coaching and being around the kids. When I’m around the kids it’s as if everything else falls to the wayside and I just get to be with them and see them as our future and they’re amazing. The kids I work with are just incredible. So that’s one piece. And then another is that I intentionally surround myself with creative, innovative, hopeful people. And so I’m more often in conversations that are paying attention to, yes, the reality of where we are and the very, very significant challenges that we’re facing, mixed with, “But what’s the next step? How do we get out of this? How do we change it? How do we evolve? How do we create new ways of thinking? How do we create new systems?” The time that I spend in the depths of where we are versus the future hopefulness is very great. I spend far more time in the future hopefulness than in the depths. And I think that’s the way to do it. That’s the way to do it for me to stay hopeful.

SARA: That’s a great answer. Thank you for the inspiration. I think we’re always, all of us, so many of us, are looking for where are those places of hope right now that we can just really sink into.

KAIG: Yeah.

SARA: This has been a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much for the amazing work you do and sharing your story with us. It’s just so beautiful to know that there are organizations like yours out there serving the community in so many ways, in addition to serving our queer kids as well. It’s just a joy.

KAIG: Thank you for the conversation. It was great. I love having all these conversations.

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