The roller derby community’s fight to save the inclusive sport they built 

Eddie Boxley, who goes by the derby name Punky D. Luffy, first thought about playing roller derby when derby skaters passed out flyers for a recruitment event at the local market. “I thought they were so badass,” he recalls. “And I wanted to do whatever they were doing, but I was so nervous.” They knew roller derby as a women’s sport, and wondered if, as a transmasculine person, they would be welcome. “Am I even allowed to go?” 

He got in touch with River City Roller Derby, based in Richmond, Virginia, who assured him that they were gender-inclusive: if he wanted to play, he was welcome to try out. 

Now, a year into his derby career, Punky D. Luffy sees this kind of inclusivity as fundamental to the sport. He’s not the only trans or gender nonconforming skater in his league—far from it. “Everyone has a place on the derby track,” they explain. “It’s not just ‘yeah, you can be here if you want to’—we actively want you to skate with us.” 

As laws banning trans people from sports have proliferated—and become a central pillar of President Trump’s administration—the derby community has stood steadfast in their view that everyone has a place on the derby track. In the hours, days, and weeks after the executive order, the line “You Can Skate With Us” appeared in social media posts by roller derby leagues across the U.S., from the Bradentucky Bombers in Southwest Florida; to South Sound Roller Derby in Lacey, Washington; to Salt City Roller Derby in Syracuse, New York. High Altitude Roller Derby of Flagstaff, Arizona, posted that “Roller Derby is for everyone. Please, come skate with us. You’re safe here.” A coalition of roller derby players in Minnesota penned an open letter condemning attempts to take trans women out of sports. The “You Can Skate With Us” movement went beyond the boundaries of the U.S., with leagues from Canada, Australia, England and Finland rolling in, vowing resistance to the States’ new executive order. As individual leagues weighed in, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, the governing body for 400 derby leagues across the world, reaffirmed their policy of allowing “any individual of a marginalized gender” to skate on a WFTDA team “despite the U.S. administration’s newest Executive Order,” and promised resources for teams concerned by the trans sports bans.

A community-organized sport that receives no federal funding, derby should be safe from the Trump administration’s recent executive action. But the sport’s relative isolation doesn’t immunize it against all trans bans. The Long Island Roller Rebels are now in the second year of a lawsuit against Nassau County over a law that bans women’s sports teams from using county facilities if their team includes trans women. Most trans sports bans start in the context of schools or federal funding, but Nassau County’s law includes any sport that uses a park or recreational space—the next step, perhaps, in an ever-evolving landscape of anti-trans laws. “It’s all the more important that an adult league like the Roller Rebels is pushing back on this before it’s normalized,” argues Gabriella Larios, a staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union who is litigating the Roller Rebels’ lawsuit. 

 Roller derby didn’t start out as a radically inclusive sport. Frenetically popular in the mid-20th century, the sport disappeared in the late 1970s, before women in Austin, Texas, revived derby in the early 2000s. And while pre-revival derby included both men and women’s teams, post-revival derby centred around women. Last year in Autostraddle, Gabrielle Grace Hogan termed derby “a sport with no true male equivalent, where the women’s leagues are the leagues.” 

At the same time, derby’s status as an underground, feminist sport, means that it attracts misfits. “One thing that I like about derby community is that it’s a place where people who fall through cracks of gendered sports are welcome,” says Silent but Violent, of Toronto’s Hogtown Roller Derby, a sentiment echoed by many of their fellow skaters, who talk about not fitting into gym classes, or feeling uncomfortable in single-gender sports. “The scrappy nature of derby brings in people who feel like they’re underdogs, which very much extends to trans people,” explains Eli Lee (derby name: Ghast Lee), the public relations representative for the Long Island Roller Rebels. Queer people historically flocked to derby, which developed a reputation as an LGBTQ2S+-friendly sport. Indeed, derby names—the often-cocky, always-playful alter egos adopted by derby players—were inspired by drag queens and their drag names.

Derby also embraced players who didn’t fit into a traditional athletic body, becoming a rare contact sport where people of all different body types play together and against one another. “It’s a big draw for people who want to join sports but don’t feel like they have the body type,” Punky D. Luffy says, connecting the sport’s radical body-inclusivity to its stance on gender. Ending strict constraints on gender seemed like the natural progression to the sport’s attitude that any kind of body could succeed on the track.

But even though it seemed like the next logical step, Derby’s gender inclusivity was hard-fought and hard-won. The WFTDA first set their gender policy in 2011. That policy defined competitors as those “living as a woman and having the sex hormones that are within the medically acceptable range for a female.” And although the WFTDA ditched this hormone policy in 2015, explicitly opening up the sports to trans women, non-binary competitors and other people of marginalized genders, the implementation wasn’t always smooth. Researcher and derby player Shea Ellen Gilliam documented persistent transphobia in leagues across the United States, noting the disconnect between the “public accolades of transgender inclusion” and the transphobia experienced by skaters on the ground. 

Kajee, (better known as Mama Menace on the track), has played in three derby leagues across Central New York over the last 13 years, and recalls that early in their career, “a lot of people were like ‘no, I can’t skate with a trans skater’ or ‘I don’t want to skate with a man.’ Me, I don’t care who you are, I just want to skate and knock you out.” 

Despite the early challenges, players worked hard to make gender inclusivity part of the structure of derby. The WFTDA seemingly has one of the most expansive gender policies of an organized sport, allowing trans women and trans men to skate in a women’s league without any kind of medical check. Their partner association, the Men’s Roller Derby Association, functions as the sport’s open-gender space, putting no gender restrictions on participation. Many leagues dropped gendered language like “doll,” “girl,” or “darling” from their names (Philly Roller Derby, for example, was once called the Philly Roller Girls). Uniforms now often include pronouns, and skating officials default to gender-neutral language when officiating matches. 

Most skaters embrace playing in a gender-diverse contact sport. “I’ve personally taken out guys that are twice my size, and have also seen skaters who are way smaller than me take out people that are four times their size,” Mama Menace recounts, before launching into an explanation of how to use physics to tackle different sizes of skaters. “It doesn’t matter what your build is, or how much you weigh, or what your body type is—[derby] is skill-based.” For T-Bone Kneegrabber, who officiates derby and whose son plays on the Philly Roller Derby’s junior team, the sport reminds her that the people pushing for trans sports bans aren’t in touch with reality: “I’ll watch a five-foot teenage girl taking out my six-foot-three cisgender son, and it’s like—yeah, they’re fine.” (Members of the derby community love to regale listeners with stories of smaller athletes tanking taller, sturdier skaters.)

Derby’s gender-expansive policies directly contravene the idea that gender-separated sports are necessary to protect female players. “People are hesitant to let daughters engage in full-contact and collision sports with members of the ‘opposite sex’ because of deep-rooted misogyny,” Ethan Garrity (a 13-year veteran of Philly Roller Derby’s junior team) argues. “But I also encourage people to open up their minds and try, because most of the boys that play derby aren’t shit—it’s a female-dominated sport.”

Quinn, better known on the track as Jest Dandy, characterizes derby as “a strange sport where you get to hit your friends, and no one is mad that you knocked them to the ground—a lot of times, your friends are encouraging you to do it.” For many players, the fact that derby is a contact sport is actively empowering. “In derby, I really love a moment where I can hit someone really hard, or I’m able to hold someone back when blocking them for a long time—the moments when you get to see your own strength,” Jest Dandy explains. 

That strength has extra meaning for the sport’s trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming players. For Mama Menace, derby gave them a sense of competence extending beyond the tracks: ” If I had never joined derby, I might still be passing as straight and binary and living in the shadows.” The sport’s gender-diverse camaraderie makes it a safe space for athletes to explore their gender and sexuality without fearing for their spot on the team. After Garrity came out as trans, he worried he wouldn’t succeed at sports, because he had so few trans examples to look up to. But his teammates—and his competitors—were open and welcoming. “I haven’t faced any issues,” he says, underlining that he trusts his coaches and teammates to support him if anyone ever says anything. “There’s never been any restrictions from competition based upon [my transition].”

Derby is the exemplar of what anti-trans politicians claim to target: a full-contact sport that began as a women’s sport and that later became famous for its gender-inclusive leagues. No surprise, then, that the derby community took the Trump administration’s executive order and its attendant sports bans personally: they fought for the sport’s gender diversity, and intend to keep it that way. 

“These are our teammates,” Ghast Lee explains about the Long Island Roller Rebels’ lawsuit. “We’re not going to turn our backs on our teammates.” That teamwork, that sense that everyone has a place on the track, is front and centre in the derby community’s response to trans bans. Derby players, from France to Canada to Florida and New York, are mobilizing in response to attacks on gender-diverse sports. Whether it’s through lawsuits, policy or just making clear that trans and gender-expansive people are welcome in their leagues, derby players are rallying around their teammates—and around the gender-diverse sport they created.