Trans Day of Visibility basketball tournament creates space for trans athletes amid international sports bans

Keinan Carpenter always dreamed of playing professional basketball.

When Carpenter, founder of the Trans Masculine Alliance Sports Club, started transitioning at 22, he kept playing women’s basketball and flag football, and found inclusion, though he still faced misgendering, among other issues.

But on Sunday, teams of all genders and ages took to the courts for a three-versus-three basketball tournament held ahead of Tuesday's International Transgender Day of Visibility.

It was the first of its kind for Carpenter and Mars Contino, an organizer with WNBGAY, who put the event together as a way to combat the exclusion they and other trans people have faced in sports.

“We shouldn’t have to sacrifice our identity to be included,” said Carpenter, 25. “If I can’t play professionally, how can I make a space that’s professional athletics for queer and trans people? So that’s the goal, there’s no limit, there’s no ‘I can’t’ — let me just make the space.”

The court, split into competitive and recreational sides, pitted players against each other for 15-minute matchups. Carpenter and Contino first met three weeks ago and worked to coordinate their groups to make the tournament happen.

Supportive cheers filled the gaps between sneaker squeaks and the sound of the ball hitting the Center on Halsted’s hardwood gym floor.

But it comes as trans people are further governed out of athletics.

As of Thursday, transgender women athletes are banned from women’s events at the Olympics after the IOC — whose Olympic Charter states that access to play sport is a human right — agreed to a new eligibility policy that it says aligns with President Donald Trump’s executive order on sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Only one openly trans woman has ever competed in the Olympics: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who left Tokyo in 2021 without a medal.

Trump issued an executive order last February threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that didn’t keep trans girls out of sports; his administration sued Maine for not complying. He also backed an amendment to a voting bill that would’ve put that edict into the word of law, though the U.S. Senate rejected it last weekend.

Illinois has ignored the order, allowing its trans high school athletes to continue playing sports. However, those young athletes have still been targeted for their identities.

Last September, USA Cycling banned trans women athletes, also citing the Trump executive order. It came two years after UCI, the international cycling governing body, banned trans women athletes who transitioned after going through a testosterone-based puberty and further restricted trans men competitors months after the first trans woman won one of its cycling events.

After that, Summer House, a player at the tournament, pivoted from cycling to basketball, and while the Ravenswood resident was eventually allowed to play, she and other trans women faced pushback participating in basketball within local city leagues.

“[Overall], I thought organized sports was out the door,” House said.

But Sunday afternoon, House took to the court with the rest of the self-named Houston Rockettes, who donned green while her teammate, Kari Kinne, covered the boards with rebounds and blocks.

Kinne and House have been playing regularly in the WNBGAY, a queer pickup basketball group started at Foster Beach four years ago that meets every Friday and Sunday for games.

That is was where Kinne felt most comfortable. She had played pickup games in high school and later at courts around the city, only to face hostility ranging from misgendering to harassment.

“Basketball was always one of those things I felt gatekept out of, even in high school,” said Kinne, 28. “I can go find a pickup game … and it’s mostly fine, but there’s always something, [like] getting called a slur. But I feel weird, out of my body a little bit.”

Contino is also an avid cyclist who faced similar pushback as House after the U.S. Cycling rule change, part of what pushed him to join WNBGAY and eventually become an organizer years later.

To many of the athletes, and even organizers, sports were part of what they envisioned for themselves, though forces beyond the government kept them away, family included.

But even before that, Contino was held back from sports by his parents, who “didn’t want me to be masculine or be a tomboy.”

“I started transitioning in my late 20s, and being able to see myself as an athlete in adulthood was a big part of that,” said Contino, 31. “It grew tiresome fighting for a little spot at the table when we could create something better.”