When USA Rugby banned transgender women from women's rugby in early 2025, many teams across the country refused to comply. The Baltimore Flamingos' Ferals did exactly that, playing on with four trans women in their lineup and showing that real inclusion lives in communities, not in the institutions that abandon them.

A frozen morning and a choice that mattered

Harper Ockert, 24, barely slept the night before the Ferals' road game against the Frederick Women's Rugby Football Club. She was taping her knee in the March cold at Walnut Ridge Park, preparing for the hits and the turf and the jarring, joyful contact sport she had fallen in love with. Her anxiety, though, was not about the game itself. It was about whether she and her three trans teammates would be reported. Whether someone in the opposition, or in the stands, would decide that the people on the pitch mattered less than the policy that now excluded them.

That is a particular kind of fear, and I hear it all the time. Not the dramatic, abstract fear of legislation, but the specific, quiet, stomach-tightening fear of not knowing which direction hostility might come from, or when. "Does someone have feelings that they're suppressing?" Harper said afterwards. "Is someone going to mess with us anyways? Like, what's going to happen?"

They played. Nobody stopped them. And that, in its way, is the story.

What the ban actually was

USA Rugby's policy shift came in February, between the fall and spring sessions of the season. The governing body bowed to pressure from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which was itself bowing to pressure from the White House. The Trump administration had made the threat explicit: adopt trans bans or lose USOPC funding, Olympic placement, or federal recognition altogether. So USA Rugby complied. Even at Division 3, the lowest rung of adult competitive rugby, made up entirely of weekend warriors, no one was exempt.

The Baltimore Flamingos had spent years actively recruiting trans men and women. For a club affiliated with International Gay Rugby, an organisation that grew rapidly after 2002 around the legacy of Mark Bingham, a gay man who died on United Flight 93 on 11 September 2001, trans inclusion was not a novelty or a policy position. It was just the culture of the club, built game by game and training session by training session.

The ban could have ended that. Instead, across the country, many teams simply refused to listen. "We're not asking for permission to be here," said Val Pizzo, a trans man and former Flamingos president who has led the pro-trans movement in rugby. "We're playing."

The people the ban was supposed to remove

Evie Clay is probably the fastest player the Ferals had this past season. She grew up playing lacrosse to Division III level. She is very, very hard to run down. She is also a trans woman who has been on oestrogen for several years, and in that time her bench press max dropped by 100 pounds and her squat max by 200. She spent three years lifting to bring those numbers back up. "I worked my ass off for that," she said.

The argument that trans women have an inherent athletic advantage over cisgender women does not survive contact with people like Evie Clay. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that transgender women, after a year or more of hormone therapy, had comparable physical fitness to cisgender women. There is no scientific evidence, and no body of studies, suggesting that competition is less safe when trans women are involved. What Flamingos and Ferals players say, consistently, is that dedication, form, and willingness to get tackled are far more reliable indicators of a player's ability than whether they are trans.

Rugby is also, it turns out, a sport that genuinely accommodates a range of bodies. The biggest and strongest play forward, the lightest and quickest play back, and every shape in between has a role. "It's not about the size of the person," said Jelytza Padro, 34, "but it's about having good form and knowing good foundations." That pragmatic flexibility, where what matters is what you can do and how hard you work, is part of why the sport has built such a strong following among LGBTQIA+ communities.

Pizzo is one of the shortest players on the Flamingos men's teams. He transitioned as a teenager and played men's college rugby for four years without telling his teammates he was trans, because he was afraid they would remove him from the squad. "There was not a space for trans people at all," he said. Now he is one of the most visible advocates for that space's existence. "The more people play alongside trans athletes," he said, "the more they can see their assumptions were wrong."

What rugby gave Harper Ockert

Harper came from a deeply Christian background and spent years unable to name what felt wrong inside her body. She coped with substance abuse, overdosed at a party in her sophomore year at Towson University, went to rehab, and spent a long time rebuilding. At the root of it, she came to understand, was that she was training and competing as a man when she was not one. The sport she had known, swimming, was one she had experienced in the wrong gender. Rugby, the Ferals, was something different.

Her story is not unusual. Many academic surveys have found that transgender young people and adults experience higher rates of mental health distress than cisgender people, and much of that distress is linked not to trans identity itself but to the rejection, isolation, and barriers that come with it. What the Flamingos gave Harper Ockert was a team. A place where she could play without apology, tape her knee in the cold, and belong.

That is the thing a ban takes away. Not just a sport, but a community, a sense of physical confidence in a body that has often felt like the site of a long argument, a reason to train and compete and feel capable and strong. The institutions that write these policies rarely seem to reckon with what they are actually removing from a person's life.

Where inclusion actually lives

What the Ferals did is not complicated, and it is not small. Faced with a governing body that had capitulated to federal pressure, they looked at their teammates and chose them. No statement, no press release, no petition. They just played.

That gap, between what institutions mandate and what communities actually do, is where trans lives are often lived. The legislative picture is relentless right now, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding state bans on transgender athletes in school sports makes the institutional terrain bleaker still. But institutions do not have a monopoly on what sport means, or on who gets to be part of it. The Ferals played on a frozen pitch in Frederick with four trans women in their lineup, and nothing terrible happened, because nothing terrible was ever going to happen.

The teams that are refusing to comply across the country deserve to be seen. Not because defiance is romantic, but because it is accurate. It reflects what people who actually play alongside trans athletes already know: that the fears driving these bans are not grounded in the reality of what happens when a team simply decides to include everyone and get on with the game.