A trans ban came to rugby. Baltimore’s Ferals played on.

It was midmorning, and the March winds lashed against the faces of the players on the Ferals rugby team as they suited up at a park in Frederick. The turf was frozen.

Harper Ockert, 24, wrapped her left knee with tape, stabilizing her joint for the jarring hits to come. She had struggled to sleep the night before, but her anxiety was not strictly about the game.

She and her teammates were preparing to defy newly enacted rules set by the sport’s governing body. A nervous energy thrummed in her chest as she considered what her defiance meant.

Ockert is a transgender woman who plays for the Ferals — the women’s-plus team within the Baltimore Flamingos rugby club. Three of her teammates are trans women, too. They had played games for the Ferals before, but this match at Walnut Ridge Park was the team’s first since USA Rugby had shifted its policy to allow only people assigned female at birth to play women’s rugby.

Whispers of an impending change had begun in February, between the fall and spring sessions of the season. Later that month, USA Rugby bowed to pressure from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which itself was bowing to pressure from the White House. Weeks before the Frederick game, the new rules took effect.

The Trump administration had warned governing bodies of many sports that they had to adopt policies banning trans women. If they refused, they would lose USOPC funding and Olympic team placement or be decertified by the federal government and lose authority over their sports.

Even in Division 3 — the lowest level of competitive adult rugby made up entirely of weekend warriors — no competitor was exempt from the ban.

Ockert had fallen in love with rugby and had suited up for the Ferals last fall without fear. But, as she prepared for the road game against the Frederick Women’s Rugby Football Club, her mind raced.

Would anyone report her or her trans teammates?

Would the Ferals lose the match before it even began because of who was playing?

“There’s always that fear,” she said later. “Does someone have feelings that they’re suppressing? Is someone going to mess with us anyways? Like, what’s going to happen?”

This fear is increasingly familiar to the trans community. New policies have dramatically limited options such as medical care and hormone therapy in many states. Nowhere has the discussion been louder — and nowhere have anti-transgender activists been more successful — than competitive sports. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld state bans on transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ school sports teams.

USA Rugby’s decision to change its bylaws was, on paper, a massive blow to trans women on the Baltimore-based Flamingos. For years the club made it a point to aggressively recruit trans men and women, and trans players on the Ferals wondered whether the policy change would force the end of their burgeoning rugby careers.

But what happened after the ban was illuminating. Across the country, many teams refused to comply.

“We’re not asking for permission to be here,” said trans man and former Flamingos president Val Pizzo, a leader in the pro-trans movement in rugby. “We’re playing.”

For every body, a tackle

Once Evie Clay hits top speed, she doesn’t get caught. Usually.

Clay was probably the fastest player on the Ferals this past season. She grew up playing lacrosse, reaching the Division III level at a small Indiana college. While she has transitioned to a woman since her lacrosse days, what hasn’t changed is she is very, very hard to run down.

But, eventually, everyone gets hit.

“I have definitely been tagged by people where, as soon as I felt contact being made, the immediate thought on my mind is, ‘Oh, there’s no escaping this,’” she said. “‘Oh, no, I’m going down.’”

Rugby is a cousin to football with multiple variants. The Ferals play the classic version with 15 people. Every position requires a specific skill set and specific physical traits.

The biggest and strongest play forward. The lightest and quickest are backs. Regardless of size and speed, all body types are welcome; players just have to be willing to tackle — even against women who are a foot taller or 100 pounds heavier.

“It’s not about the size of the person,” 34-year-old Ferals player Jelytza Padro said, “but it’s about having good form and knowing good foundations.”

This acceptance of different body types has helped the game earn a strong following among the LGBTQIA community. The Flamingos are among hundreds of clubs affiliated with International Gay Rugby.

IGR grew rapidly after 2002. The organization launched a tournament in honor of Mark Bingham, a gay man and rugby player who died during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he and fellow passengers on United Flight 93 stormed the cockpit to thwart their hijackers. The annual tournament, called the Bingham Cup, draws thousands of people from around the world.

There might be no better example of how the game fits all shapes and sizes than Pizzo, one of the shortest players on the Flamingos men’s teams. Pizzo transitioned as a teenager, then played men’s rugby for four years during college without revealing himself as trans to his teammates.

“There was not a space for trans people at all — they just thought I was born a male,” Pizzo said. “I was afraid they would kick me off the team if they knew.”

The effects of transitioning on athletic performance have not been extensively studied, much less scientifically demonstrated. A study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine released in February concluded that transgender women, after a year or more of hormone therapy, had comparable physical fitness to cisgender women.

Trans players on the Ferals have experienced such strength drop-offs from taking hormones. Clay was an avid weightlifter for years before transitioning, but after a few years of taking estrogen she got back in the gym and found her max bench press had dropped by 100 pounds and her squat max had dropped by 200.

It took three years of lifting to bring her benchmarks back up in the weight room. “I worked my ass off for that,” Clay said.

While anti-trans activists say trans women and girls pose safety threats to their competitors, there is no scientific evidence and there are no studies suggesting competition is more or less safe with trans women. Flamingos and Ferals players say the biological differences of trans players rarely give them an advantage over cisgender players. Being dedicated on the pitch and in the gym is a more reliable indicator of a player’s on-field success and ability than whether they are trans.

“The more people play alongside trans athletes,” Pizzo said, “the more they can see their assumptions were wrong.”

Internal tug-of-war

Tall and lean, Ockert started swimming in grade school, then she competed in college for Towson University.

Coming from a deeply Christian background, Ockert didn’t understand why she felt wrong inside her body. She coped by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, overdosed at a party in her sophomore year, then went to rehab and spent a year coping with substance abuse.

At the root of these substance abuse problems, Harper came to realize, was that she was training and competing as a man. The gender she presented to the world was incongruent with how she wished to live.

The pattern underlying Ockert’s story is common for many people who struggle with gender dysphoria, which is caused by a mismatch between assigned birth gender and the gender identity they feel inside.

Many academic surveys and studies have found transgender youths and adults show higher rates of mental health distress than cisgender people. A 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit crisis prevention group supporting LGBTQIA people, found that 46% of transgender and nonbinary people had considered attempting suicide. The survey also found that LGBTQIA people living in less accepting communities reported double the rate of suicide attempts than ones living in more accepting conditions.

As a competitor on a men’s college swimming team, Ockert’s physical appearance — she spent hours each week in a Speedo — was increasingly at odds with how she saw herself. Something had to give.

The tension started to ease only when Ockert gave up swimming, went to therapy and gradually started to acknowledge that her birth gender didn’t reflect her sense of self.

By 2024, her challenges with substance abuse seemed to diminish: “Staying sober got a lot easier when I started to medically transition and feel more like myself.”

She made new friends and started attending queer-friendly events, one of which led her to join an LGBTQIA rugby club.

Learning the intricacies of the game took time, but she could stay on the field without getting winded thanks to all of those years in the pool. Some of her teammates had never so much as trained for a sport; she’d done so at an elite level.

That doesn’t mean she dominated.

“I’ll still get beaten by other girls in line-outs in practice,” Ockert said. “It’s not like [trans women are] constantly outperforming everyone. That just hasn’t happened.”

Smaller space

In December 2024, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked NCAA Chairman Charlie Baker how many transgender players — out of half a million athletes — were competing in college sports.

His answer: “Less than 10.”

The feud between trans swimmer Lia Thomas and her competitor Riley Gaines brought outsize attention to trans athletes in sports. The two tied for fifth in a 2022 NCAA championship race, and Gaines became the face of a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA for allowing Thomas to compete. Her suit and anti-trans advocacy eventually helped get Thomas erased from the college record books.

Activists such as Gaines have lobbied officials to ban trans women from many levels of competition across sports, including the Olympics and the NCAA. At least 27 states have banned trans women and girls from competing on all-female teams.

In his opinion for the 6-3 decision on the Idaho and West Virginia bans, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that those states would face “an enormous practical and administrability problem” if they were forced to make individual exemptions — even though many state legislators sponsoring such bans haven’t cited a single transgender athlete in their areas.

A Pew survey published in February found that 66% of Americans favor requiring trans athletes to play on teams that match their assigned gender at birth (an increase from 58% in 2022).

For the trans women on the Ferals, these policies are an extension of transphobia and hostility that they experience often, especially when traveling beyond Maryland. Ockert plans for long drives by researching the bathroom laws of the states she will pass through. On these trips, she wears sweatsuits that conceal her figure and she tries hard not to be noticed.

Even though many sports ban trans women, teams and players hoped that such a policy might never arrive for rugby.

USA Rugby CEO Bill Goren said the organization fought for years to remain inclusive of trans members, including resisting a World Rugby policy change in 2020 that excluded them from the women’s game. But in the last year the USOPC directed its governing bodies to adopt policies targeting trans women.

Goren said USA Rugby asked the USOPC to mitigate the sweeping effects of an all-division policy across thousands of players in hundreds of clubs. The organization asked if it could research whether allowing trans women had any influence on player safety. But the USOPC wouldn’t budge.

“I feel through my conversations that people are losing that support system that’s very much needed for people that aren’t accepted everywhere, and this is a place they were,” Goren said. “I do think it’s negatively impacting the ethos of our game. Not everyone in the United States would agree this applies to the ethos of our game, but it really does.”

Decertification, the most drastic consequence, would render the organization powerless to administrate rugby in the U.S., and the government could replace USA Rugby with a governing body of its own design. This last threat, Goren said, was too much for USA Rugby to risk.

Without fanfare, USA Rugby inserted this phrase into its bylaws: “To comply with USOPC’s NGB Athlete Safety Policy, the Women’s Division is limited to individuals who are assigned female at birth.”

‘We’re gonna show up as we are’

Pizzo was one of the first to hear about the imminent policy change as the team’s International Gay Rugby representative. As the longtime team president, he had made recruiting trans players for the men’s and women’s squads a personal goal — in the offseason, he also organizes the International All-Trans match for the Bingham Cup.

Now he faced the unsavory task of talking to the four players who would be affected by the policy. At least one cried.

Sidelining the trans women players was never an option, Pizzo said. The Ferals have an internal credo to be radically inclusive. No one on the team wished to comply with a USA Rugby policy they felt was unjust.

“We’re not going to forfeit matches,” Pizzo said. “We’re gonna show up as we are. We’re gonna shoulder that burden for our players.”

The real choice, as Pizzo saw it, was whether the Ferals would try to compete anyway — hoping they wouldn’t be noticed — or whether they would make lots of noise and shame USA Rugby for its decision.

There was not much hesitation.

“I’m ready to keep playing rugby until they drag me off the field,” 38-year-old forward Christa Robison said. “I was like, ‘You can pry this ball out of my cold, dead hands.’”

The Ferals quickly found out just how many teams and players were on their side.

Rugby for All, a pro-trans advocacy group, reported that at least 72% of USA Rugby Clubs opposed the policy on social media. Goren acknowledged there has been a flood of reactions from teams and fans sent to his desk, and “it’s so much heavier on the pro-inclusiveness side.”

The Capital Union, the region in which the Flamingos and Ferals play, carefully dissected the wording of the new rule. Only players or coaches on opposing teams can report trans players — outsiders play no part in the process. The Capital Union teams decided not to tell on one another, rendering the ban functionally meaningless in regionwide games.

If a compliance officer investigates a player, that player has to produce two forms of government identification confirming the gender on their USA Rugby paperwork. That hasn’t happened. No games have been forfeited, nor has any athlete been officially removed from competition because of a grievance.

The only grievances filed have been anonymous and none has been substantive, Goren said.

“What we expected — and what we all did not want to happen — was pointing at people and going, ‘I think that’s a male,’" Goren said.

Division 3 has been successful at defying USA Rugby’s trans ban in part because the level of competition is so low. Women’s Elite Rugby, the highest level in the U.S., has kept trans women off its teams since the policy was announced — including players who were told before February that they would have roster spots.

Some cisgender players have brought trans flags to their matches and posed for photos with signs urging USA Rugby to allow trans people to play.

Alexa Hopkins, Capital Union’s D3 coordinator who has helped organize resistance to the policy, said some of those high-level players ought to consider sitting out in support of their teammates.

“If your trans teammate is not allowed to play, how do you feel about playing?” she said. “Eventually it’s going to come down to not stepping on a pitch to make a point.”

Standing together

On that cold morning in Frederick, the Ferals had a good idea that their opponents weren’t going to report them, because Frederick also has a trans player.

The Ferals had a right to be nervous, though; they were beaten 70-5. Having four trans players to Frederick’s one had no bearing on the game’s result.

Ockert and the other trans women had begun the day riding on nerves, wondering whether the women they had come to know as teammates and opponents would stick up for them.

After 80 minutes, they had their answer.

Later that day, the teams took a group picture, holding trans flags to let the rest of the rugby world know that, even after a morning of knocking each other to the ground, they would stand together against USA Rugby’s exclusionary policy.

It reminded Ockert why she fell so hard for the Ferals.

“It’s not escapism — it’s a way for my whole world to become just people who support me,” Ockert said, “whether they are playing against me on the other team or standing alongside me on the field or cheering me from the sidelines for those 80 minutes.”

It’s one of the first lessons in rugby: When you’re locked in a scrum, you have to push together with your teammates. Only then can you move forward.