Nicky is a queer trans femme and recent Vassar grad who played on the Vassar Men’s Volleyball team for two years. She is currently attempting to adult in Brooklyn, NY, where she is a social worker at a community health center connecting underserved populations—primarily low-income queer and trans folks—to social and medical services. Nicky strives to spill the tea professionally and will continue to look fierce on a budget in the meantime. She wants everyone to know that there’s a lot of missed beauty outside the norm, and believes we should all stop being blind to the power structures present in our everyday lives. You can find Nicky in her bed binge-watching Netflix and trolling Grindr, or on a Tinder date trying to find a non-transphobic partner while getting free drinks in the meantime.
In the following interview, Nicky and I discussed her experiences in the world of athletics at Vassar and beyond.
CONTENT WARNING: transphobia, queerphobia, misogyny, transmisogyny, sexual harassment and assault, dysphoria, body image
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Jane McLeod: How did you first get into volleyball?
Nicky: I’ve been playing volleyball since I was in first grade. My mom sat me down one day at the beginning of elementary school and told me I had to pick one of the after school activities [or] sports to do… probably because she couldn’t pick me up or she wanted me to socialize and have an activity. I remember picking volleyball over football or baseball because those sounded super unappealing to me, the “classic boy sports.” I had been forced to play Little League for awhile when I was even younger, and I absolutely hated it.
JM: Why did you think you would’ve liked volleyball so much more?
N: My mom seemed actually concerned that I chose volleyball ‘cause at that point it was mostly a women’s game and was perceived as a fairly feminine thing. But she conceded… thank god.
I think a lot of the appeal for me was the femininity of it… based on who I saw playing the game and the lesser emphasis on manliness or brute strength and aggression, which definitely foreshadows my transition later in life.
JM: What was your experience like playing when you were younger?
N: My first coach was amazing… honestly the best coach ever. She taught me all the fundamentals, and she told me I was really good, which made me feel great! We would play on the grass court on the elementary school field, and I did that from 1st to 5th grade. I remember always being disappointed at the end of practice ‘cause I just wanted to keep playing… I felt really connected to my teammates and I ended up recruiting a lot of my friends and creating a really great community. I also was honestly like really good in elementary school. I had this serve called the superman [laughs]. It was just a hard under-hand-serve, and no one could pass it. We played competitive games every Saturday, and it was the highlight of my life. That confidence and the fact that I had found something to excel at and be excited about was wonderful as a young person.
JM: That’s incredible… What was your middle school experience like?
N: I had another really great coach and the game just got more thrilling and fun as the kids got better. We finally moved indoors and onto a real-sized net. I always got to games early, played my pump-up music, wore my knee pads all day, sipped on my Gatorade [laughs]. I never wanted to leave the gym!
JM: Amazing! [Laughs]
N: When I got to high school I still loved the game, but unfortunately my experiences got worse and worse.
JM: Do you think that was due to gender separation?
N: Definitely a huge factor… In high school, I was perceived and acted as a gay man, which lent to me never really fitting into men’s groups in general, and it was very heightened on the teams I played on. I never clicked with my teammates. They would always bro-out or bond over misogyny and the sexualization of women… really gross, awful things, and I did not want to participate in any of that.
I was also terrified by my coach, and I don’t really think I was ever coached to my full potential then… I think a lot of it had to do with being misread gender-wise. I was a lot more fragile… not at all to say that girls are fragile, but I didn’t feel like the way I was being coached in high school was how it should’ve been. I really never felt accepted, included, or supported because I felt like the odd one out. But I still loved the sport, and I wanted to be a part of my team simply because I loved playing volleyball.
JM: And you continued playing in college… Was it influential in your college process?
N: To be honest, I didn’t even know that Vassar had a volleyball team. I applied to lots of colleges regular decision… I was far more interested in pursuing academics. But when I got to Vassar I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I was in a new space, and I just wanted to find a community and fit in right away.
JM: That makes a lot of sense… I mean we all want and need community.
N: Yeah, I wanted community. And the only thing I really knew when I got to Vassar was that I loved volleyball. I didn’t have the greatest experience playing in high school, but I loved the game, so I figured volleyball was where I was going to try to fit in again.
JM: What was it like when you first got on the team? What were team dynamics like?
N: Femininity or any perceived weakness was definitely shunned. Personally, in the beginning, the way I think I was able to participate on the team to a certain capacity was by tokenizing myself as the “little gay boy” or “the funny one.” It’s weird to think about that person then with who I am now… It’s distant… looking back is a crazy experience as a trans person.
Anyways… there was definitely a clear emphasis on manliness and virility. And while that was always present on the team and in athletic spaces, the weight room was a crystallization of it all. We had to lift…there was a huge emphasis on lifting. In the weight room, it was painfully evident how much I didn’t fit in…and how
I was coerced into doing things that made me uncomfortable in the name of team unity.
I didn’t want to be buff or muscular…which in actuality made me really dysphoric…and I didn’t want to be around that space of toxic masculinity, where my teammates tried to prove who was the manliest by competing in who could lift the most. You have to be there to really experience it, but the misogyny in that space was palpable. I felt lesser as a queer person or someone who doesn’t conform to the normative expectations of manhood… which I obviously didn’t because I was a girl.
JM: Did you ever bring any of this up to your team or anyone at the time?
N: I did… I brought up the fact that I didn’t want to lift numerous times, but there was a persistent heir that the weight room was necessary. And my non-desire to lift… my rejection of lifting culture… led my teammates and coaching staff to think of me as less of an athlete. But no one ever thought to question why I wouldn’t want to be going… no one ever thought to consider how I felt as a queer person…
to come up with an alternative for the weight room for me. I was never given a choice or really the space to talk about my discomfort…and then I was punished even further.
This logic extends beyond the weight room, too. Not being a part of the unified body is a very hard position to be in when you are supposed to be working as a cohesive unit. But difference, in some shape or form, is something every team has to deal with… and I don’t think ostracizing something or someone outside of the norm, which I think is the default method, is a fair way to go about it.
JM: In terms of athletic spaces, excluding the court or the weight room, what was your experience like? How was the party or social scene?
N: My first year I was fucked up all the time… I was belligerently happy, and I was really naive. I had zero perspective on my experience because I was kind of dumbly leading this life as a very confused freshman. As I got older, though… the more I looked around and was changing as a person… I became uncomfortable with the party scene and social scene I was associating with in terms of my team.
JM: Did you always go out with the volleyball team?
N: All the way up until senior year… tapering off at the end obviously because I would eventually quit junior year… but yeah, a lot of the time I went out with athletes…to athlete spaces. I usually went out with the women’s volleyball team because, I mean, I was and am a woman. I didn’t like hanging out with the men’s team. Pre-gaming with them was boring, honestly. I liked dancing and fruity drinks…and hated kegs and beer and just sitting around. I mainly went out with the women’s team but it was hard because there were times when there were “girl exclusive” pre-games and parties, and then I just wouldn’t go out. This was hurtful because I was friends with all of them, but I was never ever accepted as one of them. They consistently enforced the gender binary amongst the teams… even the people I called my closest friends didn’t try to integrate me.
Anyways… My first year was a blind dump. And then sophomore year was weird. I hung out with the girls a lot more. But I don’t really remember… It was a shitty year. End of sophomore year, there were definitely rumblings of major personal development and change. And then junior year was my, “I’m done with this shit year.” But it’s all this haze, really. It’s hard to remember freshman and sophomore year when I was deep into the volleyball world because I am so unbelievably different now. In terms of parties, though, I just remember “integrated” athlete parties with men and women’s teams and how predatory they were. While girls were dancing and expressing themselves and having fun, men were just sitting or standing and watching. It was like these girls were performing and men were scattered around ready to catch prey that fell off the show. It was just so predatory. And even then, I was also so removed from my team’s inner, sexual circle of sexual conquests. Not that I desired to be in it… but I wasn’t deemed worthy of hearing any of it or participating in any of it because I was queer. But I did hear rumors…and people on my team did really shitty things. The way sex existed in those spaces was really sad… It was such a nasty culture.
JM: Yikes… I’m getting flashbacks to my first month at school… You’re dancing, you’re having fun, you’re surrounded by all of your friends when all of a sudden you feel two strange hands on your hips… and the expectation is that you are then going to be taken to a more “private” wall.
N: I promise you, go to an athletics TH party and stand on the top of a sofa and look around, and you will see in the middle a ton of queer people and women having the time of their lives and men standing around ready to catch their next meal.
JM: Fuck… I can still feel those hands on my hips and feeling obligated to turn around. And then feeling obligated to make out. And then hearing in my ear, “So are we leaving, or what?” or “Come home with me.”
N: Ok, this is a tangent, but always having this weird desire to have that happen to me… because that’s what I learned womanhood was in life, but at Vassar specifically. I learned that to be a woman was to be desired by men, to be docile…to be seen as someone who, in the male gaze, is valuable. I always felt like a failure amongst that very cis-hetero logic. It was so self-damaging…
JM: Me too. In the first month of school, I just remember if someone didn’t come up behind me… I felt like a failure.
N: It’s because we were around people with that very mindset! And that’s the reality…
…As queer people, our nights are put against this cis-hetero basis… Our social lives are put against this ruler which is the cis-hetero experience.
JM: I remember going to a party once at the men’s volleyball TH with two of my queer friends who were hooking up at the time—one of them was also on the women’s volleyball team—and one of the hosts kicked them out because there were too many people… but he only kicked them out.
N: Oh my god, are you serious?
JM: Yeah.
N: Shit… I am not surprised.
JM: It was like…because the two of them weren’t there for them, they were not valued. They had no purpose in that TH. But also, I’m pretty sure it was just some straight up homophobia…
N: It just surprises me that it was so blatant. Like, my teammates said some unsettling things but the really derogatory stuff was made behind my back. I think a major problem is that a lot of them actually came into Vassar not personally knowing a queer person… Or come from a culture [or] place where queer people are shunned. It’s just hard to reconcile the fact that that exists simultaneously with Vassar’s reputation. Like we lure queer people into Vassar on the pretense that it’s going to be a queer haven…but then you come into these spaces, where athletics parties are often the only parties to go to, and your mocked or rejected. And even more, when you are an athlete, you realize that this school that touts major rainbows hasn’t put in any work to try to meld queerness and athletics.
And then you have to figure it out yourself. It was so hard… I wanted to be a part of the team, but I didn’t know how to be while being myself. And then my own understanding of myself changed over time, too…especially as my politics started becoming queer, and I became more socially and politically aware.
JM: At one point did that happen?
N: Spring of my sophomore year… That’s when I started taking Women Studies, Africana Studies, Education classes, so on and so forth.
JM: What did you start off thinking you were going to major in?
N: Uhhh… English… then I went to Media Studies…and then I made my way to finally majoring in Political Science with a correlate in Queer Studies [laughs]. I came a long way.
JM: Oh, wow. Do you remember what your teammates were studying?
N: Biology, Economics, Economics/Political Science, Chemistry, and Cognitive Science were my year’s majors I’m pretty sure. There were very few humanities majors overall. I don’t really think anyone took classes that dealt directly with social inequality and injustice or focused on marginalized identities.
JM: Did you ever have any conversations with your teammates about social justice issues?
N: Not really… I mean, they would say racist, transphobic, misogynistic things all the time. And especially in my sophomore year and moving forward, when I began to learn and know better, I was keen to call them out and talk to them… but also only to a certain extent… I wanted to fit into the team, too. I definitely drew a line and would state when I was uncomfortable with explicit bigotry but on a sports team, you have to coalesce and do well together as a unit. And it was also a burden, feeling like I had to educate my teammates, particularly about myself and my identity. I also needed to take care of my myself… It was a lot to handle. And I was already ostracized… No one wanted to listen to me and no one was really open to “cushy, leftist” or “the other people at Vassar” talk.
Also by the time I was socially more aware, I knew I was a woman. I knew I didn’t want to be in that space. It was toxic, gross, and had hurt me for so long. I wish I had planned more to be a part of some mechanism for change within that community, but I had already been so exiled, and there was no hope for me to go back. I also didn’t want to go back. I was ridiculed… I was a ridicule.
JM: Do you think it would be beneficial if athletes took more social justice-oriented humanities classes? Would that help create a more aware and inclusive community?
N: Probably…
there needs to be more people on these teams with queer politics and awareness. And if you are more aware and do have these politics, you can’t exist in the space uncritically.
But it’s also important to understand that this is not a privilege afforded to everyone… but if you can, you must.
It’s also hard, though. I don’t know how to flip a switch in someone’s mind to get them to care about other people and be empathetic. I don’t… We don’t.
I just have these memories of putting on wild, sparkly platforms, jean skirts, and halter tops in the locker room after practice. And it was the most uncomfortable thing in my life. People were so dumbfounded and cruel… but it was so beautiful… these moments were so beautiful, but I was terrified. And the fact that I was doing it was incredibly brave. Femme-ness should be cherished, especially in a space like the men’s locker room… but I felt so shitty about myself. So many of my teammates to this day don’t even know that this was my reality at Vassar. They don’t know that this is what I went through.
JM: I’m so sorry…
N: No one ever reached out to me, no one ever checked in. How do you call yourself a part of a team if you are not caring about or checking in with every person on the team, especially if it’s a relatively small one? I felt incredibly left out… I felt like I constantly tried, but it was never reciprocal. The way my team dealt with difference was by exiling it. I was stuck in this position where I loved the sport… but I didn’t know how to do it while being true to myself and keeping my humanity.
JM: Did you ever or were you able to talk to your coach about any of this?
N: God no… He was the worst. He never addressed my queerness. It was as if he ignored it, it didn’t exist. I never even told my coach I was going abroad. I mean, what is that level of trust? That’s how much I thought he cared about me as a person.
JM: I’m so sorry… Trust is so important, especially on a team… And coaches are so important in creating an inclusive, safe space for all team members… When you decided to go abroad during the spring season, did you have any reservations at all?
N: Well, for my first and second years I didn’t really play in games, but junior year fall I actually did end up playing in the lineup… If I hadn’t gone abroad in the spring I would have most likely had a role as a DS [“defensive specialist,” a player who goes in for a front row hitter in the back row] on the court. I remember playing in the alumni match and playing in that final game when we won and feeling like I kinda belonged. That was the first time I had felt that way… ever. And it was on the court. I had finally found a small place athletically, and it had taken me, what… like 7 years to get to this place? Since the beginning of high school. But by then I was committed to transitioning and volleyball had really left my mind… I have absolutely no regrets for having gone abroad. Had I stayed, I really don’t know what that would have looked like… to feel like I belonged with my team on the court but not in the social sphere.
JM: I could talk to you about that [laughs].
N: [Laughs] Yeah, I know a lot of queer people that have that place. But I never had the experience of being integrated into the team, except for that one moment. And going abroad was so important for me, it truly was the beginning of my womanhood.
JM: What happened when you came back?
N: Well, when I first went abroad, I treated it as a break from volleyball. Then when I got back to Vassar my senior year fall, I was taking mones and full blown medically transitioning. I was wearing a wig and boob and butt stuff, all stuff integral to my trans experience… but I was just a very doll-like woman at that point. I wasn’t at the place to do athletics, especially with how I was presenting at the time. I was also not comfortable with my body nor womanhood at the time.
JM: If timing in terms of hormones and everything had worked out, do you think you would have played on the women’s team?
N: Yes! I would have, and I have no idea how that would have been, but hopefully a lot better…
When I came back there was actually also a new coach for the men’s team, and he was really cool. He approached me and was like, “Hey, I’ve had a transwoman play on my men’s team before. I’d love to have you play.” This was great to hear, but… I mean, he can be as cool as he wants, but in the end, the team was horrible for me and to me… It doesn’t really matter that this one coach, this one person, was inclusive. It would have been an interesting experience though… Maybe better? I don’t know.
JM: I think it would have been interesting with the new coach. I know that he started holding a few non-physical practices, like how the women’s coach does… to try to create a more positive team culture—
N: Did that backfire?
JM: —which all coaches should be doing. I’m pretty sure it was not well received… mainly because it was different, but also probably because the team perceived sitting in a classroom for practice as “unmanly” or something.
N: Yikes… At least the coach is trying, you know. That’s important. I also think something that would improve queer athlete experiences, or just queer experiences in general, is having a true queer community at Vassar.
There really wasn’t a one when I was there… It was divisive and divided and had its own form of hierarchy. But queer people need queer spaces, where they can be fully supported.
JM: I agree. In terms of an athletic community, though, do you think things can be changed on a personal level? Or does inclusivity require total structural change?
N: I mean… it’s both. It has to be both.
The structure of athletics and teams at its core is queer exclusive. This needs to change.
But we also need more personal… individual connections. We need people to care about one another… to listen to one another.
One of my ex-teammates actually came up to me my senior year at a party. He very naively asked me that when the team was talking about me or referring to me in the past, what pronouns to use. I told him that it was up to the trans person’s preference but most people prefer to use the pronouns that they are using presently for their gender representation. I told him I would like people to use “she” pronouns for me at all times of reference. I thought it was very sweet… It was one of those few times. Little moments like these are important… even if they’re not entirely transformative on their own. They’re a step. BP
