Reflections of a Transgender Skier (10/19/2023)

The following was originally published by POWDER Magazine on 10/19/2023 and has been reprinted here as a backup

When my friend Cadence Sweetser called me to tell me she reached out to the producers of Advice for Girls and got us both spots as athletes in the film, I genuinely thought she was joking at first. We are both transgender women and people like us do not typically appear in ski films, especially not feature length ones with a top tier cast of talented athletes. There have only been a small handful of snowsport films to feature any openly queer or trans athletes, most of them independent short films produced by the athletes themselves. But when Cadence asked the Advice for Girls crew, “what about trans women?”, they took the question seriously.

This is a big moment not just for Cadence and me, but for a group of people who have had a very difficult time finding a place for themselves in the largely white cis straight man dominated world of skiing. When I first came out as transgender I, like so many others, worried that if I was trans I would no longer be welcome at my local mountain, let alone in the higher levels of the sport. I saw a ski culture that was very bro-y— including among the group of guys who were my ski partners at the time— with almost no queer people that I could see. Unfortunately my fears were partially realized; I lost a few ski buddies and periodically faced both latent and direct transphobia out on the hill the first ski season of my transition. This is an all too common experience for trans people.

Despite the unfriendly culture, it was actually skiing that served as a catalyst for finding and growing several close friendships, particularly among other trans skiers. It's how I met Cadence. Over the past few years she and I have been able to develop a small friend group centered around a shared love of mountains and skiing, and I consider that group of people as some of my closest friends now. It is wonderful to be able to have such friends in my life, particularly around the sport of skiing, because not only do they understand my transness, they share a similar sense of the deep wonder and meaning of skiing as a sport. Skiing is this completely unusual activity that allows one to move through physical space in unreal and seemingly limitless ways. There's really nothing else that enables a person to freely fly down a treacherous mountainside at 40mph and flow through that environment in such a boundlessly expressive way. Every transgender skier and snowboarder I know recognizes that kind of freedom and understands what it symbolizes. It has so much overlap to the freedom we find as trans people coming into ourselves for the very first time— the physical and emotional possibilities a trans skier experiences for fleeting moments seem truly infinite. To share that feeling with others who are tuned into the same thing brings us together in such an intimate way. Even when talking to cis skiers, I can relate to them on this very same visceral level that every skier knows, and share that little piece of my joy and experience with them. Snowsports have that incredible connective potential between people.

What I appreciated about being on location in Snowbasin with the Advice for Girls crew was that many of these same ideas about skiing's ability to bring people together were not only an integral part of the vision of the film, but actually put into daily practice in how we interacted and worked with each other during the shoot week. There was an ethos of inclusion and mutual supportiveness that was refreshing to be immersed in. As first timers to a ski film shoot, and being trans, Cadence and I were not entirely sure what to expect and were certainly intimidated by the talented women around us. That quickly faded as we were made to feel empowered to ski our very best without judgment and be a part of the sisterhood that coalesced. There were a few learning moments for some who had not spent much time around trans people before, but at no point was there ever any question that we belonged there.

I'm also glad to see that Advice for Girls has made an effort to be a ski film that is broadly inclusive of a wide variety of women, including queer women like Cadence and me, women of color, adaptive skiers and snowboarders, and the young girls who will one day take women's skiing to a level that we can't yet imagine. People think inclusion is simply some kind of checklist of identities that we need to check off just for the sake of it, but they're missing the point. The importance of inclusion in films like this is that it shows a broader swath of people that they are welcome as who they are, and that there is room to expand for those who don't fit the mold of what most people typically envision a skier to be in gender, race, ability, or background. Bringing those people in does not take anything valuable from the culture. Instead it grows the possibilities of what snow culture can be and who it is for. I also firmly believe that we cannot uplift women if our focus is solely on uplifting certain kinds of women over others. None of us are truly empowered and liberated until we all are and we still have so far to go. Inclusion is really only the beginning in a long process.

Growing up as a trans girl who was not out until adulthood, I looked up to the few pro skier women who I saw in ski films of the time in the late 90s and early 2000s. They were the kind of fearless, bold women, doing incredible athletic feats, that I wished I could be but thought I could never. But I also saw how few of them there were, and the lack of gay people, let alone trans people, sent a clear message that skiing was not necessarily open to someone like me. We still have a very long way to go to change snowsports culture to what it ought to be, but I am at least grateful to be a small part of a project that will inspire women in skiing and beyond, and to hopefully open the door for more trans skiers and snowboarders to be active participants in creating a better sport for everyone. I know it would have meant the world to my younger self to see it start to happen and to see myself as a small part of it. Let’s continue to make that little girl proud.