On Being Blog

Transgender Male Athlete Plays for NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Team: From Kay-Kay to Kye

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

George Washington University point guard Kye Allums recently made headlines as the first known transgender student to play NCAA Division I college basketball. At a press conference held last month, Allums announced: “I am a transgender male, which means feelings-wise, how it feels on the inside, I feel as if I should have been born male with male parts. But my biological sex is female, which makes me a transgender male.”

Allums’ teammates and coach now use the pronoun “he” when referring to Kye (who was born Kay-Kay). Allums, who is a junior, will continue to play on the women’s team. To comply with NCAA guidelines and retain his athletic scholarship, Allums is postponing hormone treatments until after his college basketball career is over.

A profile of Allums in Outsports describes his attempts to try on identities that ultimately didn’t fit the truth of who he experienced himself to be. In high school this meant affiliating as a lesbian, but over time this didn’t feel right. During his freshman year in college his mother sent him an angry text that read: “Who do you think you are, young lady?” All of a sudden, Allums’ awakening as a transgender male began to crystallize.

Allums’ story gets at topics and voices we’ve long been interested in: the spirituality of body image and the lived experience of being transgender. It also raises a flurry of questions about equity, fairness, and where transgender athletes fit into the larger landscape of competitive sports.

When Allums came out as transgender, his coach Mike Bozeman asked him if he thought God had made a mistake. As Allums remembers it, Bozeman followed up with words of support saying, “I’ve had your back through everything. Our relationship has grown from nothing to this, and now you think I’d just turn my back on you because you told me this? No. I love you and I’ll always be here for you.”

In the end, Allums concluded that God hadn’t made a mistake. “I was meant to be like this for a reason. Clearly my life is going to be different from anyone who was born a biological male, because of what I’ve been through. And I was meant to go through all of this.”