Harrison Browne, an openly trans hockey player and co-author of “Let Us Play,” describes the tension between his life in sport and the public battle over eligibility rules—while recent research and Olympic policy changes continue to reshape the dispute.
When Harrison Browne laced up his skates. the world narrowed to speed. instinct. and the familiar rhythm of blades sliding across the ice. Back then. long before he became the first openly transgender professional team hockey player. and before books. a short film. or a secondary role in the Canadian TV series “Heated Rivalry. ” there was something simpler: “Brownie” in the locker room.
The nickname, he said, helped him keep part of his life hidden.
“‘Hockey was the only place where I could disconnect,’” Browne said. “It was the only space where my body wasn’t the enemy. What mattered was the speed of my feet.” He recalled the moment when he could stop performing for others and ask plainly for respect. “I could just say. ‘Hey. I’m the same Brownie—can you use he/him pronouns?’” His teammates told him yes.
Even as acceptance showed up for him in hockey, it didn’t erase the separation he carried. While playing for the women’s hockey team at the University of Maine. Browne said he lived “a double life.” In the locker room. he was Harrison. In public, he wasn’t. His name on the roster wasn’t Harrison. he said. and he was announced with feminine pronouns—something that created “a greater disconnect.”.
Over time, the split became harder to hold. “After experiencing what it felt like to be seen—even in a small space—I finally found out I couldn’t keep hiding every time I played,” he said. “I felt like I was myself in the locker room. And I just knew: this is what I need.”
In 2016, while playing for the then-pro professional women’s hockey team Buffalo Beauts, Browne came out as a man publicly. He became the first openly transgender athlete in professional team sports.
Since then, the debate has grown into a global argument about equity, biology, and what sport is supposed to mean. Athletes and researchers alike have said the public fight often moves faster than the science—and leaves trans athletes carrying a question far heavier than a momentary political mood.
Browne’s book. “Let Us Play. ” co-written with his sister. journalist Rachel Browne. took shape as legislation aimed at trans people intensified. “We were watching this wave of anti-trans legislation build strength,” Harrison Browne said. He described the backlash as something that resembles moral panic. driven by attention-grabbing claims aimed at a small number of people.
He pointed to bathroom-focused bills as an example of how political rhetoric can crowd out broader problems. After the first wave of bills about restroom use failed—Browne said more rules have been approved since—politicians used the same talking points to “elevate people around trans people. ” while deflecting from issues like “health care. poverty. and human rights.”.
For many opponents in sports, the central idea is that hormones—especially testosterone—determine athletic fate.
Browne rejects that framing as reductionist and misleading. “When we focus exclusively on one hormone. ” he said. “we miss the real obstacles to equity in sport.” Training. access to coaches. nutrition. and socioeconomic status. he argued. shape results more consistently than any single biological variable.
“The sport has never been fair,” Browne said. “If it were. everyone would have the same height and the same access to resources. but that’s not reality.” He also worries that turning athletes into bodies instead of people “dehumanizes people. ” leaving only their physiology in view. “It’s only ever talked about their bodies, not their lives.”.
Hormones, he has said, don’t tell the whole story.
Ada Cheung. an endocrinologist and trans health expert at the University of Melbourne in Australia. wrote in an email that the public often treats testosterone like a permanent performance drug. “The biggest misconception is that testosterone is a kind of performance-enhancing drug that permanently improves performance. and once you’ve been exposed to it. the advantages are fixed forever. ” Cheung wrote.
Cheung said that gender-affirming hormone therapy does reshape the body in visible ways. In trans women, suppressing testosterone and using estrogen can increase fat mass and decrease lean muscle mass. In trans men like Browne. testosterone tends to do the opposite—more lean muscle and less fat mass—but not in the same way or magnitude as in cisgender men. with outcomes sitting somewhere in between. Effects on performance remain unclear and vary by person.
“The reality is much more complex than the narrative of ‘who is a man always has advantages’ that dominates public debate,” Cheung said.
Evidence continues to complicate the public argument. A meta-analysis published in February in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reviewed 52 studies with more than 6,400 participants. It found that after one to three years of hormone therapy. trans women did not show significant differences from cis women in upper-body or lower-body strength or aerobic capacity. Some differences in absolute lean muscle mass remained, but they didn’t translate into measurable performance advantages.
Cheung said newer research reflects the nuance she has described. She also cited earlier findings, including Cheung’s own review in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, that indicated performance indicators for trans women can move closer to cis women over time.
Even at the molecular level. Cheung pointed to a 2025 study published in Nature Medicine showing that feminizing hormone therapy altered hundreds of circulating proteins in trans women—shifting biological profiles toward those of cis women in systems linked to metabolism. immunity. and cardiovascular health. Similar patterns have been observed in trans men.
Still, important questions remain. Much of the available research is observational, Cheung wrote—often with relatively small sample sizes, fewer long-term longitudinal studies, and limited data on elite athletes and sport-specific outcomes.
“The evidence points in the right direction,” Cheung said. “But we need better-designed studies, especially in athlete populations.” She added that body composition alone doesn’t determine performance. “People see that trans women can retain slightly higher muscle mass and immediately think they have an ‘unfair advantage. ’” Cheung said. “But absolute muscle mass alone doesn’t determine what your body can do.” She noted that fat mass. endurance. hemoglobin levels. cardiovascular fitness. training. skill. and access to resources all influence athletic outcomes.
Cheung also argued that the biology-to-performance relationship is more complex than a single equation. “The relationship between muscle and performance is much more complex than a simple equation of ‘more muscle equals more power,’” she said.
Browne said those details matter because trans athletes have long been underrepresented at the elite level, challenging the idea that easy generalizations can settle the question.
For the athletes who do exist, visibility can be its own form of support.
Carly “CJ” Jackson, a professional nonbinary hockey player who appears in Browne’s film “Pink Light,” said she learned Browne’s story from a distance. “Seeing him come out gave me space to accept myself as I am,” Jackson said. Years later, their lives intersected in unexpected ways.
They had played on the same teams—at the University of Maine and later professionally—with only a few years between them. Their careers ran in parallel before they met, Jackson said, on a film set.
“I think about the impact Harrison had on my life,” Jackson said. “And I’m just one person. There are so many people he will never meet.”
That human reality sits at the core of the policy fight. For many trans athletes, the question of equity isn’t just about fairness—it’s about who is allowed to belong in the sport.
Alex Schmider. senior director of entertainment at GLAAD. a media monitoring and LGBTQ advocacy organization. said in an email that participation builds community. “In sports, people form friendships, learn to work as a team, and improve their health,” Schmider said. “Trans people play sports for the same reasons as everyone else, and denying them those benefits is unnecessary and cruel.”.
Schmider also said the current wave of restrictions does more than limit participation—it sends harmful messages about belonging. “Political bans on trans athletes don’t just harm them,” he said. “They also send inaccurate and harmful messages about who belongs in this group.”
In recent years, Browne has turned to storytelling as a way to reshape how trans lives are understood. He appeared in “Heated Rivalry. ” and wrote and produced his short film “Pink Light.” Schmider said that many people say they don’t know trans people personally. so their first contact often comes through fictional characters.
Stories like “Heated Rivalry,” Schmider said, work because they portray athletes “not as symbols,” but as teammates connected by shared love of the sport. “When every player and every fan can be themselves,” he said, “everyone wins.”
But policy, Schmider said, is moving the other way.
The International Olympic Committee’s 2021 framework leaned toward evidence- and sport-specific approaches for trans inclusion. Yet newer guidelines issued in March 2026 establish a generalized testing regime—Browne said—only for women’s sports.
Browne said he is troubled by what that means in practice. Over more than two decades in which trans women have been able to compete at the Olympics, only one person has competed: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who did not finish her event.
“How does that justify a generalized ban?” Browne asked. “There’s absolutely no evidence, and yet we’re seeing policies tilt in that direction.”
Rachel Browne said she is worried about the side effects, too. “Many sports try to align with Olympic policy,” she said. “And that ripples down into amateur and youth levels, where people should have more freedom to just play.”
Through the whole controversy sits the part of sport that rarely shows up in policy memos: teammates, friendships, the chance to learn who you are.
Browne and Jackson both said winning, while meaningful, isn’t the whole point. “This is where friendships are forged. This is where you discover who you are,” Browne said. “Everyone deserves that escape route.”
Jackson called sport art and self-expression. “Sport is art. It’s a form of self-expression,” she said. “And denying it is diminishing what’s possible.”
For now, the rules and studies continue to collide—hormone-by-hormone, policy-by-policy—while trans athletes keep returning to the same ice, the same fields, and the same question they believe should be answered in the simplest way: can they be teammates, not a debate.
Harrison Browne trans athlete hockey testosterone debate gender-affirming hormone therapy Olympics GLAAD Laurel Hubbard CJ Jackson Heated Rivalry