Last month, the UConn Neag School of Education’s Sport Management Program sponsored journalist and author Katie Barnes, who published their first book, “Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates,” in September.

Barnes is an award-winning journalist specializing in the coverage of legislation and policy affecting transgender and intersex athletes. “Fair Play” explores that and more as the world navigates transgender rights at a time of renewed upheaval amid legislative change.

Shannon Carlin of Time magazine, which named “Fair Play” a “Must-Read Book of 2023,” regards “Fair Play” as “[An] electrifying debut … Through in-depth and compassionate reporting, Barnes breaks down the misunderstood science surrounding sex and gender that has been used to keep cisgender women out of sports and has fueled debate over trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports.”

Barnes is a three-time GLAAD award nominee and a 2022 finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal, a prestigious award honoring outstanding sports journalism. The NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists also named them the 2017 Journalist of the Year.

Following an introduction by Neag School sport management faculty member Risa Isard, Barnes began the event by reading significant chapters of their book.

Barnes started by reading the second chapter of the book, titled “Thirty-Seven Words,” which discusses Barnes’s focus on transgender athletes, anchored in their interest in women’s sports.

In this chapter, Barnes highlights discrepancies in women’s and men’s sports that were thrust into the spotlight through a viral TikTok video amid the 2021 Women’s NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament.

The TikTok video, which exposed the drastically inferior condition of the women’s workout facilities compared to their male counterparts, spurred a national dialogue on Title IX and showed that there is still much growth to be done in terms of gender equality in collegiate athletics.

The next chapter that Barnes shared is the seventh chapter of the book titled, “The Runners in Connecticut,” which narrates the stories of two transgender, championship-winning athletes from Connecticut who unintentionally became central actors in debates about transgender athlete participation legislation across the country.

The last chapter that Barnes read was chapter 10, which focuses on Lia Thomas, the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship, who was ostracized as she also became the center of many public debates surrounding transgender athletes.

Following Barnes’s recitation of these chapters, the book event transitioned into a question-and-answer session led by Isard. Barnes addressed a variety of questions, including what it was like to write a book about a topic that is both constantly unfolding and scrutinized amid an ever-changing political landscape regarding transgender athletes, and the community of which they are a part.

“I signed the contract with St. Martin’s Publishing Group in August of 2020, which, from a timeline perspective, is after Idaho became the first state in the country to pass a law that restricted transgender girls and women from playing girls’ sports, but well before Lia Thomas,” said Barnes, of writing during such an inflection point. “So, I found myself in this just incredibly intense news environment. And with the pace of book publishing, it’s not really where you would want to be because I have to stop writing, and the news keeps going.”

It’s hard, having conversations with lawyers who are actively arguing at the Supreme Court against my community and knowing that they think that about me, too, and want me to interview them. — Katie Barnes

Barnes also gave advice regarding how to have difficult conversations about transgender rights with people who may not necessarily share the same viewpoint.

“One of the things that I learned in grad school was that a core tenet of actual dialogue is that dialogue has no winners, right? It’s not a debate,” Barnes said. “You’re not trying to win people over; you’re sharing and learning, and that was the viewpoint that I tried to bring into ‘Fair Play.’”

Through the writing and reporting process behind “Fair Play,” Barnes spent a lot of time engaging with and interviewing people actively working to restrict their liberties, which was a struggle, they said.

Barnes provided powerful insight into what it was like to navigate reporting about and conversing with these people while also ensuring that those perspectives were included in the book.

“It’s hard, having conversations with lawyers who are actively arguing at the Supreme Court against my community and knowing that they think that about me, too, and want me to interview them,” Barnes said. “Those are things that I wrestle with a lot. I also think it’s important, not because I agree with the viewpoints being shared with me, but because I think it’s essential that they be printed.”

Barnes discussed the tagline of their book, “How Sports Shape the Gender Debates,” by sharing the impact of transgender sports debates on previously existing gender conversations and the conversations that these dialogues can encourage.

You get to play. You get to be yourself. And I think that can go a long way in creating even more inclusive cultures at the top of men’s sports where it’s not inclusive from a gender expression standpoint at all. — Katie Barnes

“It broadens out from just being about trans people and being about how we think about the relationship between men and women more broadly,” Barnes said. “So, you see many people utilizing language that men and women are different; they should do different things. And you’re seeing some really interesting language crop up around equality. This is popping up in a bill that won’t pass, but redefining equality under the sexes not to mean the same thing for men and women, and that is scary.”

The event concluded with Barnes sharing their hopes for the future of sports; albeit complicated in practice, Barnes wants “all kids to get to play.”

Barnes highlighted one way to create a healthier sports culture: have more mixed-gender sport opportunities, de-emphasizing the need to sex-segregate in sports at such a young age.

“There’s just no reason to have 8-year-old boy soccer and 8-year-old girl soccer,” said Barnes, referencing several reasons, including the implicit message that this separation sends to young boys and girls, such as the idea that girls are lesser athletes.

Barnes said mixed-gender sports opportunities would also make it easier for those who are gender variant to get the chance to participate without worrying about the debate over which gendered team they would be on.

“You get to play. You get to be yourself,” Barnes said. “And I think that can go a long way in creating even more inclusive cultures at the top of men’s sports where it’s not inclusive from a gender expression standpoint at all.”

The co-sponsors of the event included UConn’s Asian American Cultural Center, Department of Journalism, Division of Athletics, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center, Rainbow Center, and Women’s Center.