Photo courtesy of Andy Walter.
Transgender athlete and activist Schuyler Bailar spoke at one of Mount Holyoke’s BOOM! panels.
By Genevieve Zahner ’26
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses transphobia and mentions depression, self harm and eating disorders.
Mount Holyoke’s annual Building On Our Momentum conference was held on Tuesday, March 28, bringing speakers from all over to speak about their life experiences and social justice work. Celebrated transgender inclusion advocate Schuyler Bailar spoke to students in a panel about his experience being the first transgender athlete to compete on a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I team that matched his gender identity. Bailar was a swimmer for the Men’s Swimming and Diving team at Harvard University.
Bailar started off by talking about his early life, how he started swimming and his early experiences with his gender expression. “I’ve always been swimming, and I learned to swim around the same time I learned how to walk,” Bailar explained. “Swimming [was] my whole life, [and I] got good at swimming around age nine or 10.” Bailar talked about his experience with feeling like an outcast, and how he never quite felt like he associated himself with his assigned gender. “I was assigned female at birth. I mean, when I was a kid, everybody said, ‘this is a girl,’ and that’s never quite fit,” he said. “So I said, okay, I guess I’m a girl, but I didn’t act like the other girls. I didn’t really play with the other girls.”
Bailar mentioned that he had always presented in a more masculine way, and felt who he was aligned more with the boys in his school. “I presented myself in a very sort of stereotypically boyish or masculine sense. I had short hair, wore mostly boys’ clothing. I played boys’ baseball, boys’ lacrosse, soccer. I played football with the boys at recess.” Bailar then talked about how his masculine presentation caused him problems, and that he was bullied and harassed in bathrooms as a result. “I was bullied constantly for looking different, for acting different, for never quite being girl enough,” he said. Bailar explained that he felt in between genders, ignored by the girls in his school for not being, as he put it, “girl enough,” and ostracized by the boys for not being “a real boy.” Bathrooms, he said, were his primary source of stress.
“I used the girls’ bathroom as I was told that I had to, but I was constantly harassed, thrown out and yelled at in the women’s or girls’ bathroom,” he continued. “People would always yell at me in the bathrooms and even yell at my mom where they would be like, ‘You can’t have your son in here, get out!’ And she’d defend me and it would become this whole fight.” Bailar explained that this was an especially difficult time for him, as he was “defending a gender [he] did not feel.” Bailar said that he would try to not go to the bathroom during the day to avoid this problem, and would even use the faculty bathroom that was off-limits to students. According to Bailar, getting in trouble for using the faculty bathroom was better than being harassed by the girls in his school. When Bailar reached high school, he decided he had had enough of the harassment, and started trying harder to fit in. “I grew my hair out, I stopped cutting it short and wearing more what I thought were girlier clothes,” he said.
In high school, Bailar’s athletic career took off. He was getting recruited to swim for Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth. His current swim team was the national champion three years in a row and he was swimming his fastest times. Still, he struggled to find the thing that made him feel so different from his peers.
“I had actually come out as gay. I knew I liked girls. I thought, okay, well, everybody says I’m a girl and I know I like girls. So that would make me gay, so maybe that’s the thing that’s different about me. Maybe that’s why I feel like I don’t fit in,” he said. But Bailar said this was not the solution to his problems. “For most of high school, and especially in these photos that I’ve shown you, I was miserable. I felt so sad, so lost, so disconnected from myself all the time,” he said.
Bailar’s mental health began to decline, and after he broke his back in a bike accident and was unable to swim, his mental health deteriorated even more. He struggled with depression, self-harm and an eating disorder. Bailar said that at this time he felt lost, and reached out to his parents for help.
“I was lucky to have parents that met me where I was at and that they supported me going to therapy, not only ideologically because there are many families that don’t, but also financially,” Bailar said. He stated that although he was in therapy, he did not feel much better. This led him to take a gap year before attending Harvard for swimming to go to a residential treatment program in Florida. The residential treatment center allowed him to take a step back, and this was what ultimately led him to realize he was transgender.
This realization brought Bailar a lot of relief and provided a reason as to why he felt so different his whole life. However, the relief was very short-lived, because he had been recruited for the Harvard women’s swim team, and had been in contact with the coach the whole time he was at the treatment center. He told his coach that he was transgender, and with this confession came fear for Bailar that he was going to lose the sport that was such an important part of his life. His coach was accepting and said that Bailar would still be able to swim for the women’s team even though he no longer identified as a woman. After Bailar completed his five months at the treatment center, he was able to finally start presenting more masculine and figuring out how to move forward with his transition.
After speaking more with his coach, he was offered a position on the Harvard men’s swim team. This was something that scared Bailar. “I burst into tears. I actually wasn’t happy or excited or relieved as one would expect. I was terrified,” he said. At first, he rejected this proposition, because he was afraid of losing all the success he might have had on the women’s team after working his whole life to be a successful women’s swimmer. He decided to stay on the women’s team for the time being, and during his gap year after he left the treatment center, he decided to get top surgery. His coach encouraged him to at least meet the Harvard men’s team, and to his surprise, they were very accepting and excited to include Bailar. It was then that the women’s coach told Bailar: “Schuyler, you know what you want.” This statement led him to make the decision to join the men’s team.
At his first meet with the men’s team, Bailar talked about the nerves he experienced. “I felt like I had a lot to prove and I was very afraid that maybe I couldn’t prove it,” he said. Bailar said that it was at that first meet that he realized that while everything was the same, his experience had changed. “I was competing as just me, just myself. There wasn’t all this baggage of what I thought I was supposed to be, who I thought I had to be, Who everybody else told me I was, I was just me.”
Bailar spoke about anti-trans bills that threaten to prevent transgender people from participating in sports and getting healthcare. He discussed the importance of fighting for transgender rights, saying, “We should be allowed to be who we are and do what we love.”