Or: Why I’m not jazzed about Heated Rivalry.
TL;DR: Hockey culture has deep-rooted problems with toxic masculinity, hazing, and sexual violence that actively harm young players, yet USA Hockey has chosen to focus on effectively banning transgender women and girls from playing at all levels—including recreational and youth leagues. Rather than addressing the abuse that has become synonymous with the sport, hockey’s governing body is excluding already-marginalized people from the game they love.
Hockey is a beautiful sport. As a recreational-level player of the sport for 30+ years, there’s nothing that makes me feel more alive than the cold air against my face as I move down the rink, the sound of my skate steel cutting the ice, the smell of the rink… I love hockey.
However, hockey has a problem with its culture, and the lessons that kids learn from it. Part of the problem was dragged into the light by the sexist and misogynistic “locker room talk” the Team USA men’s hockey team displayed during their gold medal win at the recent Olympics.
Team USA star player and Ottawa Senator Brady Tkachuk failed to articulate any sort of real accountability for the team’s actions: “Honestly, it was a whirlwind of a moment that you can’t really control what somebody says […] I guess I was caught off guard a little bit.”
Brady’s later statements in the same interview also hint at further problems with the sport: “For me, I achieved my childhood dreams. I know I wasn’t thinking about the politics of it because at the end of the day, we’re the guys on the ice playing, sacrificing our bodies and doing whatever it takes to win […]”
What do we want kids to learn from sport? I might answer: hard work and dedication, a growth mindset, working together across personal differences, handling disappointment with grace, or friendship and camaraderie. You might have different answers, but I would imagine that most people would answer similarly.
In ice hockey, one thing every young player learns–young Brady and his teammates were no exception–is to “sacrifice the body.”
Hockey can be a violent sport. Even in recreational and youth leagues that do not allow checking or fighting, the game is physical. The forces involved in skating upwards of 20 miles per hour with quick turns and stops are immense. The puck itself is a weapon: 6oz of frozen solid vulcanized rubber traveling anywhere from 20 (youth) to 100 miles per hour (pro). Getting hit with it hurts. To some degree, “playing through the pain” is a necessary part of playing the sport.
However, ice hockey culture has lionized the ability of players to endure physical damage and elevates players who can heave their broken bodies around the ice. Finesse and skill are secondary. We see this now. The smart stretch pass by Taylor Heise to find an open Megan Keller nearing the USA offensive zone and the incredible one-on-one move and finish by Keller was a thing of beauty–the golden goal that should be the highlight of the tournament. But Jack Hughes’s golden goal with a nice counterattack and team play has become a defining moment of the 2026 Olympics, largely because of his broken smile.
Professional hockey players’ ability to endure pain and sacrifice the body is part of the mystique of the sport and draws awe from fans. Consider Gregory Campbell finishing a penalty kill shift after breaking his tibia while blocking a shot by Evgeni Malkin. Or Darius Kasparitis playing two periods on a broken foot: “When you’re playing, it makes the pain go away.” Any hockey fan can probably recall a litany of players–professional and otherwise–enduring injury to become heroes. We talk about these sorts of feats years later and watch highlight reels as part of the narrative of hockey.
Or, consider Hilary Knight—Team USA’s captain—who scored the game-tying goal in the gold medal game. She played that game on a torn MCL.
Coaches call this “mental toughness.” While this specific kind of mental toughness is not a lesson we might want all children to learn, we might agree that the ability to persevere through discomfort is an important part of all athletics. The problem, however, is how one learns it.
I learned mental toughness playing competitive youth hockey for the Ohio high school hockey powerhouse of the 1990s, a Catholic preparatory school.
I learned it well. In over 30 years of playing recreational hockey, I have broken countless fingers and toes, a half-dozen ribs, my nose three times, my tailbone, and my ulna. I’ve ruptured an elbow and kneecap bursa, dislocated my shoulder, broken my front teeth, had at least 4 concussions, had my lip stitched together after being split all the way up to my nose, and carry bruises with me every week. I’m currently recovering from tendonosis and a broken os peroneum.
I never played professional or semi-professional hockey. But I’ve also only ever left five games for injury in my entire career. I’ve played entire games on broken bones so painful I couldn’t remove my equipment without help.
In hockey circles this resume of injuries would be bragging. As a 45 year old software engineer and professor, this is embarrassing and akin to pathological behavior.
It is pathological behavior. How did I learn this? How does hockey teach this to kids?
I know in my case, and in the case of many, many other young hockey players, I learned how to compartmentalize pain through sexual violence and hazing.
The culture of hazing in hockey starts young and is sexual in nature. It is pervasive throughout every level from youth to NHL. It is an open secret that repeatedly has attention drawn to it, but very little of substance has been done; how else would we create these warriors with no sense of self-preservation?
However, in 2020, I thought we might have a “Me Too” moment for hockey.
In a class-action lawsuit filed by Daniel Carcillo and joined by Dan Fritsche—a fellow Ohioan about my age—the players related stories of institutionalized hazing, including eight players being locked nude in a tiny bus bathroom together, naked players being paddled with sticks, players forced to bob for apples in coolers of urine, and a player strapped down and beaten with a belt.
A similar class-action suit against the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League detailed similar abuses, including sodomization of players with sticks, force-feeding marshmallows to players that had been inside others’ rectums, and other forms of sexual torture.
Of course this sexual violence spills out of the locker room and harms women who come into contact with these “broken boys.”
None of this was a surprise to anyone who has played competitive hockey. But little has been done in the intervening years. The Me Too moment never happened.
Stories of abuse and hazing are still as pervasive as ever, despite the problems with hockey culture being the subject of numerous books over the years: We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture was published in 2025 and Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It was published in 2021—both more than more than 23 years after Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport was published.
The sexual violence I witnessed in hockey was of the same sort: players being urinated on in nearly every group shower, feces left for junior varsity players, players taped to locker room benches nude, sodomy. A particularly creative but sickening ritual involved group masturbation and ejaculation into a rookie’s helmet, which was then left to dry with the intention of the player’s sweat during practice the next morning rehydrating the semen to drip into their face and hair.
It takes only one instance of abuse to change someone’s life. It takes witnessing this sort of abuse a mere handful of times to change someone’s life. I am lucky that I was not a target and I am thankful that I was not a perpetrator, but the shame that I carry from witnessing this cruelty and doing nothing is a shame I carry every day.
Sexual violence has been institutionalized and tolerated to the point that it has become “part of the game,” at least for those players who play at a level where they aspire to gold medals.
This is how one learns to sacrifice the body. You forget it exists and you no longer think of it as yours. How does one survive this violence? Who does one become after this abuse? Who does the abuser become?
Surely there are good men in the USA Men’s team’s locker room. Surely there are men who abhorred the President’s comment about the women’s team. But how many of those young and scared boys with dreams of gold medals, locked nude in a bus bathroom, sweating and jostling against each other, trying to imagine themselves anywhere but where they were, grew into broken men? Or grew into abusers themselves? What about the boys standing outside that locked bathroom, laughing? Did they remain abusers as adults? Who was Brady? Was he neither? Both?
It was difficult to be a girl in this environment. I’m a little older. Girl’s hockey wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. The girls played boys hockey if they played at all. They changed outside the locker rooms; they were always on the outside.
Title IX and other federal protections aren’t about creating less skilled divisions where any mediocre man can dominate a field of weak and unskilled women. They are about creating safe spaces for incredible women athletes to compete free of the life-scarring toxic masculinity of men’s sports.
They create spaces where athletes like our USA Women’s team captains—who have medaled in every Olympics that included women’s hockey—can compete, excel, thrive, and elevate each other. These captains—Cammi Granato (1998 gold, 2002 silver medal teams), Krissy Wendell-Pohl (2006 bronze), Natalie Darwitz (2010 silver), Meghan Duggan (2014 silver, 2018 gold), Kendall Coyne Schofield (2022 gold), and Hilary Knight (2026 gold)—deserve to be elevated, not for their broken teeth or ability to play through pain, but for their skill and finesse, and toughness too. You can play scrappy and not be an abuser.
I wish that I could have played with girls like these women when I was younger. I wish that I would have learned other things from hockey, like all those lessons we want kids to take from sport. At the time, though, even if there were girls teams, it would not have mattered for me.
You see, I am transgender.
And soon it will not matter anymore, again because of USA Hockey’s new policy on “participant eligibility."
There is a specific sharpness to the pain of the current moment in ice hockey. At the same time that the public—especially my LGBTQ+ community—is celebrating a completely fictionalized and fantastical version of gay and safe hockey created by the book and HBO series Heated Rivalry, USA Hockey—the governing organization of ice hockey in the United States—is enacting a rule that prevents transgender women and girls from playing women’s hockey at any level, including both youth and adult recreational.
A recreational adult league may not make its own decision about whether trans women can play. A girl’s learn-to-play program can’t decide to let trans girls play. Both are now forbidden by USA Hockey.
This, despite all evidence that trans women have no athletic advantage over cis women. A fact that is confirmed near-yearly in academic and medical journals but has somehow not managed to be a relevant part of the trans sports “debate.” There have been zero instances of trans women harming cis women in ice hockey.
It is hard to understand USA Hockey’s overreach, or even the reasoning for this decision.
I am lucky to be out and happy now at 45 and to be a middle-aged woman who won’t let go of her favorite sport, despite the annual injuries. I often wonder how much happier I would’ve been over the course of my life if the self-hatred, shame, and radio static of suicidality hadn’t been the background of 30+ years of my life.
I don’t know that things would’ve gone differently, but I do know that access to a safe space to play hockey as a young trans girl might have given me the courage to come out sooner and feel safer playing the sport I love so much. Just a few years of this sort of hockey broke me, and I know they have broken others too.
I cannot give a general and authoritative answer to the trans women in sports question. But I do know that even though I consider myself a very capable amateur athlete, I am not the athlete I was before starting estrogen, growing breasts, shrinking two inches in height, and losing two shoe sizes. I run at least 2 minutes/mile slower and have lost significant muscle. I can still pull a double shift as a forward, but not with the same intensity. The research shows that these effects are common, and that transgender female athletes have approximately the same performance as or worse than cis female athletes.
My experience is my own, one may argue. Of course, but we’ve not yet even had an honest conversation about transgender sports participation that is grounded in fact. Trans women in sports hopefully, in time, becomes a much more nuanced conversation, likely with different policies at different levels of sport. There is a lot to untangle and understand and we have already poisoned the conversation with political propaganda and hyperbole.
And until transgender people became the spotlight in a culture war, no one really seemed to care about trans women in sports, at least nowhere near as much as they do now. The amount of attention that we have paid to fewer than 10 NCAA athletes out of over 200,000—none of whom were dominating their sports—is absurd and harmful, not just to those women, but to all women. We are already returning to genital inspections for girls as young as middle school. How does this demonstrate a concern for women and girls?
USA Hockey is making rules to exclude already-marginalized groups from a game that has struggled for years with inclusion. By making this policy, USA Hockey is saying that it is more important to keep women and girls from playing rec-league hockey with their friends than it is to focus on the things in hockey that are actively harming young boys and girls right now: the toxic masculinity and abuse that has become synonymous with hockey culture.
Parents need to talk to their young boys, especially those around the age when competition begins to pick up, at the U-15 and high school level. We need to teach these boys that it’s okay to not be silent, to speak up, and that they have the same right to bodily autonomy and safety as girls.
It’s also important that we create and protect safe spaces in hockey for queer people and women. My own team, the San Francisco Earthquakes, is an LGBTQ+ organization that has space for queer and straight players alike, connected by our common love of hockey. The existence of this organization is part of the reason that I still play, as it provides a safe space from toxic masculinity and weekend warriors who are using hockey as a violent outlet for their anger. The Quakes is an organization that is open to players of all levels and is dedicated to spreading a love of the game, making it more inclusive, and providing a safe space for all players to be the best—some of the values that I think we probably want kids to learn from sport.
I would ask that fans new to hockey from the Olympics and Heated Rivalry—especially those in my queer community—think deeply about where they spend their money. The NHL and the Ottawa Senators (Brady’s team) don’t need your money for a Heated Rivalry jersey; they don’t support your values. I believe supporting the PWHL and their efforts to make hockey a more inclusive sport is a much better place to direct your money.
I’d also ask fans of hockey who see nothing wrong with USA Hockey’s policy to reconsider why they support such a ban. It’s not to preserve competition in rec leagues. It’s not for player safety—there’s not even checking in women’s leagues. If you are a hockey fan and you don’t have any transgender people in your life to get perspective from, try reading. Let Us Play is a good introduction to the lived experiences of transgender athletes, including young athletes, and was co-written by Harrison Browne, a transgender professional hockey player.
Fans of hockey need better answers from USA Hockey on how it is making the sport safe and more inclusive. Transgender women are not dangerous. Toxic masculinity is. So as we wait for fact-based, real conversations to start about trans women, hockey culture, and what we want sports to mean in our society, I have one question for USA Hockey and the US Men’s team: What do we want kids to learn from hockey?