an interview with julie kliegman, author of 'mind game'
"It's really heartbreaking the way sports places limits on gender expression and identity."
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An interview with Julie Kliegman, author of Mind Game
I am so excited to share today’s interview with you, which is really more of a conversation. It’s long, but I hope you’ll read the whole thing, even if that means coming back to it and reading it in chunks.
Julie Kliegman is the author of the book Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, which was released last month. Julie was my editor at Sports Illustrated (which we talk more about below), where we worked together on my award-winning feature about non-binary athletes1, as well as a story about the International Olympics Committee’s new (at the time) trans inclusion framework and the ways it fell short. Julie’s own writing on trans athletes at SI was (imo) groundbreaking for a major sports publication and the two of us very much share pop culture interests (*ahem* The Challenge), which is something else she writes about.
I’ve been sharing some of her recent freelance work in many of my link roundups, even if you haven’t been aware of it, including her Slate interview with comedian Mo Welch about telling good women’s sports jokes; a story for Them about the roller derby team suing their town over a trans ban; a piece about Nickelodeon’s #MeToo moment having finally arrived; or this new look at beloved child television host Marc Summers.
Below, Julie and I talk about writing trans athletes at mainstream publications and dive into the unique ways that queer and trans athletes’ mental health is impacted by the world we live in.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Out of Your League: For people that don't know who you are, can you give a brief summary of your career, what what you do, and what your work covers?
Julie Kliegman: I'm a writer and editor based in New York. I was previously the copy chief at Sports Illustrated for four years. My work looks at sports and intersections with different social justice issues like mental health and gender. I also report and write on pop culture occasionally. So it's kind of like a fun grab bag.
OOYL: Yeah, I think you and I are similar in that way.
JK: Yeah, for sure.
OOYL: You and I worked together on the story that, honestly, has received the most acclaim of my career, which was the one for Sports Illustrated about non-binary athletes. You also did a bunch of both editing stories and writing stories about trans athletes for SI. While you were there, I saw Sports Illustrated get a lot of credit for their coverage of trans athletes, and I think you were responsible for a lot of that. But I also know internally it can be a hard process. We're fighting against these established media organizations and norms. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like and the work you did there?
JK: When I first got to Sports Illustrated, I didn’t have some grand plan of covering sports and gender and trans athletes. But pretty early on in the pandemic, I saw that that Idaho was passing the first-of-its-kind bill that would ban trans women and girls from publicly-funded school sports. And I was like, ‘Hey, are we doing anything on this?’ I still wasn't super familiar with the editorial processes there or how things worked but I was like, ‘Hmm! Seems like someone should be on that.’
And no one was jumping to say they were on it, so it was like, ‘All right, I think maybe I need to be the person on this.’ I was very fortunate to work with great editors, including Jason Schwartz, who cares a lot about these issues and was always interested in working with me on these stories. So it wasn't like I got a ton of pushback, at least with my own writing, but it was a little bit like I was walking into this void of coverage.
OOYL: You also were in a unique position because you were the copy chief, so you have some element of authority over language that was being used. I don't know that people necessarily understand how that works, if they are not journalists. There's an editor, but there are also—in a fully functioning publication (lolsob)—copy editors and a copy chief who is making decisions about what language should be used. Can you talk a little bit about that role?
JK: Copy editing is a really unique and increasingly rare role in a newsroom. It's about polishing up work that other editors have ideally already workshopped pretty heavily. So it's about looking for grammar, house style, tense, making sure everything tracks. Also, in my mind, at least, it's also about sensitivity issues, spotting potential legal issues. It does give me a degree of control, like you said, over the language and how we're choosing to write about people. That's what athletes are—people.
So like with your story, the pronouns was a new situation that we encountered, where Layshia Clarendon uses multiple pronouns. That question did fall to not only you, but also me, to assess how we were going to address that.
OOYL: When we did that, we didn't have another mainstream publication that we could look at to see how they had done that. I remember we looked at, do we change pronouns mid-sentence? Every paragraph? On the sentence level? We ultimately decided at the sentence level. And since we published that story I've seen other major publications follow that same rubric, which I think is really cool to see. So I think it's definitely had impact in that way.
JK: Yeah, I agree. And it's awesome.
OOYL: Now that Sports Illustrated gutted its staff, what are you doing now?
JK: I have a part time job on Apple News's copy desk and I am doing a lot of freelancing on top of that, both about sports and about not sports. It's nice to have more time to think about what I want to write about and actually execute those ideas as opposed to getting caught in the grind of a monthly publication.
OOYL: Which is a great segue into your book! Did you write that while you were employed full-time at Sports Illustrated?
JK: Yes. I can't recommend that to anybody. Like, yes, I survived, but it was pretty brutal, honestly. I was supposed to do it in a year but I asked for an extension, so I did it in like a year-and-a-half. Obviously you’re always going to want more time with a project like this, but yeah my nights and weekends were just totally shot.
OOYL: [Lyndsey and I] also asked for an extension on ours. And again, like half the league [the NWFL], we just didn't get time to research. You have to call it at some point and be like, ‘This is what this book will be. And hopefully, someone else (or me) will do more later.’ Because this is a big topic that you cover. How did you decide that this should be bigger than a magazine feature, or something you could do within your job at Sports Illustrated?
JK: A friend of mine called this book almost like a survey into this enormous space. I've done magazine-style stories on mental illness and athletes before, and you could be doing them until the end of time. There are so many different ideas to do, and likewise, there are so many different books you could do, but I think the idea really crystallized for me after I was reporting in the early days of the pandemic. I reported a story for SI on how elite athletes were dealing with the mental health effects that the pandemic had on them being away from their sport, not being able to practice, dealing with a loss of routine and structure.
Between that article really resonating with people and then just the fact that even early on in the pandemic I had a good sense that everyone's mental health was going to be affected, not just athletes, and that proved to be true. More people experienced depression and anxiety than in “normal” years. And for a lot of them, they were experiencing that for the first time in the pandemic. I realized that this is going to be a subject people care about for the foreseeable future.
OOYL: You made the decision to talk about your own experiences with mental illness [and bipolar II disorder] and struggling with mental health. Why did it feel important to identify yourself and situate yourself in terms of your relationship to the material?
JK: It's just what felt natural to me. And real, because sometimes it comes up in my conversations with athletes themselves, or experts when they're like, ‘Hey, why are you so interested in this, anyway?’ And you know they're asking a curious way, not in a “show me your credentials” kind of way. I've been dealing with mental illness since at least high school. I think that, as journalists, there's no true objectivity or journalism that's free of bias. But I do think it helps when you disclose where you're coming from and what your personal experiences are. That's not to say that everyone has to do that at all times, but I think there are times when it makes sense, and I just wanted to show readers how I relate to the issue and where I was coming from.
OOYL: I saw that Layshia Clarendon wrote the Foreword for this book, and even though they don't really get into their transness and how that has impacted their mental health in a sporting space—although that's a topic the book covers later—I still was struck by the decision to have a trans athlete write this Foreword. I think in sports, so often trans athletes aren't visible, or their experiences are siloed to just their transness. I wanted to ask why you felt like he was the the right person to ask to open the the book?
JK: That's such a great question. No one's asked me that yet. I think originally I was thinking about it very surface-level, like, ‘Hey, I'm non-binary and trans, wouldn't it be great if the Foreword was also by someone who's non-binary and trans?’ That’s a very superficial way to look at it. But first of all, when I interviewed Layshia for the book, he had so many great thoughts about how mental health affects, not just trans athletes, but all athletes. They're just so thoughtful about all the different social justice issues that they take on, that I thought it was going to be a really good, holistic look at what it means to be an athlete, and what it means to be a queer and trans athlete.
Someone could probably argue that my writing about trans athletes and mental health are separate categories, but I think they're so interconnected that to me it was like a really great marriage of my interests to have them write the Foreword.
OOYL: I agree that they're connected. I think there's the one connection that certain anti-trans people or right-wingers or even just the misinformed public would make, which is, ‘well, of course, because being trans is a mental illness.’ But that's not the connection that you're talking about. Why do you see them as interconnected?
JK: For a couple of reasons. One is that athletes who are trans and athletes who are mentally ill are both very marginalized groups. And both not what you're expecting to find in sports, especially in elite sports, which kind of self-select for mental health and sort of self-select for people who are straight and cis, frankly.
The other reason is I think trans and queer athletes experience mental health issues at rates that maybe the general population doesn't. And that's not to do with the right-wing thing. It's just to say that because they're such marginalized groups, the way they're perceived in their sports and in their lives does lead to these mental health challenges of different sorts.
OOYL: We can talk a little bit more about specifics to trans athletes, I have a few more questions about that later. But first I want to kind talk more generally about this idea that you open with in the first chapter, about the reason that it's been so difficult for athletes to talk right about any mental health challenges they have.
Forgive the binary framing here, but male and female athletes have differing challenges, these different stereotypes that they're trying to fight. For men, it's about masculinity; for women, they don't want to be seen as weak. Both of those things are different sides of the same sexism coin. But can you talk more about why it has, historically, been so difficult for athletes to address this?
JK: No matter what stereotypes you face, you're kind of doomed in this regard. Because, like you said, men have so much pressure on them to be strong and tough and for me, the definition of strong and tough totally includes being vulnerable. But for most people it doesn't. Especially if you're an elite athlete.
Women face the other side of the coin where it's like, ‘well, of course, they're speaking out, they're so weak’ or ‘women are too emotional to handle sports at an elite level’ (or sometimes at any level, some people would argue). You're not in a good spot, no matter who you are or how you identify. And we see that with people of marginalized races, as well, Black people, in particular. There's such a pressure on them to stay strong and not speak out, not reveal any emotions of what they're going through. You see this with varying aspects of people's demographics, but it's really not easy for anyone.
OOYL: In the book, you also talk about eating disorders and disordered eating, and the way that those show up in sports. I think it's pretty well-known to a lot of people that girls and women really struggle with disordered eating and body image, particularly in certain sports. But less-talked about is the way that male athletes struggle with their own disordered eating. How do those pressures show up for male athletes?
JK: It's something that male athletes struggle with and that struggle is compounded because all the examples they see in media—or even from doctors or sports psychologists—tend to be women or little girls going through those issues. So not only are they dealing with feelings about their body, not only are they dealing with potentially restricting their eating or binging, but then they're also dealing with the narrative of, ‘oh, I shouldn't be experiencing this because I'm a guy.’ That can really lead to delays in them getting help or seeing it as an issue to address. One of the guys I was talking to, he was like, ‘I just wanted look like the guy in the Abercrombie bag. That's not a problem, right?’ But he realized it totally is, at least for him, to the point where he would take steps to restrict his eating to try to look that way.
OOYL: I know that in women's sports these pressures are really still there, but there is at least more awareness and attempts to mitigate or support athletes through some of that. What kind of support is there for male athletes? Or are we still really behind the ball on that?
JK: I think we're definitely still behind the ball. But I'll shout out Chris Carr of the Green Bay Packers, who runs their sports psychology. He's been with a team a long time, and he picks out articles to send to the players about a man discussing a certain issue, knowing who they see as idols of masculinity. So he'll send the guys things he thinks they can relate to.
It's so interesting because men's teams and leagues tend to be ahead in terms of resources compared to women's teams. For reasons like investment in the leagues, and also, you know, sexism, but which is very related to the investment in the leagues, of course. So they tend to be ahead in resources. But they're behind in breaking down these stereotypes.
OOYL: You also talk about the way eating disorders show up for queer and non-binary athletes, and how identity and disordered eating can sometimes be overlapping issues for athletes. There's two pieces here that I wan to dig into a little bit because there's the one when you talked to Adam Rippon—he's a cis athlete—and then we can talk about how and why this might show up differently for for trans athletes.
Adam Rippon is in a sport where it is more common to hear about eating disorders, because it's figure skating and jumping and going higher is somewhat dependent on their body weight and things like that. But there's also this unique thing where gay male culture also has higher rates of eating disorders, and the norms for those bodies are also different in many ways than in straight culture, and so that can come together in a way that I don't know that a lot of people are aware of or know how to talk about. Is that something that came up when you were talking to him at all?
JK: I think he is someone who didn't realize that he had disordered eating. And I think part of that was being a man, bur I think once he did realize he did make the connection between that and his queer identity. There's so much pressure. But the interesting thing about figure skating is you can't get very far with disordered eating, because as much as it's a sport about how much you weigh it’s also about your body strength. And you're going to lose strength if you're restricting your eating.
OOYL: I wrote this statistic down from your book, that trans and non-binary people are four times more likely to have or engage in disordered eating behaviors, which is related to my second question. Because trans athletes have a different overlapping pressure. You have the pressure to conform to whatever body standards your sport requires. But if you are struggling with dysphoric feelings about your body, there are certain parts that you may be trying to control through restrictive eating or certain physical workouts or something like muscle dysmorphia (aka reverse anorexia). It’s a way to compensate and I don't think it’s something that is really talked about much when we talk about trans athletes.
How did that come up while you were reporting? What did you learn about that from the athletes you talked to?
JK: It was just really interesting, reading this book by Kate Bennett, Treating Athletes with Eating Disorders: Bridging the Gap between Sport and Clinical Worlds, and she makes sure she's telling queer athlete stories and trans athletes stories and not just focusing on cisgender people—in particular, not just focusing on cisgender girls and women. It became clear to me from the start that trans people are an important part of the equation [for my book], as they are with every mental struggle, too.
But specifically, with disordered eating, when you get into this active place of wanting to modify your body [in some way], that can take on some really dangerous meanings. If you're trans masculine, for example, if you realize that restricting your eating is making your period go away that could be really affirming for you in a very dangerous way. And at the same time that you're dealing with the pressures from your sport, you might have a coach telling you to lose weight or gain weight, whatever it may be, depending on your gender and your sport.
And then you're also dealing with the stress of your sports governing body doing god knows what to regulate your participation in the competitions to begin with. So there's just like layers on layers on layers for trans athletes.
OOYL: I know I'm focusing a lot on the trans people in your book! I also really appreciated that you talked about athlete retirement and how that takes a toll on all athletes’ mental health. One of the ways that it first came to my attention was for women athletes whose sport doesn't have a pro level—this was when I was doing a lot of writing on girls and baseball, and how many switch to softball. There's always this end game, and you kind of fall off a cliff when you graduate.
But for trans athletes they may have to retire or be pushed out of their sport much earlier than they may have planned to. There's, first of all, the mental health struggles of being in a sport that is maybe misgendering you, or is causing that level of dysphoria to be living in a body that doesn't feel right. But then if your whole identity is in being an athlete and you want pursue medical transition, that's a whole other challenge. I think that's an important piece of the equation, too.
JK: Yeah, I had such a good conversation with Emet Marwell, who was a field hockey player. A large part of his struggle in high school was feeling like, ‘oh, I'm being grouped in with ladies.’ Eventually he felt like he had to make this impossible choice of, was he gonna stay presenting as a cis woman so he could hold onto field hockey, which was the light in his times of darkness? Or was he going to transition and effectively be forced to give up field hockey? Eventually he decided he really needed to transition and, luckily for him, he was able to remain a part of the team as their team manager and participated in all the team functions. But it's still not the same as being able to play your sport, obviously.
OOYL: And we know he’s not the only athlete who has had to make that choice. I know Kye Allums was a college basketball player who did a similar thing, and we know Harrison Browne in women's hockey has also done the same thing. Then you have the flip side, of athletes like Nikki Hiltz who has said, ‘I want to be on testosterone, and a lot of athletes don't know what they're gonna do when they retire and they struggle. I know I'm gonna start testosterone.’ This is the choice. The harms and struggles that these athletes are just kind of having to bite the bullet and suffer through, knowing that there's an alternative that they can't pursue.
JK: It's really heartbreaking the way sports places limits on gender expression and identity.
OOYL: Which is funny to me because—this is a thing I haven't figured out how to write about yet, because I think it is a complicated thing to put into the public sphere2. But I sometimes think about elite athletes, and how, in order to be an elite athlete, you do kind of have to be a freak (ed note: complimentary) in some ways, like, there's something so trans to me about being an elite athlete of any gender?
Deciding you're going to modify your body in these ways to do the things you want it to do and look the way you want it to look, which is not all that different from what trans people are asking to be able to do. But I digress.
How do you think sports journalists can do a better job of covering athletes as more holistic people?
JK: I think we're already seeing progress in that regard. It comes down to treating athletes like people and being open to stories that go beyond the X's and O's, which I think increasingly, journalists are, if only because the gamer, for example, is kind of falling by the wayside and the outlets that publish sports coverage are often more feature-y or a beat reporter, where people want to get to know the faces behind the teams.
I think the next step for me is I want to see more articles that synthesize multiple stories and really get at trends and really say something that advances the conversation in that regard. Because, yes, everyone has these individual really compelling stories, and I'm not saying that should stop. But I think we need to level up a little bit.
OOYL: It's hard to see a trend when you're only publishing one-off stories. And often, if it's happening to one person, then it's happening to another. It's because there's something bigger at play. Unless we're looking at these in conversation with each other, we don’t see the system which is often at the root of a problem.
JK: Totally.
OOYL: I guess the other question I have for you—and you address this a few times in the book—is that a lot of the stories we see about athlete mental health is like they've “overcome” it and they're fine now. It’s bordering on inspiration porn. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that kind of coverage and what more varied or nuanced coverage would look like?
JK: It's really hard for me to see coverage like that, because I think sometimes it does come from reporters listening to what the athletes are saying, where they might frame their own struggles of having been fully in the past, or they might see themselves as having fully overcome depression. And that might be a lack of knowledge on their part. It could be denial. It could be just the best response they can come up with to skirt the stereotypes that people who are like labeled like capital “M” Capital “I” “Mentally Ill” face, so I can understand them wanting to distance themselves from that on an individual level.
I think, as reporters, we need to probe deeper. DeMar DeRozan has this new interview series out about mental illness and sports—when people make these disclosures like he did, follow up with them years later, be like, ‘Hey, how you are doing?’ And I don't think it hurts to contextualize people's stories with expert commentary about how depression affects someone over a lifespan, including facts like that and insight that can help us out a little bit, too.
OOYL: I think there's something unique about sports culture that is so much about overcoming obstacles in order to be successful. And I think sometimes when you're an athlete who has grown up in that culture, and you identify so much with that culture, there's a tendency to frame so many of your stories and the way you talk about any struggle in your life in “sports terms,” which is the “work hard and overcome” sort of vibe. And while that's great for some things, a) I don't think it's realistic for everybody, and b) the truth is a lot more complicated than that.
JK: Totally. Yeah.
OOYL: It’s very bootstrappy.
JK: Extremely. Yeah, that's a good word for it.
You can buy Mind Game wherever books are sold, but please support your local indie bookstore if you can!
Sorry, I know you all are likely very sick of hearing me mention this story at this point lol.
But I’m trusting you, dear readers, to understand where I’m coming from here.