Kye Allums Becomes First Openly Transgender BB Player (Photo)

by Amy Judd | November 3, 2010 at 08:34 am

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Kye Allums, a George Washington Junior, Has Become the First Openly Transgender Basketball Player in the NCAA

Kye Allums (photo) is making history as the first openly transgender basketball player and will be stepping out onto the court for the George Washington's women's basketball team suffering a few nerves this year when he makes his debut.

He started feeling like an outsider in middle school and said he did not feel like any of the other girls. He then started trying to act more feminine and then identified as a lesbian, but it was not until his freshman year of college that he realized his true identity.

"I used to feel like trans anything was really weird and those people were crazy, and I wondered, 'How can you feel like that?'" he said, in an interview with Outsports.com. "But I looked it up on the Internet and I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm one of those weird people."

In his sophomore year he then started asking people to call him by male pronouns and his basketball teammates have been supportive of the switch. However, he cannot take hormones or undergo surgery if he wants to continue on the women's basketball team; he can take testosterone, but says he does not need that anyway.

Telling his coach was thought to be the biggest challenge, but the conversation went so well, that is what inspired Allums to tell everyone else.

"I was gonna have to hide a piece of me that was really important," Allums said. "All my teammates knew. I don't like keeping things from coach; I'm a very open person. It got to the point where I decided I wasn't going to go through a whole season with my coach not really knowing me, even though I knew it would probably make him feel uncomfortable."

The NCAA is now investigating how to handle the locker room situation.