APSE first vice president Erik Hall introduced a new category for the upcoming APSE contest. This category is dedicated to recognizing Excellence in Coverage of the Transgender Community in Sports. The announcement was made during the awards banquet at the annual APSE Summer Conference on Saturday night, July 18, 2026, in Arlington, Virginia. Here’s his announcement in full.
The first time I spoke on an APSE panel was right here in Arlington, at the 2014 Summer Conference.
I was younger, newer to APSE and still under the adorable delusion that saying yes to one panel would not eventually lead to standing behind this podium.
APSE calls that leadership development. I believe the legal term is a long con.
In 2014, I was here to talk about LGBTQ+ coverage. Earlier that year, I had helped cover Missouri football star Michael Sam’s decision to come out before the NFL Draft.
And what a year it had been.
In the span of roughly 12 months,
- Robbie Rogers became the first openly gay player in Major League Soccer history
- Jason Collins, may he rest in peace, became the first active male athlete in one of the four major American professional sports leagues to come out
- Brittney Griner entered the WNBA as the No. 1 pick and spoke publicly about being a lesbian
- Olympic champion Tom Daley revealed that he was in a relationship with a man
- And Michael Sam came out, was drafted by the St. Louis Rams and kissed his boyfriend on national television
For one remarkable year, the closet door did not simply crack open.
It swung open and kept opening.
One athlete after another stepped through it, and sports journalism had to decide whether it was prepared to meet the moment — not as a novelty, not as a controversy, but as a human story.
Now APSE has returned to Arlington at another transformative moment for LGBTQ+ people in sports.
But history does not move in a straight line.
Sometimes it advances.
Sometimes it doubles back.
And sometimes it asks whether the journalists who chronicled the breakthrough are also willing to chronicle the backlash.
Less than three weeks ago, in the case of West Virginia v. B.P.J., a 6–to-3 Supreme Court majority upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho that prohibit transgender girls and women from competing on girls’ and women’s school sports teams. The majority held that those laws do not violate Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cataloged what sports can give young people: resilience and discipline, friendship and community, joy and belonging.
Then she ended with a sentence every sports journalist should sit with:
“Sports, of course, are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”
Our job now is not to reduce transgender athletes to a court case, a statute or a culture-war talking point.
Our job is to report what happens next.
To tell the stories of the girls and women who lose not only a place on a roster, but a routine, a coach, a locker room, a bus ride, a circle of friends and a sense of belonging.
To ask what exclusion costs.
To follow where they go.
To show what they grieve, what they build, and how they endure.
Because when a young person is told she can no longer play the sport she loves with her friends, the story does not end at the courthouse.
That is where our reporting begins.
And next year, that reporting will have a place in the APSE contest.
I am proud to announce that next year’s contest will include a new category recognizing excellence in coverage of the transgender community in sports. We will provide the full details this fall.
This category is not about asking journalists to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.
It is about asking us to do what great journalism has always done: report rigorously, listen closely, reject caricature and make visible the people whom public debate too often turns into abstractions.
We are journalists.
Words matter.
Accuracy matters.
Humanity matters.
So let us be clear:
Transgender boys are boys.
Transgender men are men.
Transgender girls are girls.
Transgender women are women.
Their lives are not a sidebar.
Their stories are sports stories.
And I cannot wait to see the extraordinary journalism the people in this room produce as we tell those stories with the rigor, courage and humanity they deserve.
