You Are Made of Dust and Leather, Stitches and Seams
You Are Made of Dust and Leather, Stitches and Seams
Mary Rand
When you pick up a recreational sport as an adult, everyone talks about feeling like a kid again. I hate it.
Here’s the thing: I am a trans woman. I play baseball as an adult, as the organizer of a queer club that’s part of a casual, inclusive, but mostly male baseball scene. I did play as a kid, though not so long nor so well. Once, I mentioned the age I played to a guy before a game, and he said, “So, not at all then,” and it hurt, because it wasn’t true.
I may have been pretty afraid of the ball back then, but I loved baseball deeply. I grew up by a AAA minor league team, attending games as a chubby baby in a stroller. I played tee ball and moved on to low-level Little League, a proud member of the Association of Daydreaming Right Fielders. I learned the legend of Babe Ruth, played MVP Baseball 2005 on my PlayStation, and watched Derek Jeter lead the Yankees to another title in 2009. After school, my baseball friends and I would play pickle on the field by our elementary school, sliding around in the dirt, laughing all the while.
Yet even my first love could preserve me. Like many girls who grow up with baseball, I found myself increasingly alienated when the boys started to grow up. The terror was that I was growing alike with them. I couldn’t stand to see, let alone embody, my own physicality as it evolved into a male form I did not want, that I could not even imagine possessing. To exist in a peer group of athletic boys (as athletic as nine-year-olds can be) was intolerable, a constant reminder of my poor vision and husky pants, low stamina and strong aversion to the sight of others. Sports as a whole became a representation of all the things I could not and would not be: outgoing, smelly, boyish.
I wore jeans to bed to avoid changing. I wasn’t about to keep working on my fastball.
I gave up Little League around when I turned ten. I stopped going outside if I could help it, especially in the summer. I withdrew into the within, anything to keep my mind off myself. To even be a baseball fan on TV faded. My Yankees retired and moved on with their lives, and I with mine, unable to bear the idea of men who were strong, who were comfortable.
***
One of the strange parts of being trans is that you exist in opposition to your own history. The reason you are what you are is because you were not something before. Not masculine, or not feminine, or not neither, if you were not this not, then you would simply be, and though that is fine for most, it is not fine for us. And so we change. This changing, this not-being, however, creates dissonance, and dissonance, distress. It’s no painless thing to assert against the world’s opinion that which you know to be true in your heart, and the lasting wounds of doing so remain for a long, long time.
The contradiction of adopting a boyhood interest was something I wrestled with when I decided I wanted to pick up the game again as an adult. I was twenty-three, living in a city and working at an office job for the first time. I longed for an outlet that was social, exercise-focused and outdoors. I never liked soccer, feel no connection to softball, and basketball is impenetrable to me to this day. I thought to myself: well, I used to like baseball. I should try that.
Returning to baseball, liking baseball at all, presented its own emotional challenges. It is a sport traditionally considered only for men. To play, I would have to be welcomed into a mostly male space, and that felt like a betrayal of all the work I had done to assert myself as a woman in this life, if not a concession to the public opinion that a trans woman’s natural place in sports was with men. I couldn’t abide that.
The idea that this love of mine came from that boyish part of me I had tried to disown, from a person – even if a child – that I did not recognize nagged at me. While the other guys channeled their childhoods of carefree play and confidence, who would I be? The sad, awkward boy who counted himself out, who struggled to believe in connection, who never took his coat off at school? That was a person who was not really there, who I do not remember well, and who most certainly did not want to exist.
I told myself no, that I left that life far behind, and I could not return.
Yet the possibilities of what baseball could be when one is happy, an adult—a woman!—lingered in my imagination.
In the early winter, I signed up for the upcoming first season of an easygoing, inclusive team that ended up being mostly men. I made my hopes small, telling myself that if I was kind and spirited I’d at least be liked, even if I couldn’t always make the throws. Summer came, and for the most part, it was really, really good. I got my old Little League glove from my parents’ house (with my old initials still in Sharpie by the thumb). I learned how to catch again, where to stand as the cutoff to second, and how to (try to) keep my hands close through my swing. I couldn’t get a hit to save my life, but I felt as though I was finally doing it right, that an unanswered question was being answered.
Still, there was a disconnect.
I felt as long as I remained an exception, an ‘other’ type of person on the team, that I wasn’t being true to what I wanted and deserved. Simply, I wanted to play and not feel different. I knew about queer baseball and softball teams in other cities and I daydreamed constantly about having what they had. It wasn’t until the next spring that I realized I didn’t have to wait for someone to make what I wanted, I could do it myself.
***
When I take the field, I don’t feel like the same sad kid I was. I feel thoroughly like an adult, or even – when my fingernails are crusted with dirt and my hands smell like leather, grass and wood—closer to a deer or a dog than a woman in how natural it is to stretch and run and slide, to feel the fear of catching a sharp line drive, the tension stretch of making a bang-bang first base play. Where my body once was without strings, an inert thing, when I’m at bat, or behind the plate, I come in tune. I play.
The teammates in my queer club are a broad spectrum: trans women, cis women, nonbinary people, queer people; office workers, bartenders, artists, bus drivers; my lovers, my friends, and their friends. Where the boys of yesterday felt out of reach, creatures I could not understand, these are people I do know, whose lives have traced the same path of withdrawal and self-discovery. They are members of a community whose name we all wear across our chest. A community I reached out towards, and who reached back.
We hang the trans flag on the backstop at the city park and we play our baseball, a baseball as goofy, error-prone and human as we are.
Playing baseball again is sending myself a message, a toss backwards across a long, long while. If I could, I would say to that child I once was: it’s okay to feel the way you do. One day, you will learn you are made of stiffer stuff, of dust and leather, stitches and seams. You were meant to be outside for all this. You were meant to be alive.
Mary Rand is an amateur baseball player and writer from Albany, New York. She publishes zines, essays and poetry on her website and has a blog about the upcoming Women’s Pro Baseball League at Towards a More Perfect Game on Substack.
Andy Lattimer is a gay guy who lives in Southern California. He makes comics, most of which are about baseball. You can read them on his website, andylattimer.com
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