Why Hailey Davidson loves golf, and why the pro tours don't love her back.
I can relate to pro golfer Hailey Davidson: Growing up, she endured whopping 34 surgeries on her feet and ankles after she was born with a form of clubfoot. Her feet were pointing fully backward. She abandoned the running sports like basketball because she couldn't keep up with her teammates. She took up golf and loved it.
After enduring just five surgeries on my own club feet (which were just turned inwards), I also found a refuge in the sport. I could excel and play decently, without being physically magnificent, or even with the usual hardware humans get with their feet.
Unlike me, Hailey got really good at the sport — knocking on the door of reaching the LPGA. But the sport won't let her in because the LPGA announced a near-complete ban on transgender girls and women across all big time competitions. According to Julie Kliegman of Defector, Davidson is the only out trans woman currently golfing professionally and pushing to make it on LPGA tour.
...Davidson knew she was being targeted, though the news release didn’t name-check her. It wasn’t the first time she’d been through this: Back in March, the Florida-based NXXT Golf mini-tour issued a similar ban while Davidson was actively participating.
Davidson has had a long road trying to get to the tour. It's even harder in the women's game with unlivable pay on the mini-tours, and soul crushing isolation. Add the vitriol of death threats and lack of support from fellow players because everyone fears losing sponsorship money. A lurking fear exists in just supporting a trans individual. In just supporting someone who is different.
Even with the threats, the bans, and isolation, Davidson continues to play. Golf gives her something back. Its seems like a refuge and escape — a purpose that breaks someone out of recursive thought.
For many years that is what the sport did, and to some degree, still does, for me. I was never going to be good at most sports. I was never going to be like most guys, or many people in physical experience.
This warrants a much longer entry for context building, but I'll say I spent years disliking, even hating, my own body because it wasn't as fast, tall, or strong as most men. My crooked spine and feet made me feel like something different among the athletes/jocks in my youth. I felt I had to fight for acceptance among the boys, among the men, but never "earned" that title because of my body. I thought I needed a different body to be one of the guys — a body I couldn't access because of my feet and spine. I tried to hide my differences. Or pretend they weren't there. I tried to be like everyone else. Instead, I needed a different way of looking at my body, a different way of experiencing it and understanding my place among the guys, and everyone else.
Playing golf gave me a temporary exit window from all that — another place to focus that confused and negative energy.
Golf — or any sport, any hobby — can give peace. This is especially true when the world refuses to give you peace just because of your body.
“I was in such a negative, suicidal state back before I came out,” Davidson said. “Because I’ve had that dark, depressive path at times, I don’t ever want to go back to that. … As much as golf is what has caused this [distress], at the same time, if I didn’t have it, I don’t know if I’d be here.”
Julie Kliegman
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