by Alexis Shotwell

CrossFit has reversed its trans-inclusive competition policy; what should those of us who care about the sport do?

So look, I’ve been in a number of close-knit groups with very specific ritual practices, languages, ways of making sense of life, and modes of building a sense of self: Buddhist meditation communities, academia, CrossFit. I’ve known from the beginning that CrossFit might be my most problematic fave. But it’s also been so wonderful for me – a site of social connection with people who have become real friends, of physical joy, and of building capacities to do things with my body that I would never have predicted. If you know anyone who does CrossFit you’ve probably heard about how great it is from them, because of the contract everyone who does CrossFit signs to talk about it at least three times per day. (Kidding! Kind of. As the other joke that applies to me goes, “What does a vegan who does CrossFit tell you about first?” “Fermentation.”) But it has a kind of macho reputation, an orientation towards the belief that everyone would be better off if they too did high intensity work with weights, and, yes, a bit of cult-adjacentness in its use of in-group language, fervent devotion, and shared rituals.

In many ways as a sport, however accidentally, it also has liberatory potential. There are no mirrors in CrossFit gyms, which really changes the vibe from a place where people are constantly watching themselves and each other. The focus is explicitly on functional movement, which has an outcome of also focusing on adapting movements to people’s bodily needs, scaling workouts to capacity, and all genders doing the same movements in shared spaces.

Some of the shared rituals of CrossFit are daily: Gathering at a fixed time around a board with the day’s workout, warming up together, doing movements together. But annual rituals are equally important. CrossFit’s include a yearly sequence of competitions. Everyone who does CrossFit, from the newest to the most elite athletes, can participate in this sequence. It starts with the Open, a series of three weekly workouts that are performed in local gyms or homes, recorded and scored. Last year, more than 344,000 people registered for this worldwide.

Then there’s a series of more elite competitions, culminating in the annual CrossFit Games. All of these are governed by the same rulebook. The fact that I, a middle-aged white lady, can do the same workouts as hundreds of thousands of other people around the world (though much, much slower than many), including someone who’s been declared “fittest in the world,” alongside the people who come to my local gym, is weird and neat. It’s part of the binding factor that builds the culture of CrossFit.

So when in 2018 they updated the rulebook to explicitly welcome trans athletes at all levels of competition, there was widespread rejoicing. The regulations were actually still fairly restrictive (like many sport regulations of trans people), especially if athletes did well enough in the Open to go on to more competitive levels. They specifically governed what serum testosterone levels were allowed for trans women, though it didn’t specify estrogen levels. But since the Game has a “drug-free” policy, trans men would have not been able to be on hormones for the previous year. And, of course, the regulations maintained a gender binary system (there is a much longer and very interesting conversation yet to be had in CrossFit about having nonbinary competition categories, which exist in other sports).

But in practice, after much advocacy and struggle by trans athletes and their allies, many trans athletes found the more expansive regulations an improvement. The CrossFit Games are one of the significant rituals that build community membership; excluding people from those rituals excludes them from community.

In January 2025, when the Games rulebook came out, the sections affirming trans participation had been quietly reversed: People are now required to compete under their “gender assigned at birth.” While there has been no official explanation of this change, and none of the big CrossFit fan websites are explicitly covering it, it’s hard not to think that this is a craven, pre-emptive capitulation with the Trump administration’s war on trans people.

So far, those attacks include executive orders about: gender being binary, trans women in sports, restricting youth health care, restricting passport notations to “M” and “F,” kicking trans people out of the military, as well as, by extension, the anti-DEI orders. But of course also the attacks on immigration, environment, and more also affect trans people.

The far Right is attacking everywhere all at once, and it can feel overwhelming to know what to do. This move by CrossFit is part of a broader tendency in which people and corporations comply with evil before being forced to. This is called “anticipatory obedience” and fascist governments rely on it.

But everywhere they attack, we can resist. It matters to fight back wherever we are connected to a site of attack. It matters to do this even if, especially if, we are not directly targeted. It matters to resist even in our frivolous and slightly ridiculous leisure pursuits, like trying to swing kettlebells slightly faster today than we could this time last year.

We could think about building the muscle to fight back just the way we think about building any skill at the gym: We assess our capacities, figure out in consultation with others what version of a lift we can do, pick an appropriate weight. Then we work with good form, progressively loading, getting stronger while avoiding injuring ourselves.

On a personal level, building the muscle of saying no, even when or because we’re not targeted, works like this. Just like we’re not going to be able to do a muscle-up without practicing pull-ups, we’re not going to be able to shelter someone targeted for unjust deportation without practicing intervening when people say racist things at work.

So here’s what you start with to build your anti-authoritarian, functional fitness, starting with some scaled versions, from easiest to Rx+.

·       Don’t pay Crossfit that $20 to compete in the Open this year.

·       Email them to tell them why, especially if you’re someone who has registered for the open in years past. Your email can be as simple as saying “Dear CrossFit, I want you to know that even though in 2022 I was 94,242th in the world and in 2023 moved up to 77,840th, and just this past year I finally got my first pull-up and I was so excited, I’m not competing this year because of your decision to not allow trans athletes to compete in the division that accords with their lived gender.”

·       Tell your friends at the gym that you’re not registering for the Open, and why. Some of your cis friends might never have thought about this as an issue, so you can be ready to help them understand what’s at stake and why it matters.

·       Connect with and support trans CrossFit athletes, boxes, and organizations that are speaking out about this.

·       Set up an alternative Open in your gym, or in your city – not paying money to CrossFit central doesn’t mean that you can’t do fun hard things together. If you set this up as a registration-based program, decide where to send the money to – maybe someplace doing cool things to support trans people in your town accessing sport?

·       See if your gym is open to conveying to CrossFit HQ how unhappy its members are; help them explore what would be involved in disaffiliating if they continue to promote bigoted, unscientific, anti-trans policies. Remind your head coaches that gyms that have openly queer and trans-supportive practices also have a leg up in attracting awesome, positive, and sexy members.

·       Rx+: be part of a groundswell of resistance that everyone will be super surprised started with people who were mostly just trying to get a better Fran time and then turned out to be extremely effective at fighting the seeping tide of grim fascism. They thought we only cared about protein and gainz! But no!

There is precedent for ordinary people who care about this sport changing its policies and practices. When former CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman unfurled his racism back in 2020, there was widespread response, including a number of gyms disaffiliating. HQ pivoted, and he left the company.

Whoever made this decision about falling into lockstep with the Trump administration is betting that there won’t be outrage about it, that people will think gender stuff has nothing to do with them. They think that because this is a business, it’s not also a community – but the thing is, the thing that makes people love CrossFit is its infinite variation. Resisting anticipatory obedience makes you a better person and athlete. I guarantee you that there are trans people at your gym and that they make it a better place to be. Defend them, build the muscle of your own integrity, and keep training to be more equipped for the work to come.

Bio: Teacher, writer, SF nerd, functional potter, queer, currently obsessed with doing handstands in middle age. Author of Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times and currently writing about Ursula K Le Guin’s anarchism.