Paolo Rosa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Martina Navratilova at the 2012 Australian Open.
In line with the theme of this issue of The Progressive, I’d like to dedicate the following to every transgender and nonbinary child who feels isolated, attacked, and erased from the country they call home. We are failing them, and it’s not only coming from the far right. These ideas have been trumpeted to the heavens—in terms that are getting uglier by the day—by a liberal hero and one of the all-time athletic trailblazers: Martina Navratilova.
Martina is a legend for what she has accomplished on the tennis court, with a list that could fill volumes. She is also a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal” whose open queerness in the 1980s created space and pride, both inside and outside the sports world, for countless others. That’s why it is so shattering for so many of us to learn that she has decided that, while she is a liberal on most issues, her invective toward trans people—delivered in the cruelest, most contemptible manner on her X feed—burns out your retinas.
In a 2023 interview with journalist Kara Swisher, Martina said, “I’m all for trans rights on a civil level, 100 percent, every which way.” Her only issue, she claimed, was keeping trans women out of women’s sports. That’s an issue that my friends—like trailblazing trans athlete Chris Mosier, and Harrison Browne, the first openly trans professional hockey player—believe requires patient discussion with people who have questions or their own thoughts about how a binary sports world needs to respond to gender fluidity. Good people have big questions about this. It’s why Browne wrote Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes, which profiles trans athletes of all ages.
Martina’s position of “trans support in everything but sports” was either a cover or a first step down a very dark path. She isn’t the only woman athlete I’ve interviewed who has since descended into this anti-trans, MAGA rot, but she’s by far the most important. She is someone people have looked to for leadership, and this is where she is taking them. In the process, she has traveled from trailblazer to cliché.
Now Martina uses the phrase “LGB,” which mimics Donald Trump’s erasure of “TQ+” identities, even on a Stonewall memorial. This is particularly disgusting, given the role of trans people in leading that 1969 revolt, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Martina denies this history, saying that there “were no trans people back then.” She followed that by arrogantly declaring that she knows the history of Stonewall better than anyone else because she was on “the front lines.” In actuality, during the Stonewall Uprising, she was just twelve years old and living in Czechoslovakia, where she played tennis for hours a day.
“First they came for trans people” was a fact in Nazi Germany, where the first research clinic dedicated to gender-affirming care was raided and shut down in 1933, and that history is repeating itself in the present. I’m sickened by what Martina has become. To see her align herself with the right on transgender rights has been so repugnant, and shows how her claims of being liberal about everything but this issue is pathetically hollow and deeply cynical.
In many ways, she’s worse than a Trump supporter, because her heroic past serves to divide our side at the exact moment when division will destroy us.
We also need to be clear that Martina is not trying to debate the finer points of queer history, which in a safer era would actually be important. We shouldn’t fear debate. But she’s not debating. She is now part of a broader push to remove trans people from our society. As a “bleeding-heart liberal” who is so fond of her own intelligence, she should know that fascism is not a buffet where you get to pick and choose who is demonized. She should know that anti-trans hatred and violence animate every day of this fascist administration and is used as a jumping-off point to not only attack all queer people, but also everyone else.
Martina was an all-time great tennis player. She was openly queer in a time when visibility was both rare in sports and truly heroic. Now it seems like her life’s work is taking a wrecking ball to the solidarity that is essential to beating back the far right. To all the young people out there caught in this violent maelstrom for no reason other than being their true selves, please know that you are not alone.