At age 60, Erica Rand decided to take up pairs figure skating. As two white queer adult skaters, Rand and her partner have come into direct contact with the interconnected binarisms that shape athletic participation, from oversimplified distinctions between cis and trans to the artificial division between athletic and artistic. Rand’s book Skating Away from the Binary is a call to transform gender norms in sport. Here, Rand is joined in conversation with Travers and Mary Louis Adams. This conversation was recorded in December 2025. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/5ce9d8f8

Erica Rand is professor of art and visual culture and of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College. She is author of several books, including Skating Away from the Binary ; Barbie’s Queer Accessories; The Ellis Island Snow Globe; Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice; and The Small Book of Hip Checks On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing. She has served on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher and Salacious and co-edits the series Writing Matters! for Duke University Press. In a piece for Global Sports Matters called “Skating Out of the Binary” and in “At the Ice Rink, My Feet End in Knives,” she describes training in a gender non-conforming adult figure skating pairs team, with pairs partner Anna Kellar of the Future of Figure Skating podcast, as they participate in growing efforts to expand inclusion in the sport—a sport mired in racialized heteronormativity that is also being transformed through critically engaged practice and institutional change.

Mary Louise Adams is a retired professor from the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Adams is author of Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity and the Limits of Sport and The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality.

Travers is a professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University. They are author of The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution; Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sports; and Writing the Public in Cyberspace: Redefining Inclusion on the Net.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Podcast, Anna Kellar, The Future of Figure Skating

Danya Lagos, American Journal of Sociology: “Has There Been a Transgender Tipping Point?”

Eric A. Stanley, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Gender Self-Determination

Skating Away from the Binary by Erica Rand is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.