Though he is a professional coach in both archery and equestrian, when it comes to competitions, Carey Norland, a 26-year-old athlete from Eugene, Ore., will participate in only one of the sports: horseback riding.
That is because as an archer, Norland, who is nonbinary and uses both they/them and male pronouns, may only compete in the same category he was assigned to at birth: female. On horseback, the rules allow him to compete against a mixed group of riders of all genders. In fact, equestrian is the only recognized Olympic sport where male and female competitors compete against each other.
As such, many riding disciplines, like show jumping, dressage and eventing, where riders also jump solid obstacles, have emerged as refuges in a sporting world grappling with questions of whether and how transgender athletes should compete. The debate has led to a slew of new legislation, an executive order and policy debates among other sports governing bodies.
“With riding I participate freely, and I have no problems at all. I know that no one is going to question me about my gender — it’s not even addressed in the rule books,” Norland said in an interview this month from his stables in Eugene, where he trains his seven horses. “It’s about the relationship between the rider and the horse; hormones have nothing to do with it.”
Weeks after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order barring transgender women and girls from female sports. Similar bans for trans youth exist in more than half the states, and major U.S. sporting organizations like the N.C.A.A. have followed suit.
The International Olympic Committee itself does not have a ban, but has left the decisions individually to the governing bodies of the sports under its umbrella. Equestrian, where male and female riders compete in mixed-sex competition, has managed to avoid the questions of fairness and biological advantage dogging trans athletes in other sports.
“Equestrian sport is one of the few genuinely gender-neutral disciplines,” Vanessa Martin Randin, a spokeswoman for the Fédération Equestre Internationale, or F.E.I., said in an email. “As there is no requirement for athletes to declare their gender in order to participate in F.E.I. competitions, the F.E.I. does not have a specific policy regarding transgender athletes. Such a policy is simply not necessary.”
While competitors in English riding, and even racing, are not divided along gender lines, not all horse sports follow suit. In Western riding, sports like bronc riding or barrel racing, for example, are traditionally sex-segregated.
Even so, participants must follow World Anti-Doping Agency rules, under which testosterone is a banned substance that may be used only with an official exemption for therapeutic use; obtaining that involves things like a psychological evaluation, a doctor’s note and paperwork that must be updated every few years.
Isa Berdugo, 23, a United States Equestrian Federation steward from Philadelphia who is transgender, said he understood the requirements, though it came with onerous paperwork for other sports. “It’s fair,” he said. “But not for a non-sex-segregated sport.”
The equestrian association said it did not have the authority to waive international doping rules.
Yet the stress of the antidoping requirements for his testosterone, and the feeling of being singled out from other riders, is why Clay Murray, 32, a trans horse trainer from Sapulpa, Okla., no longer competes in official events. “I don’t want to deal with every time I am going to go to a show, I have to deal with somebody not wanting me somewhere,” he said.
Some trans and nonbinary riders said they felt that equestrian, by dint of its composition, had not tackled the issue. But in recent years the U.S. association spotlighted trans athletes, including Murray, as part of diversity and inclusion efforts that it started in 2020.
Jess Clawson, 43, a higher education administrator who is nonbinary and keeps their eight horses in Berryville, Va., said it was far from enough. “That is not to say there is not transphobia; it’s just not on the entry form,” they said.
An elite pursuit for many, where participants are predominantly white and wealthy, equestrian sport’s country-club-like exclusivity, Clawson said, has also kept many trans horse riders from feeling truly included.
“There is a big narrative that I have been combating for years: that horse people, in the capacity of their sport, really only care about horsemanship,” Clawson added. “They still go to the polls and vote the way they vote, they continue to make life easier or harder for trans people in their daily life the same way everybody else does,” they said. “Thinking they can leave that behind when they pull up to the horse show grounds or the riding school is just silly and it’s not true.”
On her horses Riverside Kooee and Connollys Karachi, Haydie Bird, 30, a show jumper from Sydney, Australia, has emerged as an equestrian social media influencer, competing at the meter 1.25 level. Competitive riding, she said, felt like a safe place for a transgender woman like her.
“It is not really based on gender,” she said. “It is based on how good of a rider you are and how good your horse is.”
But last year she took to Instagram to share her devastation after announcers were captured on a hot mic discussing her identity as a transgender woman and her genitalia in graphic detail during a livestream broadcast after she had left the riding arena.
For a time, it shattered her sense of horseback riding as an oasis, she said. “I’m just trying to be my most authentic self,” she said. “And my most authentic self is a girl from the outback of Australia who is riding a horse.”
In interviews, many transgender riders said it was the horses themselves, and the deep connection and emotional bonds they formed with their rider, irrespective of identity, that helped them through challenges.
At his stables in Sapulpa, and among horses in general, Murray said he found the unquestioning acceptance he often lacked elsewhere. He named his business Transcend Equestrian — it is a play on his identity and how horses helped him rise above the struggles he experienced when he began transitioning in 2020, he said.
“I always felt like I didn’t have to pretend to be anybody else when with a horse,” he said. “They are not asking me any questions,” he added. “I got to be completely myself.”
Sarah Maslin Nir, a staff reporter for The Times, is the author of four books on horses.
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