Courtney Crowder

The Des Moines Register

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa -- Ben Christiason begins his morning run on asphalt, pounding the straightaway of a tree-lined suburban boulevard that looks plucked from a John Hughes movie. As the road curves, he trades pavement for the gravel of a trail at the edge of a cluster of baseball fields.

On this airless morning, the sun hangs low, radiating a sticky heat as sweat flattens Christiason’s normally coiffed hair. Performing balletic movements to string his iPhone through his shirt without losing rhythm, he whips off the perspiration-covered tee and tucks it into his shorts.

His bare chest isn’t exactly out of place on this busy Cedar Falls trail, but what is rare are the deep mauve marks forming two perfectly straight lines just under his pecs — the scars left behind from the mastectomy Christiason endured to remove his breasts.

The colored bands are a physical reminder of his emotional journey to a recent milepost: Coming out as transgender and, in the process, becoming the first known transgender high school athlete to compete openly in Iowa.

Popping out against his pale skin, the rich purple streaks are all that remain of Karna, the name Christiason ran cross country under for years until the toll of racing with a group of women while struggling with an internal male identity became too great. They are equally the marks of finally living life as he’d dreamed, and of enjoying acceptance from family and a good portion of the Cedar Falls community, an acceptance that gave him the confidence to rejoin the cross country squad — only this time on the boys' team.

Christiason, 18, is one of a small but growing number of transgender athletes choosing to participate publicly in sports, experts said. But whether competing at an elite level or for a middle school team, transgender athletes often face a mixed bag of policies and laws and confront questions about perceived competitive advantages that come from their birth gender’s inherent physiological traits.

For most of Christiason’s life, gender roles weren’t a big deal. His parents let him wear what he wanted and play how he wanted, but, deep inside, something was always off, he said.

“I would play in my imaginary worlds with my imaginary friends, who always called me Michael, Jacob or Ben,” he said. “Looking back, I think I was imagining these places to keep myself sane.”

That's also why he ran.

Being active is important to the Christiason family. In addition to skiing, backpacking and snow-showing, his parents always ran. So when Christiason had the opportunity to join cross country, it was a natural fit.

Until it wasn’t.

Christiason joined his middle school’s co-ed team and loved the physical aspect of running every day with the same group of people. More importantly, he found a needed calm, a chunk of time to escape the thoughts, questions and feelings he had about his gender.

“When you run, you almost go numb because all you can think about is, ‘Oh, this sucks,’” he said with a laugh. And “I couldn’t think when I was done running because I was so tired.”

But in his freshman year, when the team was divided on gender lines, something changed. He felt like a boy on a women’s team, he said, and that calm he loved was suddenly gone.

“I felt weird whenever I looked down at my shirt and saw ‘women’s cross country,’” he said. “Being on the women’s cross country team was just such a big reminder for me of what I was feeling.”

He left the team when the season ended.

Like Christiason, many young transgender athletes tell Mosier they would rather quit than compete on a team that doesn’t align with their gender identity.

For more on this story, click here.

Iowa’s first transgender high school athlete found his truth on the track

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