Kae Ravichandran：不止是波士顿马拉松冠军，更是越野跑中寻找自我的跨性别跑者

Published October 1, 2026 10:36AM

What You Need to Know

Journalist Emma Zimmerman met Kae Ravichandran—the first nonbinary champion of the Boston Marathon—while reporting at the All the Above Trail Fest in Western, MA. Ravichandran sheds light on the complicated reality of being a transgender runner for whom the sport is an outlet of joy, freedom, and self-expression, and also judgement, confinement, and grief.

When Kae Ravichandran won the 2023 Boston Marathon, no one told her she was a champion. No tape was held up for her, and no reporters greeted her at the finish line. She strode across the yellow paint on Boylston Street and slowed to a walk, as any finisher might. Ravichandran had just claimed victory in the Boston Marathon’s inaugural nonbinary division, but she would receive no prize money. She would have no podium ceremony. Few people would even know her name.

“I don’t think I was particularly infuriated,” she told me over a video call in September 2026. For the most part, the anticlimactic experience just felt “really weird.”

In the years that preceded that race, Ravichandran had faced a conundrum all too familiar to trans athletes: She could continue competing in the male division, the gender she was assigned at birth, hide her true self, face the mental repercussions, but see her athletic achievements taken seriously by the public. Or she could begin hormone therapy, live in alignment with her identity, and be considered—at best—a representative of a movement.

By 2023, she had made her decision. She started hormone therapy and began racing in the nonbinary division (at the time, she used she/they pronouns, though she’d eventually shift to she/her as she grew more comfortable in her identity as a woman). She then joined a group of LGBTQ+ athletes to successfully advocate for a nonbinary division at the Boston Marathon.

When she crossed the finish line, she was a winner with nothing to show for it, save for a plastic vase engraved with the words “Boston Marathon 2023,” mailed to her home in Vermont two months later.

Running Home

When Ravichandran and I spoke, three-and-a-half years after her historic win, she was a 28-year-old medical resident in pediatrics at the University of Vermont. It was 7:30 p.m. and she had just finished a shift in the pediatric ICU. She was surprisingly alert, if relaxed in demeanor. She wore a loose ponytail, wisps of dark hair escaping into curlicues at her ears. Her words were earnest, though slow and deliberate; she seemed careful to choose the right ones.

When I asked about her choice in medical speciality, any caution disappeared. “I know that I myself would have really benefited from a gender-affirming pediatrician growing up,” she said. “I’m just hoping to be that person for somebody else.”

Kae Ravichandran grew up in Westford, Massachusetts. The child of immigrants, her mother came from Kuwait and her father from India. Her parents were raised in “fairly conservative” families, backgrounds that informed their reactions to her gender expression. “They didn’t totally understand it,” she reflected.

As a child, Ravichandran excelled in school, particularly in the sciences. She cherished her collection of dolls “before [her] parents found them,” she added. Her favorite was a figurine of Daphne from Scooby Doo, clad in a purple dress with long hair flipped at the edges. Upon seeing the doll, “I was like, oh, I want to be this when I grow up. At that point, I did not realize it was going to be really hard.”

Her free time was spent among clusters of friends, predominantly girls. In preschool and early elementary, they played with dolls before graduating to shopping, baking, running, and outdoor adventures. Ravichandran’s parents didn’t approve of her playmates, or of the feminine manner in which she expressed herself. “I was often told, ‘those girls are such bad influences on you’,” she said.

If Ravichandran lacked acceptance at home, she found it in her high school cross country team. The kids were quirky and from diverse backgrounds. They laughed often, despite the physical demands of the sport. No one blinked when Ravichandran arrived at practice wearing form-fitting clothing and shorts that revealed her thighs.

She went on to compete on the cross country and track teams at Case Western University in Ohio. Her teammates celebrated her gender expression, albeit in quiet and understated ways. Members of the women’s team invited her on shopping trips, encouraging her to try on the feminine clothing she admired. They decorated her hair before parties and invited her to pasta dinners before home meets. Toward the end of college, she began using they/them pronouns.

All the while, she excelled on the race course, competing as a valuable member of the men’s team. She often finished among the top seven runners and received All-Academic honors in the University Athletic Association. Ravichandran straddled two worlds: in one, she excelled as an athlete on the men’s team. In the other, she expressed her true identity. “When you’re a college athlete, you want to be the best that you can be,” she said. “But I had this other truth that was really eating away at me.”

A New Kind of Training

It was the late 2010s, and transgender athletes were beginning to receive more media attention, most of which was critical. Ravichandran remembered reading about Lia Thomas—a collegiate swimmer and the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I championship—and the hostility she received. She understood that seeking eligibility on the women’s team would require considerable time, work, and medical treatment. Would she even be allowed to compete? “I decided, at that point, to prioritize running over the feelings that were eating away at me,” she said.

She graduated in January 2020—three months before the pandemic hit the U.S., spinning the country into lockdown and Ravichandran back to her hometown. In Massachusetts, she was 600 miles from the friends she’d made in college who honored her identity. She stopped running. But as the pandemic ebbed and flowed around her, she moved closer to Boston for a medical assistant job, and began living with housemates who used her correct pronouns. Suddenly, she felt an internal pull back to the sport.

When Ravichandran moved to Vermont for medical school in 2021, she signed up for her first marathon.

A few miles into the Hartford Marathon, she heard a familiar voice. She glanced toward the sidelines to find a handful of faces she recognized—their mouths wide with excitement, shouting her name. Her college friends had traveled all the way from Ohio, just to surprise her. “I think, having a family that doesn’t accept part of who I am, having a chosen family is really important,” she said. “It’s especially common in queer communities, especially queer communities of color.”

These were good days: Ravichandran kept her chosen family close, if not in proximity, then in spirit. Their voices were just a phone call away as she logged miles on Vermont country roads. She ran a 2:36 marathon and a 1:11 half-marathon. She was training to become a doctor—a long-held dream. But she was still racing in the men’s division, feeling something jabbing inside of her, reminding her: none of this was enough.

At the 2022 Boston Marathon, that feeling grew too sharp to ignore. That year, the nonbinary division had yet to be instated, and Ravichandran registered for the men’s race. As she crested Heartbreak Hill, something inside of her gave way. “I was like, ‘I’m just gonna run to the top of this hill and then be done, because I don’t want my name associated with a male gender,’ and I just walked off and got a ride to the finish line.”

After the race, Ravichandran began gender-affirming hormone therapy and shifted to using she/they pronouns.

A Bittersweet Victory

Not long after the 2022 marathon, Ravichandran connected with Jake Fedorowski, author of The Guide to Nonbinary Inclusion in Running, who was leading efforts to push for a nonbinary division at the Boston Marathon and other races. She began collaborating with Fedorowski and a group of other runners passionate about inclusion. She contacted race directors throughout New England, asking for nonbinary divisions. On Boston Marathon weekend in 2023, she met some of the runners with whom she’d collaborated at a shakeout run. All of them were buoyant over their successful advocacy. “There were so many tears of trans joy. It was something I had not totally experienced [until] that point,” she said.

But when she looked back on that day in Boston—and its aftermath—a few painful memories clouded the joy.

Following her win, the Daily Mail put out an article, sharing photographs from Ravichandran’s teenage years, “before I had socially and physically transitioned,” she said. Soon, she was tagged in a plethora of angry tweets. She received direct messages over Instagram, including from people “telling me to kill myself, because 41% of trans people kill themselves,” she said, alluding to data by the Trevor Project that shows 40% of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered attempting suicide in 2025.

But not all attention was hostile. Ravichandran was also invited to present at schools and organizations. In Vermont, she stood before a room of elementary school students and issued a hard-hitting question: “Do you consider banana bread to be bread or cake?” The children quarreled, unyielding in their opinions: bread, cake, bread, cake.

“Does it really matter if it’s bread or cake if it tastes really good?” she asked. It was a metaphor for gender, of course—the boxes society squeezes people into; the anger that ensues when someone doesn’t fit.

Undoubtedly, Ravichandran was no longer just an athlete. To some, she was a cause for hate speech. To others, she was a symbol of a larger movement. While she didn’t mind the latter classification, it didn’t come without a layer of grief: “I have always been so jealous that cis runners can just run in races without the larger social ramifications,” she said.

Transcending

Not long after the 2023 Boston Marathon, Ais Oisín was searching for athletes to recruit for their transgender and nonbinary running team, Transcenders. Oisín, cofounder of the team, typed phrases like “trans and run” into the search bar. Suddenly, an Instagram profile appeared. The handle: @transrunnergirl. It was Ravichandran.

The two began talking over the phone—discussing Transcenders, queer community-building, and Ravichandran’s experience as a trans woman of color in both medicine and running. “I think we really connected on this earnest level,” Oisín said. Soon, Ravichandran was traveling from Vermont to New York’s Hudson Valley on weekends when her schedule allowed, attending Transcender’s first Queer Track Meet, or simply visiting with members of the team.

The first time I met Ravichandran, she was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her Transcenders teammates at All of the Above Trail Fest in Western Massachusetts, a celebration of queer runners. She seemed at home among her teammates, some clad in black singlets with the words “Transcenders” across their chests—calm and smiling, even in the minutes before running a 20K.

“Sometimes it’s just radical to exist,” Oisín said. “Kae goes beyond that. She’s visible in places that are not comfortable to be visible.”

Early in medical school, Ravichandran expanded her advocacy work beyond running, helping transgender kids gain access to safe and healthy lives. She began volunteering as a medical staff member at Camp Outright, a residential summer camp focused on queer and trans youth. At camp, she discussed safe practices for binding and tucking, and how kids can talk with the adults in their lives about gender-affirming care.

While the term “gender-affirming care” is often used in reference to surgery and medication, in reality, it spans much broader. A 2025 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that less than 0.1% of transgender and gender diverse minors receive puberty blockers or hormone treatment. A 2024 study found that 97% of adolescent breast reductions—the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries—were performed on cisgender boys. For young people, gender-affirming care can also mean mental health resources, haircuts, and clothing that helps “make your body the way you want it to be shaped,” Ravichandran said—all resources she discusses with campers.

To Ravichandran, the topic of trans kids’ health cannot be understood in isolation from sports: “Preventing trans youth from participating in sports is a public health issue as well as an equity issue,” she said. As of June 2026, 29 states had banned trans youth from playing sports in alignment with their gender identities, decisions with ramifications that extend far beyond simple belonging.

“Trans youth participate in sports at a much lower rate than cis youth,” Ravichandran said, “while things like chronic pain, depression, and anxiety are much higher in trans youth.” Indeed, a 2020 study published in JAMA found that transgender individuals face significantly higher rates of both mental and physical health conditions than their cisgender peers. Ravichandran wondered how many of these conditions could be partially prevented if kids had access to gender-affirming physical activities.

But alongside her wishes for inclusion in sport, Ravichandran remains acutely aware of the struggles inherent to existing as a transgender athlete. She recalls the aftermath of the Boston Marathon and countless other times when running, which is “the most liberating thing in the world,” became a means of confinement.

“I remember at camp one year I asked some kiddos how they felt about sports,” she said. “They said, ‘I don’t want to be the next Lia Thomas.’”