It's a WHAM shame: Women's Hockey Association of Minnesota betrays women

Back in 1975, Patt Ligman and some of her friends at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls signed up for intramural hockey using a first initial and last name because they weren’t sure women would be allowed to play. Later, she was involved in the beginnings of the Minnesota Girls’ and Women’s Hockey Association, which, after the Minnesota State High School League established girls’ hockey, became the Women’s Hockey Association of Minnesota with the catchy acronym WHAM.

“Men already had adult leagues, whereas women did not,” Patt said. “The idea was to provide women a place to play. But also, we wanted to create an organization with some clout. [Before WHAM] we’d show up at a rink and they’d have double booked with a boys’ practice. The boys’ practice always took precedence over our game.”

Oh the irony.

Reflecting USA Hockey’s current transgender policy at the recreational level, WHAM’s policy is that anyone “shall be permitted to participate according to the gender with which the athlete identifies, based on the gender shown in their USA Hockey Registration.” To be clear, WHAM’s only requirement for males who wish to play in the women’s league is to tick the F on the registration form. The accommodation of men in women’s leagues continues: “USA Hockey strongly recommends that any team with a transgender player apply a locker room policy requiring all players to wear certain ‘minimum attire’ at all times.”

Trouble is, women don’t know if there is a male on their women’s team. WHAM does not disclose a player’s sex to women with whom they share the ice and the locker room. They have to trust that WHAM’s teams will be women only. That trust has been betrayed. Men’s privacy and their desire to play in what is supposed to be a women’s league is prioritized; women’s is not. Decades after WHAM started as a place for women to play hockey, men’s identities take precedence.

When asked about their eligibility policy, Beth Chaplin, president of WHAM, deferred to Minnesota Hockey and USA Hockey. Neither organization responded to my calls or emails.

While I was alerted to this story by women who have quit WHAM, have quit the sport, because they don’t want to play with men, there is a range of viewpoints on this topic. Via pre-game locker room conversations with a C1 team (these are skill-based levels from A1 to C3), in-depth phone conversations, and emails, I tried to represent as many as I could. I reached out to some of the men playing in WHAM, but got no response. I also tried to capture the social role that, what was for decades a women’s only league, plays in women’s lives. I hope you’ll read all of these voices, but a few overarching thoughts stood out:

1) Everyone felt strongly that all people should have a place to play

2) Every woman expected to play with and against women when she signed up for WHAM

3) Many were unaware that WHAM has no hormonal or medical requirements for men who play in the women’s league

4) Many were unaware that WHAM does not reveal a player’s sex, so they might not know, cannot consent to, or complain about a male player in WHAM

5) Most were unaware that Team Trans, a league based in Minnesota specifically for trans and nonbinary players, even existed

I pushed open the dented metal door to locker room #2. Awkwardly, all conversation ceased, and 16 pairs of eyes turned on me. I was not carrying a stick or lugging a Hyundai-sized bag.

“Oh hey, you made it.” My neighbor, Teresa, introduced me. She’s played in WHAM for over 20 years. In the last game of the 2024-2025 season, her team was held scoreless by the opposing team’s goalie—a net-filling 6+ foot man with a full beard. “Twenty years ago, I would never in a million years have joined WHAM if I’d known we’d be playing against men,” she said. “Now, I’m stuck because this is my social life. These are my friends. I wouldn’t make it through the winter without it.”

As this C1-level team wrestled with clothing and gear, I asked one question of the group as a whole—given that there are men’s, coed, and open leagues (I didn’t know yet about Team Trans), how do you feel about WHAM’s policy of allowing men in a women’s league?

Kirsten’s hand shot up. “I say, ‘Welcome to the team ladies.’ Anyone who identifies as a woman is welcome to play with me.” She smiled confidently. The others avoided eye contact, very focused on gear. After finding my Substack, Kirsten declined a follow-up conversation.

Chris, the goalie, has been playing with WHAM for over 20 years. She and two other women on the team watched their children play hockey and thought it looked like fun. “I personally think it’s dangerous,” she said. “Men are bigger, stronger, and faster. I don’t play coed because I don’t want to be taking shots from guys. It’s just a safety issue for me. And there are coed teams they can play on.”

A woman pushed through the door, unlike the others, quiet and red-eyed. There were some quick hugs and murmurs of sympathy. “You can go ahead and cry. My mom died a year ago and I still cry,” Chris said.

The decibel level ratcheted up again as ten different conversations rattled on. Kids, life, schedules, what color jersey tonight.

Ann, sitting next to me, said, “I feel uninformed. I guess in this league, it’s different than high school or college. [It’s not different. Males are eligible in almost all levels of female hockey in Minnesota].

Gabby, on my other side, said she didn’t have strong opinions about men in WHAM. “Everyone should have a place to belong, but I know there are inherent physical differences. I play coed too, and it’s definitely different playing with men. Most men in coed kind of hold back. A few will play full on—I don’t know what that’s about. Like they don’t want women there or something. There are so many teams in the Twin Cities—hundreds—there really is a place for everyone.”

As I’d learned, a team is assigned one locker room, whether that team is coed or a women’s team with a trans-identified man on it. “When I play coed, I come with my leggings on,” Gabby said. “If you have to strip down, you go to the bathroom. People are respectful.”

Of course, all coed players have consented to sharing the locker room and the ice with those of the opposite sex. A man with a feminine identity, however, is there by stealth. WHAM will not reveal a player’s sex, few if any women would question a player’s sex, and in fact, would likely find themselves shamed as a bigot or hounded out of the league for expressing discomfort with a man’s presence, or not accepting him as a woman—”transphobic behavior.”

I asked Claire about how the all-women’s locker room behavior differed from one where a male is present. She answered assuming she’d know he was male, which is an incorrect assumption: “You have to behave a certain way if it’s coed. If it’s all women, I might walk across the room in my underwear. The conversation is different. We’re talking about hot flashes and menstruation and whiskers on our chins. We might say the word vagina. It might change the mood if there was a man in here. He wouldn’t understand a lot of things. So many things are just the way a woman thinks. I don’t know, some men are more androgenous—maybe he thinks like a woman. I guess if there was a transgender man [male] in the locker room, I’d feel uncomfortable.”

Kris, another longtime C1 player, also assumed she’d know a player was male: “Some women aren’t even comfortable changing in front of other women. If there was a male in our locker room I’d say, ‘I’m uncomfortable changing with you in here,’ or I’d go change somewhere else.”

Just then, two males trotted into the locker room behind their mom, tossing a stuffed Pikachu into the air. Aged four and six, they talked in silly voices for a bit, then scurried out to take a spot in the bleachers with their dad.

“Are we dressed enough for Michael?” Michael is the team’s coach. He’s not allowed in the locker room until everyone is sufficiently dressed because he’s male. No one seemed to notice the irony—according to WHAM’s policies, a man who claimed a feminine identity would be welcome as they undressed and chatted, their privacy, their trust that they were in an all-female environment betrayed.

After nearly all the players had left the locker room, Kayla, a small, young woman approached: “I think WHAM allowing men defeats the purpose of having a women’s league. I mean, we have coed leagues.”

Just before their ice time was about to start, I ducked into the opposing team’s locker room and asked the ten women remaining in there how they felt about WHAM’s policy of allowing males to play in the women’s league. In identical fashion, one woman spoke up immediately, loudly, righteously: “Anyone who identifies as a woman can play with me.” There was head nodding and a couple familiar deer-in-the-headlights stares that could have been fear of sounding transphobic, and no time for a follow up.

I spoke at length with Kris by phone. She chose her words carefully. She said she expected to be playing with and against women in WHAM, but then said:

“I don’t have an issue playing with anyone who identifies as female. The issue for me is, whether it’s coed or WHAM, that they are playing at the right level. If there’s a trans woman playing with more ability, I think there’s a concern across the board that people just need to find the right level. I don’t care if they’re female or not—it’s about making sure folks are in the right spot.”

I asked if she found it problematic that WHAM is billed as a women’s league, but is not. She said: “No. It may not seem fair, it may seem disappointing, but the reality is there are very few folks who identify as female playing in WHAM. The odds of playing at the same level are pretty low.”

The week after this conversation, Kris played a team with a male player, Eliza Gazett, in goal. I’ve tried to find contact info for Gazett but have been unsuccessful. Last season, an A3 team, Robins, had two male players on the roster. One is on the Robins’ roster again this season. Because trans players’ privacy is protected, I can’t publish their names unless they are “out” in a previous media source, as Gazett is. Last season, a male played on two teams, Glory Days and Minnesota Mean, and is on Minnesota Mean again this season. This player is on the right, below. I’ve reached out to this person, but have not gotten a response.

“That’s our world now,” Kris continued. “We’re crossing paths with different folks all the time. We need to interact, be kind to one another, or choose not to be. If someone was really really unhappy and wanted an all-female activity, there’s things out there for you.”

I pointed out that, as bizarre as it sounds, in Minnesota female-only activities are illegal. Kris did not know that, or maybe, didn’t believe me. So a woman who is unhappy with WHAM’s policy cannot find another league or another sport. She either resigns herself to sharing a women’s league with men, or quits sports.

Trying to find a bright spot, Kris said, “The flip side should be if a woman wanted to go to an all-male team, she could.”

I asked why she thought women should give up the right to their own sports to men. “If they’ve gone through transition, hormone treatments…” Kris was not aware that WHAM has no hormonal or surgical requirements for men.

There were a lot of issues that Kris had not thought about, indeed, would never have had to think about if WHAM were a women’s-only league. “There’s a lot of complexity. Equity is where I’m coming from, allowing people to play. It’s not as simple as that sometimes,” she said.

Kelley Grotting was the first woman to go to the media and say men in women’s hockey is wrong. She established a petition to protect females in Minnesota women’s hockey leagues. That petition is not sponsored by WHAM, and has 976 signatures. WHAM did sponsor a competing petition that supports trans and nonbinary hockey players, but bizarrely, Team Trans did not. The petition for men in a women’s league has 4,399 signatures. Most of the comments are along the lines of hockey is for everyone! What’s missing from that strawman argument is that while hockey is for everyone, women’s hockey is for women.

“The people that signed that petition and the 200 people who came to harass me after I spoke out, none of them have stepped on the ice. They’re not the hockey community,” Grotting said in our phone conversation. She’s been playing hockey for over 30 years, skated for St. Thomas University, and joined WHAM with a bunch of friends: “You didn’t have to worry about the messy kitchen or the kids. It was our time to get some exercise and laugh,” she said. “This past year, 2024-2025, we were told we were getting a new player on the team. After the fifth or sixth game—we’d been undressing in front of this person all that time—we went out for beers afterward and he told four of us he’d transitioned.”

This player is in his 40s now and began identifying as a woman five years ago. It appears he plays on trans leagues too, but WHAM’s website indicates he is still looking for a WHAM team for the 2025-2026 season.

“I’d never had to think of how I felt about it, but only four of us knew he was male and I didn’t think that was fair, so I sent an email to everyone on the team so they could make their own decision. I thought, I’m okay with it if you are, and they all were okay. We played A2. A couple games later we played a team with three skaters, all over six feet tall. They had clearly gone through male puberty. An easy search revealed one of them had played boys’ varsity hockey. He’d changed his name the year before but that wasn’t going to slow down his slap shot. Another team had a player with a beard, a female who identified as male and was obviously taking testosterone. I played collegiate hockey with a lot of butch lesbians—I don’t care about that, but you can’t dope. I had had it.

“Two teammates and I met with WHAM board members. We were very calm; our message was that if we sign up for women’s hockey, we want to play against women because it’s not fair, safe, or fun to play against biological males. The board said their hands were tied because they couldn’t ask anybody to verify their sex, they couldn’t ask for medical records. They said we could form a cis gender team, but we never considered that because it makes a mockery of WHAM.

“There’s open, co-ed, and trans leagues, and by the way, Team Trans has not received one single second of media time because they want to make it seem like trans players have nowhere to play. But people feel entitled to play on whatever team they want to. It’s not a god-given right to play on a women’s hockey team if you’re a male.

“The next day some trans players and allies met with the WHAM board and I don’t think that meeting was calm. They demanded that I be kicked out of the league for calling them biological males.

“By March 2025, I had already decided I was no longer going to play in WHAM, and I didn’t go to our last game because I feared for my safety. My social media was blown up with disgusting messages, and 200 people showed up to harass me. That was a few dark months for me. Trans allies and keyboard warriors deluged my social media with hateful messages. They called my place of business to try to have me fired.

“At the same time, women have been reaching out to me with their stories. WHAM is not supposed to have checking: A woman reached out to me and said she was checked into the boards by a male, and never returned. Three of the women on my team no longer skate, some are still undecided, and some don’t understand why I spoke out.”

Kelley shared some of the emails she received from women who believe WHAM should be for women only:

Player #1: “2024-2025 was my first year playing WHAM, on an A2 team. It was very uncomfortable for me doing the skills assessment this year because, as I’m getting undressed, two transgenders walked into the locker room!”

Player #2: “This is a discussion I’ve had for the last 1.5 years with family and friends. There are multiple reasons why I’ve never been a fan of WHAM, but this has been the nail in the coffin. I’ve also been playing on multiple teams over the last 13/14 years. And you nailed it--we all look forward to spending a couple hours playing a game we’ve loved since we were little girls. I can’t believe we’ve gotten to this point. I’m 39 years old and until last season this hasn’t been an issue. It’s really disheartening about WHAM because I feel like they care about their image more than they do about us, which is a major bummer. I hope we can go back to how it should be! Will my two little girls have to deal with this some day? Your petition is signed. THANK YOU”

Player #3: “I play in WHAM for an A2 team. I share your views about keeping guys out of WHAM. I thought that was the whole point about having a women’s league, so women don’t have to share the ice with men, especially as adults? I raised the same question as you at the end of the year survey for WHAM, but never heard a response from the league so I assumed not enough players are concerned. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I’m in full support. That is super crazy that you had a trans player on your team without WHAM notifying you ahead of time. That seems disrespectful to women who are looking for a team to join who are passed over for a trans player, plus it creates an awkward situation in the locker room. It’s weak that WHAM is hiding behind MN/USA hockey rules. I feel like if enough WHAM players want a rule change, we ought to be able to determine that ourselves or else WHAM will no longer be a women’s league. I signed the petition and shared it with my team

I spoke to Claire from the C1 team at greater length on the phone. “In WHAM specifically, I think it’s okay to allow men because we play based on assessed skill. Most sports are not like that, like in pro sports where it’s based on body weight and sex. I don’t think male advantage is removed. For example, I don’t think that powerlifter [JayCee Cooper] should be in the female category.”

I asked about the fact that men are bigger, stronger, and faster than equally skilled women. “I think there’s a spectrum,” Claire said of men with trans identities. “Some people just dress like the opposite sex. Some people do anti-estrogen and anti-progesterone steroids, some have surgery. I know that men who’ve done hormone therapy, it absolutely changes their bodies [Claire is an oncology nurse]. It would be hard for me to say that is a complete male.”

I pointed out that WHAM has no hormonal or surgery requirements for men to play in the women’s league. “I assumed they had that. I thought they had a definition of who is a woman, biologically and physiologically,” Claire said. “If WHAM has no criteria for what is a female, if we start getting a bunch of men in there, no, I don’t think it would be good.”

I asked Claire why she thought there are women’s and men’s sports. “The premise is to be fair, so you’re competing against the same sex. But there’s a social aspect too—people with similar cultural denomination, for good community, camaraderie, support. If it’s just women, you don’t have to explain to anybody what it is to be a woman. In oncology there are all kinds of support groups because people need different things. We wouldn’t want to ever lose the option of just women or just men. It’s hard because people can define themselves any way they want.

“I do want everybody to play hockey, it’s just how to do that,” Claire continued. “WHAM wanted to be inclusive. There has been so much hate, so much violence [against trans people]. This [allowing men in a women’s league] is an extreme rebound. I mean, I don’t want my tax dollars to pay for transgender surgeries. I’m just hoping the pendulum lands in the middle.”

Claire was unaware that Team Trans existed, and has for two years. “Team Trans is exactly the kind of organization WHAM should support so people can play,” she said. “If this [Team Trans] is easily available and affordable the way WHAM is, then no, I don’t think we should mix transgender with women. If there’s not much opportunity with this [Team Trans] yet, I think there should be a transition period. Maybe WHAM can talk with them and work out a referral system to take place over the next couple years.”

I pointed out that men who identify as women can play in men’s, open, coed, trans, and now women’s leagues, thus providing them more opportunities to play than virtually any other demographic, yet women lacked even one dedicated league.

“I hear you,” Claire said. “It’ll be tough to get that message out there without being misunderstood.”

Like my neighbor Teresa, WHAM is exercise, social life, emotional support, and fun for thousands of women in Minnesota. While some are speaking out against WHAM’s policies, many are resigned to giving up something they all agreed is precious—this is our world.