Trans Trailblazer Schuyler Bailar: ‘A More Inclusive Business Makes More Money’

He’s a swimmer who made history in 2015 as the first out transgender athlete to compete on an NCAA Division I men’s team. He’s a 2019 graduate of Harvard University. Last month, he was honored as a grand marshal for the NYC Pride March, wearing nothing but a skinny, custom-made swimsuit with the words “trans athlete” emblazoned on the rear.

“I haven’t felt as confident and powerful and empowered as I did, wearing only my swimsuit,” wrote Schuyler Bailar on Instagram. “This nakedness both in physicality and in emotional vulnerability is my power, built off of all the trans people who came before me making it even possible.”

At 26, Bailar is turning his outspoken advocacy for diversity, equity and inclusion into entrepreneurship.

“You cannot sit down in front of me, hear my story and tell me, ‘You don’t deserve the same rights as me,” Bailar told me in a recent interview to promote his new venture, LaneChanger, a gender literacy program that incorporates his four years of public speaking. Among its first clients is General Mills, which purchased an enterprise license for its 35,000 employees worldwide. Others include FOLX Health, August, and Within Health,

Since graduating with a degree in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology in 2019, Bailar has already advised hundreds of businesses, organizations, and schools, been profiled on 60 Minutes, was presented with the Harvard Director’s Award and named LGBTQ Nation’s Instagram Advocate for 2020. He’s amassed 385K followers on Instagram with messages of advocacy for trans people, for athletes and for reproductive rights.

“I’m directly affected by the return of Roe vs. Wade in case I get pregnant and want to get an abortion,” said Bailar. “I do have a uterus that functions, so I’m more directly affected.” But his mission with LaneChanger, he said, is to educate more broadly about gender.

“Everybody, including cisgender people, has an experience with gender,” he said. “This is gender literacy. Yes, it’s focused on trans people, but trans people are an excellent window into understanding yourself more.”

That understanding doesn’t come without some uncomfortable conversations.

“Four hundred-plus times, people always come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t want to be here.’ Because most of the audiences I go to are conscripted. They’re forced to be there because their schools made them, their athletic departments made them, their companies made them. And they’ll tell me, ‘I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t like trans people. I didn’t understand, Schuyler. I had no idea. I was resistant. And now you’ve changed it for me. I recognize that you’re just like me.’”

There may, in fact, be no one, just like Bailar.

He was born in New York City in 1996 and raised in McLean, Va. Before his first birthday, he was already swimming on his own, and by age 10, he was competing in the Junior Olympics. At 15, he ranked as one of the top breaststroke swimmers in the U.S. for his age group. But just one year later, Bailar’s future as an athlete seemed grim when he broke his back in three places in a biking accident.

Yet with determination, he recovered and returned to the pool to compete, and win.

The star student at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., was aggressively recruited by most of the Ivy League, and eventually committed to swimming for Harvard.

But there, and during all his years in high school, Bailar battled with his body image, self-esteem, an eating disorder and even self-harm. Just months from graduating, he chose to take a gap year to discover, through therapy, that his real struggle was with gender identity. Bailar had to choose: Would he continue as a potential NCAA champion—on the women’s team—or to live an authentic life as the man he is? He chose to transition, and made history on Harvard’s men’s team.

Since then, Bailar has been meeting with young trans people, including those attending a retreat just weeks ago, playing sports and telling his story. He said the hard part for him was what happened when the retreat ended.

“Many of them went home to places that have banned their healthcare and banned them playing sports,” said Bailar, describing his pain in realizing the young people he mentored could not do what he did. “I’m a beacon of some kind of like proof, or hope, but it’s really muddy right now. And that light has been dimmed because of the amount of anti-trans legislation that we’ve seen. You’d think would make you stop wanting to work. But it doesn’t. It motivates me further because I know the call is slightly different. I need to fight first for the ability for those kids. Representation matters.”

That’s just another reason Bailar decided to turn his advocacy into a business.

“LaneChanger is all of the trainings that I’ve done honed over 400 plus speeches to get to give you basically 40 plus Q&A models and answer all the common questions about trans people, including trans people. In sports, there’s a whole section of trans people in sports, in trans people, bathrooms. What about coming out? What does it look like to put a mixed race identity into that? You know, that’s what I am. You know, what about what what what about trans people? Is a phase? Is that a phase? What does that look like? Right. All these questions that people ask me all the time have very thorough and direct and concise answers. The models are not very longer, 30 seconds long, actually up to a couple of minutes. Most of them are about 2 minutes long. So they’re really digestible. And the goal is to really present a person with the humanity of a trans person so that you can have more difficult conversations about trans people that actually are grounded in the humanity of us, as opposed to all these lies, propaganda.”