Andraya Yearwood

Andraya Yearwood (born August 15, 2001) is an American transgender student athlete from Connecticut. Yearwood began competing on a high school girls' team in early April 2017 and won first place in the girls 100- and 200-meter dashes. Yearwood's second-place finish at the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) 100-yard dash finals on June 4, 2017, behind another transgender student, gained international media attention.

The decision of the State of Connecticut to allow Yearwood to compete on the women's team is a focus of debate surrounding Title IX and trans people. In 2018, writing on the subject of transgender people in sports, ESPN called Yearwood and a handful of other transgender athletes "focal points in a fight over the future of sports". Yearwood has competed without hormones or puberty blockers, which, according to Vice Media, "could have contributed to an advantage". However, Vice Media also stated that schools requiring medical treatment for transgender athletes would create a barrier to entry due to the costs of treatment.

Legal Challenges

Petitions In June 2018, in the state of Connecticut, there was a petition created by parents of student-athletes that had the goal of banning transgender girls from competing in girls' sports. This petition allowed Yearwood to speak on Good Morning America and address the issues that came with the petition and encourage other transgender girls to compete.

Soule et al. v. CT Association of Schools et al. The families of three students who have competed against Yearwood filed a lawsuit in an attempt to bar transgender athletes from competing in women's teams in Connecticut; the families are represented by the conservative nonprofit organization, Alliance Defending Freedom. The lawsuit was dismissed in April 2021 by the district court as moot.

In 2021, the Biden Administration withdrew former Attorney General William Barr’s support of the exclusion of Yearwood, reconsidering her right as a woman and her right to play women's sports.

Media and Public Profile

Changing The Game (2019 / 2021) In 2019, Andraya Yearwood appeared in Changing The Game, a documentary that highlights the stories of three transgender athletes and the hardships they faced in the athletic industry being a transgender person. In the documentary, Yearwood talks about her journey of becoming her true, authentic self through all the struggles she faced growing up.

Joy Run (2020) Directed by the celebrated transgender activist and filmmaker Tourmaline (activist), Joy Run is a stylized documentary short produced in collaboration with the fashion bodywear company Chromat and athletic brand Reebok. Created for New York Fashion Week, the film serves as a vibrant visual celebration of Black trans athletes. It specifically centers on Yearwood and Terry Miller, reframing their narratives away from political trauma to highlight the liberating power of movement, community bond, and the pure pleasure of running track.

Vice Investigates (2020) In March 2020, Yearwood and her mother, Ngozi Nnaji, appeared in the seventh episode of the Hulu original documentary series Vice Investigates, titled "Defending Champions." Hosted by correspondent Gianna Toboni, the episode explored the systemic policing, biological arguments, and legal challenges surrounding transgender and intersex athletes in competitive sports. The segment focused on Yearwood's experiences as a high school track athlete at Cromwell High School, highlighting how she faced intense community opposition and public scrutiny despite receiving support from her school administration. The documentary also examined the Title IX federal lawsuit filed against Connecticut's inclusive policies by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), featuring Yearwood's perspective on how the legal and media arguments reduced her identity strictly to biology.

Running While Black (2022) A three-part documentary project produced by Vice Media and Adidas that examines the intersection of systemic racism, sports culture, and running safety. Episode 2 features a dedicated profile of Yearwood. It showcases her athletic resilience and documents her ongoing perspective on why access to sports remains a fundamental human experience for marginalized youth.

Queer Sports (2023) In 2023, Yearwood was featured in two episodes of the Vice TV weekly docuseries Queer Sports, hosted by Arielle Duhaime-Ross. In Episode 3, titled "Trans Athletes Address the 'Debate'," she participated in a roundtable panel alongside Veronica Ivy, Cat Runner, and Frankie De La Cretaz to analyze the emotional tax and institutional policies affecting transgender competitors. In a later episode focused on equality in women's sports, Yearwood was the subject of a one-on-one spotlight interview examining the intersection of identity, systemic media pressure, and her personal resilience as a Black trans athlete.

Education Yearwood received recruitment interest from Harvard University, the University of Connecticut, Springfield College, and West Point to run track and field in the NCAA. Beginning in the fall of 2020, she was a student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a Historically Black University (HBCU) in Durham, North Carolina. During her undergraduate studies, Yearwood intentionally declined to participate in intercollegiate athletics to have the academic freedom necessary to pursue international study. In 2022, she completed the first semester of her junior year abroad at New York University Buenos Aires in Argentina. While there, she worked with the Diáspora Africana de la Argentina (DIAFAR).

This intensive immersion program allowed her to deepen her fluency in Spanish and intercultural competence of the Afro-Argentine diaspora. The summer following her coursework in Argentina, Yearwood expanded her linguistic focus to Portuguese. She is only the second student from NCCU to be selected for the prestigious Critical Language Scholarship Program, a fully funded initiative sponsored by the United States Department of State aimed at mastering languages crucial to national security and global commerce. Through the CLS program, Yearwood underwent rigorous linguistic and cultural immersion in Brazil, which required adhering to a strict, native-only language policy.

She graduated Magna cum Laude in the spring of 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish Language and Literature and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in race, gender, and class. She also earned two minors in political science and women's and gender studies. The summer immediately following her college graduation, Andraya received the HBCU Scholarship to fully-fund her studies at the School of Spanish at the Middlebury College Language Schools in Middlebury, Vermont. In September of that year, Andraya pursued a Master of Arts degree at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York as her alma mater's inaugural recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship in Portuguese funded by the United States Department of Education. Her M.A. thesis, titled "'Samba’o na cara da sociedade': A Quare Linguistic Anthropological Account of Brazilian Portuguese," which applies quare theory to linguistic anthropological methodology to investigate how Afro-Brazilian LGBTQIA+ communities use pajubá—a traditional queer sociolect combining Portuguese with West African elements—to articulate Black queer identities and push back against systemic marginalization and national myths of an "Afro-paradise". Her thesis, advised by João Nemi Neto and Gustavo Silva Azenha, is the first application of quare linguistic anthropological theory and method to a non-Anglophone language.

Career Post-graduation from Columbia in May 2025, Yearwood served as the Youth Advocacy Fellow with the New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG) in Manhattan's Flatiron District, supporting youth-led grassroots lobbying, popular mobilization, and donor prospects to advance equity for transgender and gender non-conforming protections throughout the State of New York.

As of 2026, Andraya Yearwood is the assistant director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where she also serves as a Staff Advisor for the center's Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA) and chairs the 2SLGBTQIA+ Faculty and Staff Advisory Committee under the Office of the President. Additionally, in September 2026, she was named the Reconciliation and Educating Character Inaugural Employee Fellow for the Center for Indigenous Research, Culture, and Language (CIRCL) at the college, leveraging her ethnopragmatic and semiotic anthropological expertise to spearhead the "Indigenous Language Student Showcase" project alongside the Center for Reconciliation's Indigenous Language Recording Studio.

References

Andraya Yearwood

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