Hailey Davidson can’t resist popping what she calls “phone pimples”: those nagging little red notification dots that indicate new messages. So on Dec. 4, when she was at her home golf course near Orlando, waiting with a friend to tee off on the fourth hole, she squeezed one.
“It numbed me at first,” said Davidson, 32, in early December. “It’s almost like I didn’t know where I was for a few minutes.” Though she zoned out during her tee shot that followed, the ball still landed within four feet of the par-3 hole.
Davidson’s phone pimple was an email from the LPGA announcing a near-complete ban on transgender girls and women across the elite competitions it oversees. As the only out trans woman currently golfing professionally and striving to make the LPGA, Davidson knew she was being targeted, though the news release didn’t name-check her. It wasn’t the first time she’d been through this: Back in March, the Florida-based NXXT Golf mini-tour issued a similar ban while Davidson was actively participating.
Still, she told herself as she continued practicing that day, there’s one event I can still play: a United States Golf Association tournament.
“It wasn’t till later on that night I went and reread it, and I was like, Oh, never mind, I’m banned from that, too. I had about a half-day period where I thought I still had one tournament I could play in every year,” she said. “I was like, Oh. One would have been better than none.”
The new policy stipulates that transgender girls and women are ineligible to compete in events on the LPGA Tour, the developmental Epson Tour, the Ladies European Tour, and qualifying events for all those tours, unless they haven’t experienced any part of “male puberty” beyond Tanner Stage 2 or after age 12 (whichever comes first). Any such transgender girl or woman must then maintain testosterone levels below 2.5 nanomoles per liter—a metric many cisgender girls and women don’t naturally hit—for as long as she wishes to play.
Davidson and her camp are “weighing all our options at this time,” she said. “It’s so fresh.” Her Instagram statement about the ban read in part, “I will never stop fighting for the right to play the sport I love.”
Davidson has been fighting to play golf since about age 10. After moving with her parents and half-sister to Virginia from Scotland in 1997 (“the day Princess Diana died”), she joined a club when her father, Hamish, got her hooked on the sport. They were built to brave the cold for nine holes when most locals weren’t willing.
Growing up, Davidson endured 34 surgeries on her feet and ankles after she was born with a form of clubfoot where her feet were pointing fully backward. In running-intensive activities like basketball, she knew she was dragging down her team. So golf appealed by comparison—she initially saw it as a “lazy sport.”
“Unfortunately I didn’t think about, Wow, you have to walk seven billion miles,” Davidson said. But there she was on the golf course, especially over the summers, at about 7:30 a.m.—before the workers showed up sometimes—until 6 p.m., when her parents picked her up. She figured it beat sitting at home alone all day.
“With some of the members, there was a lot of jealousy because [she] was this kid that, at that time, was probably 13 years old, up and beating all these guys that had been playing golf for 20, 30 years,” Hamish said. His kid left him in the dust too. She was golfing well, though the youth competition in her area wasn’t exactly stiff, and she was golfing mad.
Davidson thought for a long time that as long as there was work to do to perfect her game, she could ignore the frustration she felt bubbling up within her off the course. “I would get so angry, and that was really what held me back my whole life,” she said. “It wasn’t anything ability-wise. I was just a mental nutcase.”
From a young age, she knew that she was a girl but kept her feelings to herself and put off dealing with her discomfort surrounding gender, instead pouring herself into improving her game. It wasn’t until she was almost done with college, when she and her parents moved to Florida—stopping near West Palm Beach for a few years before moving north to Orlando—that she began transitioning socially and medically.
Getting bottom surgery, in particular, was difficult financially and logistically. Even after consulting with a surgeon she liked in Baltimore, Davidson had to wait longer for the procedure while she worked to meet a requisite benchmark on the flawed body mass index. Finally, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, she had the operation.
“Even when I was first playing again in tournaments, I was still in quite a bit of pain,” Davidson said. “But … the second I had the opportunity to, I didn’t care if I was bleeding walking down the fairway.”
In the few years since then, Davidson has been toiling in the feeder system, through which she had hoped—still hopes—to make the LPGA Tour. Beneath the LPGA and second-tier qualifying Epson Tour, the other stateside options for professional women’s golfers are smaller regional tours: NXXT in Florida, Cactus in Arizona, and the Women’s All Pro Tour in the South. Then there’s LPGA Q-School, where hundreds of players compete for the chance to earn LPGA or Epson membership. The travel and schedules make it difficult for serious athletes to hold down full-time jobs outside of golf, even though those are often exactly what people like Davidson need to get by.
For financial and safety reasons, Davidson lives with her parents and their three dogs. She won a NXXT tournament this year. It netted her $1,500—minus the $700 entry fee. That remaining $800? It covers the annual fee to belong to her club. It’s cheaper than most.
Davidson, who has a full-time customer service job where she works afternoons into evenings, likened the feeder-tour system to an unpaid internship. “Unless you do have money or you come from money, you’re just kind of piecing it together when you can,” she said.
Her new coach is “decently affordable.” She estimates that most in her area charge at least $200 per hour. Davidson’s last coach quit the gig after NXXT banned her; sometimes she forgoes coaching altogether. Securing a caddy for a tournament will set an aspiring LPGA golfer back at least $800, if not well over $1,000. Davidson typically forgoes the luxury, but she did once promise a friend a PlayStation in return for his services. Her dad caddied for her once, but she’s quick to clarify that they had a cart for the event. “I don’t really count that,” she said, smiling.
Had Davidson made it past the second round of LPGA Q-School ($2,500 entry fee) this year, she would’ve run out of paid time off from her customer-service job and had to consider quitting it. It’s a scary prospect, but that could have paid off: Upon finishing Q-School successfully, she would’ve earned a spot on the LPGA or Epson tour.
“If you can penny-pinch and be lucky and live in the right area like I do, and only play tournaments for three months a year, it’s gonna cost you like, 10 grand. At my level, if you want to go play full-time, travel around the U.S., and play in all the mini-tours, it’s probably gonna cost you around, I would say, 40 grand, at least,” Davidson said. “And that money is not out there to be won.”
The feeder system is also a lonely existence.
“It’s just so isolating,” said Maya Satya Reddy, a former professional women’s golfer who lived in San Diego and drove solo for hours back and forth to events in Phoenix on the Cactus mini-tour (which also banned trans women this year). “Think of Interstellar, but make it less space.”
Davidson feels that isolation even more deeply than most. There aren’t many women golfers vocally in her corner, even as she has faced death threats and needed an LPGA-provided security detail at her two most recent events. “I feel like I’m on a deserted island being bombed while everyone just stands and watches me,” she said.
Aspiring LPGA members are incentivized to avoid any hint of controversy because they fret over branding opportunities, said Linley Ooi, an assistant coach at Cal State Fullerton who played with Davidson during Q-School practice rounds.
“I think women’s golf is held by a ball and chain,” Ooi said. “Men’s golf, you can play on Tour, you can make a decent amount of money even playing on mini-tours, but women’s golf, for you to be financially OK, you need to be on the LPGA. And unfortunately, the only way we can get there is through sponsors. People struggle to speak up for Hailey or just the LGBTQ community in general because they’re worried about destroying their image to suit a sponsor.”
“There’s a lot of pressure to fit this mold of what golf is supposed to be,” said Reddy, who now works as an LGBTQ+ sports law and policy expert. “Which is kind of that old man’s club, right?” Literally: Some U.S. country clubs are still men-only.
Longtime LPGA member Sarah Kemp of Australia is perhaps the highest-profile woman golfer to publicly support Davidson. “I can’t imagine having to deal with the amount of hate she does on an everyday basis. It’s cruel and shameful,” Kemp told Golfweek in October.
In 2010, two years after Kemp joined the Tour, LPGA players voted to eliminate its constitutional requirement that all members must be “female at birth.” They did so as the association faced a lawsuit from a trans woman named Lana Lawless, who argued that the exclusionary clause violated California civil-rights law. (The next year, Lawless settled her case.)
This time around, there was no player vote on gender eligibility. Instead, the LPGA, which also recently announced a commissioner change, noted in its release, “The policy—informed by a working group of top experts in medicine, science, sport physiology, golf performance and gender policy law—was developed with input from a broad array of stakeholders and prioritizes the competitive integrity of women’s professional tournaments and elite amateur competitions.” When reached for comment by Defector, an LPGA spokesperson declined to specify the members of its working group, whether any of them were transgender, and how long the group had met. They also declined to explain how the policy would be enforced.
Four years into her professional career, as the doors of the most exclusive tours close in her face, Davidson insists she’s still at the start of everything. She’s excited to keep putting in the work. Even in spare moments away from the course, which she visits almost daily, and the office, Davidson will sometimes indulge her best friend in a game of miniature golf or attempt to teach her Topgolf.
After each round at Q-School, Davidson sat for a couple of hours using a Theragun on the backs of her ankles to loosen up her muscles and make sure she’d be able to walk the next day. She is used to pushing through the pain.
But on Dec. 6, the first time she tried to play golf after the LPGA ban was announced two days earlier, she couldn’t quite gut it out the way she’s become accustomed to. She was alone on the course this time. She had called out of a couple of shifts of her job to sit with the news. She was no longer numb. After some starts and stops, she gave up on completing the round and drove to a local LGBTQ+ center to begin the process of finding a new therapist.
“I was in such a negative, suicidal state back before I came out,” Davidson said. “Because I’ve had that dark, depressive path at times, I don’t ever want to go back to that. … As much as golf is what has caused this [distress], at the same time, if I didn’t have it, I don’t know if I’d be here.”
