For female professional disc golfers, the July 29–31 Discraft Great Lakes Open (DGLO) in Milford, Michigan represented a watershed—marking the first time in the young sport’s history that an Elite-series tournament offered women the same first-place prize money as men. “It should have been a great moment,” one of the female competitors told me once the crowds had gone home. “But then the thing ended, and the winners weren’t a male and a female. It was basically two males.”

By this, the woman was referring to male star Calvin Heimburg, who won what is formally called the “Open” division (but which, in practice, is 100 percent male); and the female-division winner, Natalie Ryan, a trans woman who’s been playing disc-golf tournaments for only three years. Despite this lack of experience, Ryan already is starting to make victory something of a habit, winning not only DGLO, but also a second Elite event in Leicester, Massachusetts this past weekend. As a result, Ryan is now ranked as one of the world’s top five female-classified disc golfers.

The first-place prizes at DGLO were US$6,000—hardly a bonanza by the standards of professional sports. But for disc golf’s touring women, many of whom have spent a decade or more on the road, trying to scratch out a living as full-time athletes, it’s a huge amount of money.

“The [current] female tour only came on the scene in 2016,” a well-known female pro told me. “There’d been a tour going on since 2000, but in those days, even most of the top professionals had side jobs. The men’s game was probably economically viable as a full-time occupation by the early 2010s, but the women’s game wasn’t really viable until a few years ago. So yeah, the timing of this is interesting. It’s just all too convenient that now is when [trans women] decide to jump in and make a splash.”

Ryan is not the first openly transgender disc golfer to compete in a Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) event—a distinction claimed by a Massachusetts trans woman named Kelly Jenkins. Nor is Ryan the first openly trans disc golfer to win a prominent event—a distinction that belongs to Dutch player Laura Nagtegaal. And in both 2021 and 2022, the PDGA Masters World FP50 championship (for women aged 50 or over) went to a trans woman named Nova Politte (who, at 6‘4”, self-describes as ”the tallest female disc golfer in the world”). But Ryan’s victory was different, because DGLO is such an…