3 min readOn Monday, for the first time in the Boston Marathon’s 127-year history, 27 athletes will be competing in the race’s inaugural nonbinary division.
One of them, Cal Calamia, played a crucial role in getting the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) to create the new official category, making it the fourth of the six World Marathon Majors to now offer a nonbinary classification.
They told Boston.com that the BAA “has proven its allyship” by making the race more inclusive. “The running world is a microcosm for the world at large,” they added. “And if we can just have people begin to acknowledge that people do exist beyond the gender binary of male and female or man and woman, then that opens up a more inclusive space where as many people as possible can enjoy running.”
The 26-year-old ran cross-country in high school and college, and as a busy high school health and Spanish teacher in San Francisco, running remains an important, restorative part of their life.
Running Boston has always been a dream of Calamia’s, and they qualified for the 2020 race in the female category, but then the race was canceled because of COVID-19, and the 2021 race was postponed to the fall. Then Calamia tore their ACL playing soccer and had two knee surgeries.
“I like to look back on it and just think I’m actually really grateful that things happened the way they did,” Calamia told The Washington Post. “Because I was gonna go in there as a nonbinary person in the female category, and it didn’t feel right.”
About a year ago, Calamia got involved in advocating for gender inclusivity at races, particularly around creating the nonbinary division. They were recovering from their ACL injury and didn’t know how to register for the races they wanted to run.
“I was confronting this impossibility of choosing male or female in registration,” they said to Boston.com. “There was not a clear answer for me, what I should choose, because I embody characteristics of both and I’ve had lived experiences in both. So I felt like I was trying to make this impossible decision of who to run as, or in other words, who to pretend to be.”
Calamia has run two other marathons in the emerging nonbinary division, the San Francisco Marathon and Chicago Marathon, and last year, they won the 12-mile Bay to Breakers race in the newly-created division. They were thrilled to break the tape, but when Calamia learned there weren’t any awards for nonbinary winners, they were spurred to action. Their advocacy helped lead to the San Francisco race adding an awards process for the division, and that gave Calamia the confidence to reach out to the BAA, who were receptive to adding a new category.
At Boston, there still won’t be prize money for winners in the nonbinary division, but like all other participants, awards will go to first, second, and third places in their category.
The Boston Marathon will be a special experience for Calamia on a personal level, but they say it’s also about visibility. “I’m really running this race because I think that the world needs to see trans joy right now, and it needs to see trans success right now and it needs to see trans people,” they told Boston.com.
Abby Carney is a writer and journalist in New York. A former D1 college runner and current amateur track athlete, she's written about culture and characters in running and outdoor sports for Runner's World, Like the Wind Magazine, The New York Times, and other outlets. She also writes about things that have nothing to do with running, and was previously the editor of a food magazine.
