Bear with me while I digress immediately: One of my favorite “a girl?? who plays football??” books is Like Other Girls by Britta Lundin. The protagonist, Mara, is a closeted butch lesbian who joins the football team not to make a statement, but to show her coach in basketball — her sport of choice — that despite being kicked off the team for getting in a fight during a game, she’s still a team player. But other girls do see her move as a statement, and all of a sudden Mara is one of five girls on the football team. The title comes from the boys on the team lumping all of them together as un-athletic and talentless just because they’re girls. Mara’s not seen as the superstar athlete she’s grown used to being anymore — she’s just “like other girls.”

Victoria Zeller’s protagonist in One of the Boys (out May 13, 2025) is Grace, a newly out trans girl whose football career as a kicker seemingly ended over the course of several months: first, in the fall of her junior year when she missed the game-winning field goal and ended her team’s season, and second, when she came out as trans the following spring. She’s thrilled to be out as herself, but figures football is a thing of the past — until, suddenly, it’s not. After a chance run-in with a college coach and the assurances of her team captains that they’ll stick up for her if the rest of the team gives her trouble, Grace returns to the football team for her senior year. Because it’s the same game, isn’t it? Kicking is still in her blood, even if she’s on hormones now and many of the Division I teams courting her before she came out are no longer interested.

Of course, it’s not all the same. Grace’s head coach welcomes her back but isn’t totally ready to acknowledge her being trans, she’s shuffled to a makeshift locker room, and a handful of her teammates are loud-and-wrong transphobes. On the football team, she’s “one of the boys” again — a loaded phrase depending on who’s wielding it, just like “like other girls” — but as much as the game hasn’t changed, so much is different now. Through flashback scenes, we learn how Grace got her new group of queer friends, many of whom are girls (she says she hasn’t really had girls as friends aside from her ex-girlfriend, Zoe, whom she broke up with right before coming out), and learn more about Grace’s struggles with anger, toxic masculinity, and gender dysphoria.

I was thrilled to learn about the existence of this book, and heartened as I read by how matter-of-fact this story was. Yes, it’s huge that a trans girl is playing organized sports at all, much less football — and still, every story beat just made sense. I hesitate to praise a book for its realism alone, but it was really important to me as a trans person (and former athlete and sportswriter) that Grace’s support system wasn’t perfect, that she got to make mistakes, and even that Zeller didn’t shy away from describing the overt transphobia Grace faced from her teammates, opposing fans, and others. All that mattered, really, is that I came into this book rooting for Grace, and I came away from it rooting for Grace even more. (Oh, and with a new appreciation for the city of Buffalo.)

Thanks to Levine Querido and NetGalley for the ARC!