• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, March 16, 2022

Amid increasing legislation targeting transgender kids and sports, the GenderCool Project is taking an ultra-positive approach. Working with Nike, it’s launched a national TV campaign called "Play it Out" that features 11 trans and non-binary teens in low-key athletic settings.

Jen Grosshandler, a co-founder of GenderCool, lifelong athlete and mother of a trans teen, tells Marketing Daily what the group hopes to accomplish.

Marketing Daily: Let’s start with some background on the Gender Cool Project. How did you get started?

Jen Grosshandler: My husband and I have four kids. We have three boys, and then our fourth was assigned male at birth. Despite being born into a household full of all this stereotypical masculine stuff, she showed she was -- and always had been -- our daughter.

Chazzie is 15 now. She’s proud to be transgender, and we’re proud to be her parents. Five years ago, we sat down as a family and thought about how we could get involved in the conversation on a national level.

As we started to meet more trans kids, we realized they were having a positive experience, too. So with Gearah Goldstein, a trans woman and proud mom, and my husband John, we started the project.

With my background in brand marketing -- I started my career at Edelman, and I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in the world -- I felt like we had to find ways to let these kids tell their very positive stories.

Marketing Daily: Why tell positive stories? Many stories about trans kids aren’t. Many are bullied, attacked and even thrown out of their homes.

Grosshandler: That’s true. But what we found was a tidal wave of sad, tragedy-forward stories that are often sensational and horrifically inaccurate.

These [stories] usually don’t convey that these are just kids, first and foremost. They want the same things other kids do, like how to bump a volleyball over a net.

We know that 80% of the population say they’ve never even met a trans person, and we wanted to change that. We hope to stop all the broken information by storytelling and introducing these kids. We wanted to show how many of these kids, like my daughter, are thriving.

By focusing on sad stories, you might get people to feel sorry for these kids. That may be helpful in some contexts, but it doesn’t make people want to hang out with them.

Marketing Daily: I’d call this approach sweet and non-threatening. Why take a low-key tack, especially when so many who oppose transgender rights talk about how trans athletes are “ruining” college sports?

Grosshandler: We don’t have any background in elite athletics. Many of the conversations about college-level, elite athletics need to be happening, but that’s not who we are. We’re focusing on our kids’ experiences just trying to be kids.

Marketing Daily: There are many nonprofits in this space. How did you get off the ground?

Grosshandler: Earned media. We didn’t have any money. But we were featured on the “Megyn Kelly Today” show, making history by bringing six trans kids onto national TV.

It was 23 minutes! That created a tremendous domino effect. From there, companies -- big ones --came to us, looking for training.

We’ve started a “reverse mentoring” program that’s been successful. Companies are eager to learn how to talk to their younger workforce. And we’ve now got more than 20 corporate partners, including AbbVie, Dell, Intuit and Nike.

Marketing Daily: Nike is your partner on this campaign, right?

Grosshandler: Yes. We turned our stories into great videos, working with Kobi Swissa, who is amazing.

We made a sort of a mini-documentary. When the Nike team saw it, they asked how they could help. With their input, we turned it into a 30-second spot, which has been running nationally for two weeks on TV.

It’s airing on places like Fox and CNN. And there’s a paid digital component. Within, one of Nike’s marketing agencies, also helped.

Marketing Daily: How are you paying for the media buy?

Grosshandler: With help from Nike and the Gill Foundation and other donors.

Marketing Daily: What’s the goal?

Grosshandler: We hope that people who have never met a transgender person will see this and say, “They’re just like other kids. They just want to kick a soccer ball.”