On Friday, Danielle Cortez will have a moment she never would have predicted.
She’ll stand in front of the Chase Field mound, her fingertips gripping the seams of a baseball. The stands will be filled, at least by COVID-19-era standards, with Diamondbacks fans in a celebratory mood. It will be Pride Night, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, and Cortez will be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch.
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It will encapsulate everything she loves about her life. The 29-year-old is a transgender woman who came out last year and now is an advocate for trans rights, and she is a diehard baseball fan who has relished the last six years she’s spent in the orbit of her hometown team while working as a photographer for Major League Baseball. And, until recently, Cortez feared she couldn’t be both at once.
Cortez says that since she was 9 years old, she’d felt that the sex assigned to her at birth was wrong. For nearly two decades, she’d battled gender dysphoria, grasping for a sense of herself. As a teen, anxiety over her identity led her to quit playing baseball, a sport she loves more than almost anything in the world. Four years ago, she had a panic attack while driving to a spring training game, after which she resolved to address her dysphoria and begin to transition. Two years ago, she walked away from her job, worried that the game would have no place in it for her after she came out.
To her surprise, she has discovered not only a sense of belonging but also the confidence to live proudly, loudly and unapologetically as who she is — what friend and Diamondbacks employee Noel Guevara calls “that whole caterpillar-to-butterfly effect.” Once timid and shy, Cortez now radiates a wide smile and comfort in her own skin. She is passionate about baseball, about the transgender community and about bringing the two together. Since coming out, she has made more friends than she ever knew she could have.
One of them will be crouching behind the plate Friday, readying to catch the strike she prepares to throw. Billy Bean is MLB’s inclusion ambassador, a former player who came out as gay four years after his playing career ended in 1995 and now is one of Cortez’s newfound mentors. In regular conversations over the past year, they have talked about navigating a hypermasculine game still mostly devoid of out LGBTQ+ individuals and about the burdens and responsibilities of public advocacy in a world that remains hostile to people like them.
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They also talk about how to throw a first pitch. Bean has seen too many first-pitch honorees spike it into the dirt. “I told her to aim high,” Bean says. If baseball is a metaphor for life, Cortez already is a shining example of that wisdom. After too many painful and unhappy years living as someone else, she made a choice to be herself. She aimed for happiness and the constant joy that comes with newly developed self-confidence.
She found her place in baseball, and she wants to help others in the trans community find theirs.
“It’s so surreal. I get to be me, and I get to live this life that I’ve wanted for so long, that I never thought I could have,” Cortez says. “I’m happy.”
There was always baseball.
Cortez is a native of Mesa, Arizona, who grew up as the Diamondbacks were establishing themselves as an expansion franchise, and the team immediately captured her imagination. In elementary school, she had a habit of forgetting to write her name on her assignments, but her work always could be identified by the many Diamondbacks logos scribbled in the margins. Being at what was then called Bank One Ballpark quieted anything that was roiling her emotionally.
“When I was at Chase Field, nothing I was going through mattered,” she says. “It was just me and baseball.”
Early in childhood, Cortez says, she realized she didn’t fit, either in her own skin or into her surroundings. “I grew up thinking I was the only one in the world who felt like this,” she says. “I felt like a freak.” It wasn’t until her senior year at Mesa High that she realized there were other people who felt as she did. She eavesdropped as a classmate told friends, indelicately and absent the proper vocabulary, that a sibling had expressed wanting to transition.
The other students appeared shocked, but Cortez was intrigued that she wasn’t alone. It was in college, as a journalism student at Arizona State, that she first heard the word transgender. What’s more, she heard it in a context that was not explicitly negative. “I finally heard words put to my feelings,” she says. “Good words to my feelings.”
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She played baseball through high school but walked away from her summer-league team before college as she struggled with her dysphoria. “Rather than owning up to my feelings and accepting them, I felt so angry and ashamed of myself that I quit,” she says. “I never played baseball again. That hurts to know that.” Still, there were the Diamondbacks.
At ASU, she took strategic sports communications, a class taught by Josh Rawitch, the Diamondbacks senior vice president of communications. He encouraged Cortez to apply for the team’s social media internship, a position that she later parlayed into her current full-time position as a “live content creator” for MLB. Every home game, she shoots photos and video from batting practice until the final out, capturing images that teams — mostly the visiting club, as the Diamondbacks have their own media department — can use on social media during the game. It was just her, the camera and the game she loved. That, she hoped, would be enough.
But baseball was a refuge until it wasn’t. At Chase Field, Cortez would hear game-day employees greet a vendor named Danielle, a name Cortez had used for herself privately since she was a child. Each time, she says, it would cause her heart to skip a beat. “Any time anyone would call her,” Cortez says, “I’d turn around and worry, ‘Oh no, somebody knew.’” To guard against such a revelation, she receded within herself. She spoke little to people she didn’t know. She kept her head down to avoid making eye contact.
Then, on the way to a spring training game at Salt River Fields in 2017, pain and panic seized her. “Gender dysphoria is different for everybody, but for me, it was a physical pain,” Cortez says. “I was driving, and it just felt like somebody had their hands around my stomach and was just squeezing. I had to do something. I couldn’t keep running from myself.” From that date, she gave herself two years to address her dysphoria. She began counseling and started to accept herself. “I never wanted to be trans, but I am,” she says. In August 2019, she started hormone replacement therapy. “I’ll own it,” she told herself.
Later that fall, when the Diamondbacks beat the Padres at home to end their season, Cortez broke down in tears, having decided she would be out as trans by the next season and thinking no one would want her back in her job. She knew that publicly disclosing she was trans was what she wanted. But she feared that a trans woman would not be welcome in her favorite place on earth.
“I didn’t want to lose baseball,” she says. “I would be out and I would have to do something else.”
The first time Cortez set foot in Chase Field after her transition, in July 2020, she was a ball of nerves.
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Afraid of being rejected, Cortez almost made that decision to do something else before baseball had a chance to make it for her. For a couple of months over the offseason, she actually left her job with MLB. She had thought better of that and returned — to explain her indecision, she came out to her boss when she asked to come back — but she was still unsure of how she’d be received at the ballpark.
There were no fans in the stands as she arrived for summer workouts, just a smattering of front-office folks and a handful of media members. Yet she braced for their judgment. She was settling into a seat when she was approached by media relations director Casey Wilcox. He told Cortez that it was good to see her and that the team was happy she was there. She expressed that she was nervous, but Wilcox was quick to put her at ease. “We love you here,” Wilcox replied.
Years of tension instantly dissipated.
“Ever since then, I haven’t even thought about losing baseball,” she says. “I never told Casey about that, but it just meant so much to me. It melted every fear that I had away.”
The year that has followed has been one of affirmation for Cortez, almost all of it catching her off guard, she says. Once, in a phone conversation with Rawitch, she mentioned that she’d dehydrate herself so that she didn’t have to make the choice of which restroom to use. “I hung up the phone and I honestly was in tears in my car,” Rawitch recalls. “I couldn’t believe what her experience was like.” By the end of the day, one of Chase Field’s family restrooms had been converted to a gender-neutral bathroom, with accompanying signage.
Cortez began participating in Zoom meetings for the Diamondbacks’ employee group dedicated to LGBTQ+ issues, helmed by Guevara and Nona Lee, the team’s chief legal officer. In one meeting, Cortez shared her journey toward accepting herself. When she finished, Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo chimed in to thank her. “Hearing Danielle’s story was heartbreaking, enlightening and helped my growth,” recalls Lovullo, who credits a long friendship with Bean for his interest in LGBTQ+ issues. “I wanted to make sure I told her that.” Overcome with happiness, Cortez cried.
“Just to have them listen and care,” Cortez says, “it meant so much to me.”
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It was on one of those meetings that Cortez first got to know Bean, who had participated at Lovullo’s invitation. The two have remained in regular contact as Cortez navigates her life and a path of advocacy for her community, channeling an ever-deepening well of self-confidence into promoting trans rights.
The furthest thing from outspoken before, on any subject, she throws herself into the social media arena with gusto. “Not only has she figured out who she is,” Guevara says, “but she feels more comfortable living outwardly.” No one would blame her for simply going about her business, but she and Bean have spoken about how her willingness to put herself out there — to participate in feature stories like this one, to throw out the first pitch on Pride Night — could help other transgender people feel like they don’t have to choose between being themselves and baseball, a sport that still has a long way to go in making LGBTQ+ folks feel safe and included.
“It’s something that is going to be so unique to see if indeed her story will allow others to feel more comfortable to come forward that are already working in and around baseball,” Bean says. “That’s what I mean by the bravery of the choice. It’s not about where she is in self-acceptance. It’s about where she is with the invitation for others to have an opinion about her life.”
Those opinions do have the ability to sting her. She can deal with the trolls and a bunch of bad-faith, bigoted arguments, but — just like anyone else — she wants acceptance from the people around her. Once, a former college classmate attacked her on Twitter for being trans. “I’m ashamed to say that I let it get to me,” she says. “I don’t like that I let this guy whom I hadn’t thought about since college have that power over me.” That’s going to happen, she knows. Throwing the first pitch on Pride Night will only raise her profile.
But a high profile will hopefully make it easier to help others like her. Would she have battled her dysphoria for so long if transgender issues had been talked about more openly and acceptingly when she was growing up? Would she have worried so much about her place in baseball if there were more transgender people visible in the sport? Cortez knows she has the ability to make it easier for anyone who is trying to find the courage to live not by what’s on their birth certificate but by who they know they are.
“I’m not hiding anymore. I’m me. I know who I am. I have so much more confidence now,” she says. “I never knew this kind of confidence and even happiness was possible.”
There’s a place for you, she wants to tell them. Aim high.
(Photo courtesy of Danielle Cortez)
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