Several months after coming out publicly as a queer woman, Canadian ice dance star Kaitlyn Weaver was doing a show in Nashville when another woman approached her and asked, “Are you and Andrew dating?”
The woman was referring to Andrew Poje, Weaver’s ice dance partner of 15 years. Weaver told her no, and the conversation flowed into a different topic, before the woman interrupted Weaver to ask her the same question.
Weaver answered again: no. “I told her, ‘I have a girlfriend’ and she did not understand. She looked so disparaged that I wasn’t dating Andrew,” she recalls.
Weaver, who represented Canada at the Sochi and Pyeongchang Olympics, had a long, successful career performing love stories on the ice with Poje. The two of them share three world championship medals, a loving friendship, but not, despite what fans may assume from their very well-executed acting, a romance.
As an athlete, Weaver never wanted to let an audience down. “I was so afraid that people would think of us as inauthentic. I never wanted to risk feeling like I was faking what I loved to do,” Weaver says. “But there was so much more to who I was than what I was able to show.”
Turns out, who she is is so much more than a figure skater. It’s a simple fact, but one that wasn’t always an easy pill to swallow. Weaver and Poje haven’t competed since March 2019, but the pair were still doing shows and as long as she was still skating, Weaver did not need to think about her identity outside of the rink. When the pandemic hit, however, she was forced to stop training for a while.
“When we’re faced with a global pandemic and hundreds of thousands of people are dying, I didn’t want to consider the skating side of myself as important anymore,” Weaver explains. “At the same time, it was like, ‘Well, if I don’t have my identity as a skater, if I’m not winning medals, then really what value do I have as a person?’” That’s when she realized she needed to talk to somebody.
The conversation around the mental health of athletes is still fresh, so it wasn’t until she retired from competition that Weaver got a therapist. As an athlete, she was taught to just push through the pain and while that discipline has served her well in many areas of life, Weaver acknowledges that should not be one’s approach to mental wellbeing. “I was feeling ongoing effects of depression. As soon as I started talking with a therapist, it all just came pouring out.”
In therapy, Weaver also explored a part of herself that she never got to fully come to terms with while competing: her sexuality. In her early 20s, the now 32-year-old began realizing her queerness, but only when she was able to be a young person away from the rink.
“At the time, I didn’t know any queer women in skating. I felt different. I felt ashamed,” Weaver says. It took a few years for her to realize that these attractions were not a phase. She began her journey by coming out to only one friend, who could relate to her situation. Meanwhile, Weaver also read a lot of research papers on bisexuality and pansexuality to understand herself better. “I still didn’t tell anybody else, but I could keep that knowledge inside for me, like a small gift to myself.”
Weaver then began Googling queer celebrities. Her favorite was Megan Fox, who came out as bisexual. “I present more feminine, and I didn’t understand you could be queer and feminine,” Weaver says. “Then, I would see pictures of Megan Fox and be like, ‘She can be both. So I could be both.’” She also loves looking into old movie stars that were rumored to be queer, such as Billie Holiday and Greta Garbo. “I identify with them having to hide who they are, but also having this secret little space where they can explore who they are,” Weaver explains.
Coming out while still competing never felt like an option for Weaver. In figure skating, athletes are scored by a panel of nine judges. In the discipline of ice dance especially, women are scrutinized for everything. “We are judged 24 hours a day. We are judged on what we wear, how we present, how we speak, how we relate to our partners, coaches, and even other women,” Weaver says. Women in ice dance were not even allowed to wear pants whenever they wanted until this current season.
As one of the top ice dance pairs in the world, Weaver and Poje were very good at presenting themselves. They constantly made changes to their skating, their hair, the music they performed to, anything to get higher scores. Being queer then, was something Weaver saw as less than perfect that could not be changed. She also knew that being queer is illegal in many of the countries she competed in. The idea that revealing this part of herself could negatively affect her and Poje’s scores was far too terrifying to consider.
More than a year after retiring, Weaver finally began to consider coming out publicly. By then, she had been hiding herself for too many years, despite always trying to be an honest person. In June of last year, Weaver made the announcement via Instagram. Within seconds of hitting “post”, she received hundreds of supportive messages; friends, fans, and strangers shared their love, congratulations, and even their own stories.
“A lot of the messages were from parents saying that their kid had come out to them after seeing my article, or around the same time,” Weaver says. “That made me feel like I was doing the right thing.”
Afterwards, people kept asking her if she felt relief. If Weaver was being honest with herself, the answer was no but she couldn’t understand why.
A few weeks later, Weaver and Poje began training again for a show. The first day of practice, Weaver put on a rainbow sweatshirt. “I got on the ice as Kaitlyn, the skater, and I felt so proud to wear this little rainbow and be fully me,” Weaver recalls. It was the first time Weaver stepped onto the ice as an out woman, a moment of finally being herself in a sport whose rigid rules had once made it hard for her to accept her identity.
The same summer, Weaver created Open Ice Collective, a charity nonprofit aimed to tell diverse stories in figure skating through a documentary series. Figure skating, Weaver acknowledges, is far from inclusive. “Overall, the rules are being made by older white European people so that limits the types of people whose stories are told through skating,” Weaver says. Through her own experiences, Weaver knows how isolating that can make athletes feel. As a producer, Weaver wants to keep talking about difficult subjects, to help create a safer environment within the sport.
After the film was released, the International Skating Union contacted Weaver and her co-stars Elladj Baldé, Adam Rippon, Scott Hamilton and Kiira Korpi to discuss the ways in which skating could become more equitable. For the first time, there were discussions on racism in skating and the option for athletes to put their preferred pronouns in their bios.
As an athlete, Weaver constantly asked if others were proud of her without ever considering if she was proud of herself. Now, her priorities are different. “I want to be known for the person that I am not necessarily the points I scored 10 years ago at the Olympics. What matters is how we make people feel, the impact that we have, what we do with our lives and how we be of benefit to the community around us,” Weaver says.
Instead of worrying if her coaches and fans are proud of her, Weaver asks herself, “Am I proud of what I put out into the world? Of how I treat the people I love? That’s real success.”
