Che Flores’s suitcase sat empty on their bed at home in Los Angeles. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, exactly: Flores has lived the bulk of their professional life out of a bag and on the road. The second-year NBA referee has worked at least 1,000 games in their impressive 14-year career, a journey that has spanned three countries, three professional leagues, every level of intercollegiate athletics, and 10 championship games to date. Between July 2020 and March 2021, Flores became the first person—as far as anyone can tell—to work championship games for the NCAA, G League, and WNBA. In that span, they were home in Los Angeles for about 20 days total. All this is to say that for Flores, packing for a week-long road trip is as second-nature as calling a travel violation.
But in September, ahead of a trip to Brooklyn for the NBA referees’ annual preseason meetings, Flores realized they could do things more on their terms this time. In the past, they might have made a trip to the mall to get some unflashy polo shirts and khakis—professional clothes that, in their words, “I’m never freaking going to wear again.” On this trip, though, Flores planned to tell their 70-plus colleagues that they identify as trans and non-binary, and would be going by “Che” at work. (Flores uses they/them pronouns, and “Che” is pronounced “Shay.”) Packing felt different, less constrained. They felt they could finally dress in clothes that made them feel at ease in their body and true to their gender identity—clothes in line with who they really are.
It felt like the beginning of a new chapter. “When I started refereeing, you had to look a certain way,” Flores says. “This is the first time I’m comfortable expressing myself through my own fashion and not having to worry about it. I feel one hundred percent myself now.”
It’s a rainy Monday evening, and we’re sitting in the backyard of Ginger’s, a beloved gay dive in Park Slope. Flores has spent the past 12 hours fulfilling various preseason commitments, including a physical and a timed shuttle run, and still has a refs’ union meeting ahead of them, which is scheduled to run until midnight. They’ve never done a sit-down interview before, and are feeling a little nervous. Referees are, by professional nature, judicious and reticent—meant to project as impartial, in-control floor generals. (Flores is wearing a Dodgers cap when we meet, and says it’s the only fandom they’ve retained from their L.A. upbringing: “There’s something that happens to you when you become a referee. You end up just serving the game. No allegiance to anybody.”)
But they’re also ready to open up. When Flores became an NBA official in 2022, it was the culmination of years of hard work, the realization of a goal that very few in their profession ever pull off. But the language around their hire, which proudly announced two new women to the NBA’s predominantly cis-male referee corps, was alienating for Flores, who knew they were gay at a young age and has privately identified as trans for the past couple of years.
“One piece I was missing for myself was that no one knew how I identified,” they say. “Being misgendered as she/her always just felt like a little jab in the gut.” With their identity known, Flores says, “I can go through the world and even my job a lot more comfortably.”
Flores will become the first out nonbinary trans referee in American major professional sports at a time when the ability of trans athletes to compete is under attack: globally, trans athletes have been banned from international competition in both track and field and swimming, while in the U.S., 23 states have passed laws restricting trans athletes from participating in school sports since 2020. Even if trans athletes are able to compete, they often must do so in the face of intense public scrutiny and harassment. As a NBA referee, Flores will spend the next six months traversing the country, and the importance of their visibility at this particular time in history is not lost on them.
“I just think of having younger queer kids look at somebody who’s on a high-profile stage and not using it,” Flores says. “And I’m not using the league to an advantage in any way. This is just to let young kids know that we can exist, we can be successful in all different ways. For me, that is most important—to just be a face that somebody can be like, Oh, okay, that person exists. I think I can do that.”
They are not seeking the spotlight, however. Being a referee is, in some ways, an unusual job; doing it well, for example, often means not standing out. Being open about their identity, Flores feels, will help them do exactly that.
Flores grew up the eldest of three kids in Highland Park, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles. Their parents worked long hours, and like so many latchkey kids of their generation, they found refuge playing sports at the local rec center after school. They were, in the language of the day, a “tomboy,” and highly encouraged by their large, close knit family (their father, who is Mexican American, has 16 siblings, while their Costa Rican mother has seven) to pursue sports. Their mother played in a softball league, and from a young age, Flores found they felt drawn to the masculine-presenting lesbians on the team. “When I grew up, it was either you chose this feminine role or this masculine role and you identified as a lesbian and that was it,” they say. “That word never felt right with me. But I didn’t have any idea what else was out there to identify as.” (Nonetheless, they came out at age 19, when their mom discovered a letter they’d written to a girlfriend. Flores says after a bumpy start, their parents have become “huge advocates” for the LGBTQ+ community.)
On the court, Flores excelled in basketball, and won a state title their senior year of high school. After a couple years playing juco ball, they transferred to Cal State Northridge and walked onto the Division I team, eventually earning a full athletic scholarship and being named team captain. Their team struggled, but Flores relished the opportunity to keep playing at a high level. Their senior year, Northridge played the eventual champion UConn Huskies at Gampel Pavilion, and lost by 57 points. “That honestly was the best experience of my career,” Flores says, a sentiment only a committed student of the game might share.
They had never had a particularly cordial relationship with referees throughout their playing career. The then-new hand check rule, Flores felt, had slowed down the game. They had a tendency to run their mouth when they disagreed with calls, and estimate they got a technical foul “every other game.”
“I thought I knew it all,” they say. “And to a degree, maybe sometimes I was right.”
When they graduated, their father was refereeing high school basketball games in east L.A. for about 50 bucks a game, and suggested they give it a try. Flores remembers telling him, “Hell no, I’m not wearing that zebra stripe.” But they didn’t want to go back to waiting tables at the Cheesecake Factory, which they’d done between college seasons. Their first assignments, in the early aughts, were high school games in San Gabriel.
“Once I was on the court, I fell in love with it,” Flores says. It felt like a natural way to earn some cash and stay involved with the sport they loved. And, increasingly, gender didn’t seem like a barrier to a career at the highest levels of the game. “I had no idea to what degree, but I do remember Violet Palmer being in the NBA and she was the only different one out of that entire staff,” Flores says, referring to the league’s first female ref. “And that was some sort of glimmer of hope, like, Oh, is the NBA actually a destination?”
Despite their initial reticence, Flores immediately took to reffing, and their talent got noticed. It’s a long climb from high school games to the premier pro basketball league in the world, but referees share a special comradeship, and tend to look out for one another. (They also, it turns out, have lives off of the basketball court: Flores is a capable stick-and-poke tattoo artist, and in our interview revealed they were the “mystery ref” who gave soccer star Megan Rapinoe a tattoo during their final night in the Wubble, the WNBA’s pandemic campus.) They are bonded by a strange shared experience: fans usually only remember the officiating from a game if they really hated it. Veteran officials tend to look out for budding talent and establish mentor relationships early on to help them climb through the ranks. That summer, Flores started to get invited to camps, where refs get their “true training.”
“We would come in and then every referee would assess every other referee, and we would all decide collectively who would move on and who would literally get voted off the island,” Flores says. “It was like Survivor with referees.”
Billy Kennedy, the veteran NBA ref, remembers noticing Flores at those camps, where, he says, “the cream will rise to the top. Che is one of those that has risen to the top and has done it all on their own.”
By 2012, Flores was working a year-round schedule as a referee for the NCAA, NBA G League, and WNBA, a grueling grind they more or less kept up for 10 years. “I was working five days a week,” they say. “There was really no off-season.” They would work a game, then catch a flight to the next city that night or early the next morning. Professional leagues take care of referees’ travel accommodations, but NCAA refs act as independent contractors, and are responsible for making their own schedules and booking their own travel, which can make for some dizzying calculations. “If I work for four different college supervisors for any of the Power Fives, I’m getting schedules from all four of them, and I have to decide which games I’m taking,” Flores explains. “With that, I have to look at the next four months and make sure I don’t double book, [and that] I’m able to get to Billings, Montana, from Florida State.”
What’s more, they were essentially officiating three different rulebooks, Lauren Holtkamp-Sterling, Flores’s friend and colleague, explains. “I mean, our [NBA] rule book is 70 pages long and it’s written by lawyers. It’s not easy reading. You take that combined with the NCAA women’s rules, which are different also than NCAA men’s rules, which are different [from the G League’s and WNBA’s rules]—being able to do all of that within one calendar year just really speaks to [Che’s] intelligence and mental nimbleness.”
In layman’s terms, fifth-year NBA ref Jenna Schroeder says, it’s like “you worked at McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell, [and] you’re the best at making the taco, the best at making the cheeseburger, and the best at making the Whopper. The best. And everyone knows it.”
The grind paid off: in 2020, Flores refereed championship games for all three organizations. The previous season, they’d asked Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s head of referee training and development, if they could be considered for the league. McCutchen, who’d been following their progress in the WNBA, added Flores to his staff in the summer of 2022.
“Good refereeing travels,” McCutchen says. “Whenever you’re committed to the level that Che is, regardless of where you work, people are going to see and find that excellence.”
Even for the most experienced officials, Schroeder says, finally reaching the NBA is “a huge jump. Your first few years in the league are so difficult because nobody knows you. You really have to be seen for a while for people to get to trust you.”
Flores felt the pressure of a rookie referee, and wanted to spend their first year in the league establishing themselves and building relationships with players and coaches before opening up about their identity. But early in the season, someone who recognized Che from refereeing approached them at a queer party in Los Angeles. “I’ve seen you on the court and I think it’s so awesome,” they told Flores. The interaction stuck with them. “I don’t want to be misrepresented,” Flores remembers telling their partner, the filmmaker Kait Schuster. “I have a community of people [and] I want them to know that someone like them exists. That conversation really shifted my idea of timing, as far as letting the league know.”
Their midyear evaluation with McCutcheon was scheduled for February, but when Flores told him there was something they wanted to discuss, he pushed up the call. “He was like, ‘If it’s important to you, let’s talk about it now,’” Flores remembers. They spoke on the phone soon after.
“He immediately just called me Che, with no problem, which just makes you feel more comfortable, and easier to let him know everything that was related to my gender,” Flores says. McCutchen said he wanted the league to celebrate Flores’s identity and, with their permission, soon sent their preferred they/them pronouns to ref operations. Flores’s final assignment of the season was a game in Denver, and Schuster and a few friends flew out to see it. Flores came out to the floor for pregame warmups and saw “Che Flores” on the Jumbotron during referee introductions. They allowed themselves to briefly soak in the moment, and then snapped back to professionalism. There was still basketball to be played.
“I got a little emotional and I’m like, ‘Dude, get with it. You’re about to referee a game,’” Flores says, laughing. One of the Denver announcers checked in before the game to double-check their pronouns, and for the first time, players and coaches referred to them as Che on the floor. “It allowed me to be, I guess, free in a way,” Flores says. “I was like, ‘All right, cool. I’m here.’”
Flores expects that “letting people in,” as they describe it, will make them better at their job. Kennedy publicly came out as gay in 2015, after then-Sacramento King Rajon Rondo called him a homophobic slur during a game; he recalled feeling “a lifting of a weight that has been on your shoulders for so long.” At his first game back, in San Antonio, the Spurs forward David Lee approached him during pregame warmups and told him, “I’m so proud of you, Billy. You be who you are.” That immediate expression of support buoyed Kennedy, and he hopes Flores experiences a similar embrace: “Che is going to feel so much better and so empowered out on the floor.”
“I think that Che coming out as trans and nonbinary really is a visible testament that gender does not equal competence,” Holtkamp-Sterling says. “There’s no wrong way to show up in sport, and there’s no wrong way to be a human being.”
“There’s a confidence that comes anytime any of us claim ourselves, both privately and publicly,” McCutchen says. “When you are able to say publicly who and what you stand for, you can’t help but grow in strength and courage.”
That support starts with the NBA, which Flores says is following their lead when it comes to anticipating and addressing safety concerns and other needs. (Every NBA employee has access to an app that offers, among other things, emergency response at the tap of a button, and Kennedy recalls a league representative traveling with him to San Antonio after he came out.)
“To some degree, we’re going to have to grow in this area together,” McCutchen allows. “Che will have to be the communicator to let us know when and where they are feeling these kinds of issues.”
For pregame locker room access, for example, Flores initially thought, “Yeah, it’s fine. I’ll just go in with the women. And then after taking some time to think about that I’m like, actually, no, I’m not doing the people that are behind me any service. The league is working on those things, but yes, I do have a responsibility.”
More than employer protocols, though, Flores is still thinking about the kids out there who might feel how they did growing up—working out their identities in real time, and figuring out who they are and what makes them feel like themselves. They may have found gender nonconforming role models in other parts of culture, like music or fashion, but “sports in general can be some of the slowest spaces to catch up what is happening in human lives,” Holtkamp-Sterling points out.
By talking about their identity publicly, Flores says, “I’m allowing you in my life. And then you have the decision to be a part of it or not. I feel like I have a responsibility to be who exactly I am without hiding anything. I am letting everybody in.”
So far, so good. “I just feel like just 100 percent myself now, and I just feel so light now moving around, not having to worry about anything,” they say. Now, “I don’t have to worry about myself not being myself.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Hunter Abrams
Grooming by Laramie Glen at Day One