Christina Kahrl is the Sports Editor for The San Francisco Chronicle since 2021, becoming one of the few women ever named to lead a sports section for a major daily newspaper, and the first transgender woman. She was previously a senior editor for MLB and later national sports coverage at ESPN.com, working for the worldwide leader in sports for 10 years before her move to The Chronicle. In her brief time with The Chronicle, the section has already received multiple nominations and awards for its columnists, investigative reporting, newsbreaking and digital coverage of sports.
Kahrl came out publicly as transgender in 2003, becoming the first out trans sports journalist in the U.S. She has been a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America since 2009, having launched her career in 1996 as one of the founding members of the revolutionary online baseball think tank, Baseball Prospectus, which has also published multiple bestselling books about baseball analysis while launching the careers of dozens of baseball analysts and journalists – notably Nate Silver – and baseball executives, including two current MLB general managers.
Beyond her career in sports journalism, Kahrl has also worked as an advocate for civic equality for transgender Americans, helping to reform Chicago police policy on transgender individuals, training police departments throughout the Midwest in cooperation with the Department of Justice, and writing on trans issues in mainstream society and sports for ESPN, Cosmo.com, Playboy, the Windy City Times, and elsewhere. She was previously on the boards of NLGJA, GLAAD and Equality Illinois, and was previously elected to both the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, the Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame and the NLGJA Hall of Fame. She lives in Vallejo, California with her spouse.