Our next guest made history in 2015 as the first openly transgender male athlete in any sport to compete in NCAA Division One sports. And now he is a fierce advocate for LGBTQ plus rights. Skyler Baylor joins us now to discuss his new book and why the way we talk about gender and pronouns matters so much. Skyler, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Well, before we dive into your book, first, congratulations, relations on your marriage.

Thank you so much.

Was it love at first sight with Sarah?

You know, we hit it off very quickly. We actually had an online relationship. We started on Instagram. She had reposted something that I posted about pronouns. Actually, we're talking about pronouns today. And we just started talking, and it was very clear that we were interested in each other very quickly, even though we started talking about work, actually.

That's amazing. You share a lot in your book about your life, especially the part that we talked about, the fact that you were this Harvard swimmer, the first NCAA Division One male athlete. What was that like, sort of coming to terms with your teammate? You were given the option of competing.

On either, you know, coming out as trans was, I think, a momentary relief because it explained a lot about my childhood, why I never quite fit in, why gender had been so complicated and difficult and painful for me. But at the same time, it was something that because I was an athlete, discovering I was trans was terrifying. And I thought, maybe I'm going to lose the thing I love the most in the world. I've been recruited to swim for Harvard women's swim team.

Right.

Did I want to lose Harvard? Did I want to lose swimming by coming out as trans? So it was very scary to name my identity and then to declare that to the world, to tell my coaches to say, I don't know what to do with this part of myself, but I know that I want to swim and I know who I am.

So you are an activist, an educator. You wrote this book. He she, they and you talk about why the way we talk about gender matters so much. But first, let's take a look at a clip of you at a Ted Talk.

In Korean culture, daughters take care of their parents. Your mother has no more daughters. It is still your duty, Skylar, to take care of your parents. I said okay, harmony, I can do and that was actually such an important moment for me that I got those words pumo hyodo, take care of your parents tattooed underneath my mastectomy scar in my grandmother's handwriting. She does know about it as my sort of eternal vow to my origins, to my parents, to my grandparents.

I happen to know how conservative Korean culture can be at times. What was that conversation, like with your grandmother, with your heimini?

Yeah, that was terrifying. I mean, I told the entire world before I told her, and I was so afraid of her reaction. I blocked her on Facebook. I told everybody not to tell her, and I really labored over how to tell her as well, because I'm sure, as you know, there's no word for transgender in Korean. It's transgender with a Korean accent. Turan su chen DA. Right? And so I felt like I had to explain so much. And my grandmother's very Catholic. She's quite conservative in many ways, and I was very afraid that she was just going to never talk to me again. And so when I sat down and told her, I read her this long letter because I didn't know how else to say it, and the first words out of her mouth were, okay, so I have two grandsons from your mom. And there was this overwhelm of relief that my mom was immediately in tears. She was so ready to accept me. And her one stipulation was that was a reminder of Korean culture and the responsibilities that daughters have to take care of their parents.

And tell me about the book He She they, how we talk about gender and why it matters. Where does the book fall in the landscape right now when there are at least 500 anti LGBTQ plus bills introduced in the US. This year alone, 80 of them passed, many of them are going to come back in legislative sessions. How does this enter into this conversation?

Yeah, well, everybody seems to be talking about trans people and gender and not just talking about debating trans people right. And our rights. But most people claim they haven't met a trans person. Most people can't define the word transgender, and yet they're debating our rights. And so my goal in He She, They How we talk about gender and why it matters is to really bring everybody into this conversation, give them a little bit more context, research, facts, and, of course, humanity, because if we don't start with that, I think we're lost before we begin.

And He She they is so interesting because I've heard a lot of people of a certain generation say pronouns are pronouns. It should be binary. Why the they? Why he she? What do you say to folks who have that confusion?

Yeah, I really think we need to understand that language shifts, and as it does, we can update ourselves. People will say, oh, well, he she, they. These are just they them pronouns. They're made up. Everything's made up. All words are made up.

Right.

We actually made up every single word we ever used to communicate, but we use them to communicate, and we should update them to make sure we're best being comprehensive of society.

A lot of folks say, okay, trans rights, I believe in that. But trans women should not compete in elite sports. What do you say on that score?

I say a couple things. The first is that we need to understand that the focus on trans athletes, specifically trans women in sports, is not truly actually, most of the time about women. It's not about sports and it's not about trans people. There's a very strong push for control, for bodily autonomy in many different regions. We can zoom out and see the attack of reproductive rights, attack on many other different types of bodies. There's an attack that isn't actually focused on sports. If we were actually trying to fix women's sports, we'd focus on the things that actually impact fairness in sports, which are not trans people. That's one. Two, we've actually seen a lot of research that supports that inclusion of trans women doesn't threaten anybody. In fact, the exclusion is what threatens because we're policing the women's category, saying who is allowed to be woman enough? There's a lot of different types of systems of oppression that impact who gets allowed access to womanhood. So excluding trans women is actually going to hurt all women.

Good thing you wrote a book, because there's a lot to talk about in this conversation. The book is he, she, they how we talk about gender under and why it matters. And it's available now.

Hi, everyone. George Stephanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.