Football fans, meet Maureen Raisch: She’s the woman who is the lead designer of next year’s Super Bowl logo. She’s an award-winning illustrator, and she just happens to be transgender.
Raisch came out publicly as the logo’s chief designer and as a trans woman during Transgender Awareness Week, earlier this month, in what she dubbed her own personal “rebranding.”
“Contributing something of value to the Super Bowl as a brand, for America to know that a trans woman created it, I think is a powerful thing,” Raisch said in a phone interview on her way to Thanksgiving dinner with her family. She stressed that the design was a collaborative team effort, and recognized in revealing herself she wasn’t looking for credit as much as representation. ‘It's not about me, it’s just important to know the visibility of that.”
From the hundreds of positive comments and shares of her social media posts, 1.7 million views of her LinkedIn post, and more than 12K views of a video she recorded for the occasion, the launch of Raisch’s new brand was an unqualified success, both for her and for the National Football League.
Sports fans know Raisch through her largely anonymous work on the revamp of the Houston Astros logo, the Toronto Blue Jays logo, and under the creative direction of the NFL’s Chris Stackhouse, the logo design for Super Bowl LVI, to be played in Los Angeles on February 13, 2022.
Raisch, 39, is a Clio award-winner and digital content producer with 18-years’ experience in the creative industry. Before working for the NFL in New York City, she was at Fanbrandz, designing and developing national sports and event identities for Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
Her digital content work has been seen all around the world and has been featured on Brand New, HOW Design, the Smithsonian Channel, IFC, The Guardian and CNN.
But until now, most people outside the industry would never know Raisch, or the fact that she is trans. She is self-conscious about her newfound fame, declaring, “I can't speak for all trans people.” But she is also outspoken, energetic, and an amateur impressionist who does a dead-on Christopher Walken and Harrison Ford, And Raisch uses humor effectively in conversation, as well as with her colleagues.
“I felt really good about approaching this, to my team, with a lot of humor and grace, and I think I did want to make it approachable,” she said. “I think it was really cool to talk with the NFL about this analogy of a rebrand that a sports fan could relate to, and go, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, maybe that logo, as it comes out, that's pretty shocking—but I see.’ And for anyone that didn't know this [about being a trans woman], I'm sure they were shocked, but I think they could see, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, that is that person I know and love.’ And it's going that way for me in my life. It's a beautiful thing, with the support of my family. Really, it's a beautiful thing.”
As Raisch drove to her sister’s home in the suburbs for the traditional feast with their parents, she reflected on her joy and her awareness of what her transition meant for her life, what too often journalists who are cisgender overlook, in favor of focusing on loss and the impact on others.
“I think that’s hard to communicate,” Raisch said. “Being the complete person. I think for me, what slammed me in the face, it was so irrefutable, it was this whole burning, eventual, slow-burning realization of, ‘Oh God, this is what it is. Jesus Christ! Oh shit!’ And I only mean ‘shit’ in the sense of the looming things that I knew would upend my life.”
Raisch is now a single parent whose coworkers and supervisors, close friends and family have known Maureen as her authentic self for seven months. On Nov. 18th, she came out to the entire NFL and to the world. She did so with a tweet and posts on Instagram, revealing the “before” and “after” photos she felt were important to share.
“This is my experience,” Raisch explained, when asked about publicly displaying her pre-transition photo and what many transgender people call their “deadname:” the name they were given by their parents, the name which Raisch references in her video introducing herself as Maureen. Raisch has another word for “deadname” she prefers to use.
“The relationship I have with that name really doesn't bother me, actually, nor do I associate the word ‘dead’ with it. I call it my ‘legacy name,’” she said. “I think of the newer Star Wars films: they looked at Harrison Ford as Han Solo and called him ‘the legacy character.’ So I looked at that and thought, ‘Ah, ‘legacy;’ I like that!’ Because for me, I've published so much work and art under that name, under ‘Michael,’ that work is part of me. Those World Series logos I designed as far back as 2006, 2009, it's part of my body of work as an artist.”
Raisch is in the process of updating her personal site to reflect her authentic name, her new look and her pronouns. Transitioning genders requires a lot of unsung work: Legally changing one’s name, updating a driver’s license, credit cards, bank accounts, Social Security information, U.S. passport and birth certificate to reflect the new gender and name. It should be noted, some states don’t allow gender marker changes to driver’s licenses or birth certificates; others, like Texas, reject “amended” birth certificates as a matter of law.
Raisch came out to most of her coworkers via Zoom. She said her transition actually benefited from the COVID-19 lockdown and the resulting work-from-home isolation. When the NFL offered its staff half-days, she took advantage of the opportunity to have her first makeover.
“I had a whole makeup session where they completely transformed me, and God, that was just irrefutable, the euphoria I felt,” said Raisch. “It just quieted my mind. The balance I felt, coming out the other side, ‘Oh my God. We can just do this?’ It was so right and a very special time for me.”
Raisch hopes that by sharing her story, others in the larger sports community will recognize that it’s better to come out, just as the Las Vegas Raiders’ Carl Nassib did earlier this year. He’s the first gay active NFL player, following in the trailblazing footsteps of Jason Collins in the NBA. There are many out LGBTQ women in pro sports and it was a record year for out LGBTQ athletes at the Olympics this summer, including transgender and nonbinary athletes. Also, as Outsports reported in September, for the first time, pro baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer each has an out gay male player under contract. That’s never happened before.
Now, the LGBTQ community, and the NFL, have Raisch on their team.
“The NFL is, it's a microcosm of America,” said Raisch. “These issues that come to the forefront that are important are about, you know, race, equality, what Colin Kaepernick was saying. And mental health of players, all those things. And somehow, I brought up a real relevant conversation about identity and gender and transition into the league. I wanted to be my authentic self, be balanced, be whole, be complete. One of our art directors said this really well: That this conversation, if it starts with the NFL, it can disseminate back into America.”
Connect with Maureen Raisch on Twitter (@raischstudios) by clicking here, Instagram (@maureendeets) by clicking here and click here to connect on LinkedIn. Her personal site is raischstudios.com
