I tried hard to suppress the changes that my body was going through during puberty by attempting to become my own puberty blocker, as I wasn't able to get any medical intervention at that time. What that ended up looking like was an eating disorder, which is painful to reflect on. I started to starve myself, which I thought was to be a better runner because distance runners are typically really thin.

I would do all these weird things to specifically prevent my hips from getting wider – I wasn't starving to look like a Victoria's Secret model, I was starving to stay androgynous and more like a boy. I started binding my chest with ace bandages and tape and was super resistant to getting a bra.

I felt so much shame and probably had scoliosis because I was slouching so much, trying to pull my shirt out so I could hide my bra and chest. In locker rooms, the girl’s team would run in their sports bras without a shirt and I never took mine off. They’d wear short little volleyball shorts and I was always wearing basketball shorts – because I was trying to hide my body and the ways that it was changing.

Later on, the stress of growing up low-income and feeling academically unprepared for the rigor of a prestigious college led to stress eating that made me put on weight in areas that were more classically feminine. The dysphoria that set in basically ruled my life, and I stopped running. I pretended I had an injury because I didn't want to be naked or wear short shorts. I just wanted to hide because my body was changing and I felt like I couldn't control it.

I remember coming home from my freshman year of college after two seasons of pretending to be injured and the first thing that a family friend said when he picked me up at the airport was, "Wow, you look like a woman now."

Immediately, I stopped eating. I spent the whole summer starving myself and running. I lost 30 to 40 pounds and I wasn't okay. And that was just because that one comment was so painful to hear as a trans person that it just sent me into this cognitive freefall of a spiral of dysphoria.

Now that I have the language to articulate my trans identity as an athlete, it has actually cured my eating disorders.

I have a very healthy relationship with my body, and with food now. The behaviors that were ways of controlling my body have now become things I do not as punishment for being feminine, but as self-love to become the person that I want to be.

For example, I hate lifting weights at the gym, and before I would do that to punish myself. I wouldn't eat and then I would try to burn fat while lifting weights. But now I'm like, "I want to look more masculine. I'm gonna go to the gym with a stomach full of protein, I'm not going to be hungry. I'm gonna give myself the energy to build muscle so that I can be who I truly am and that's an act of love and I don't have to like, punish myself for being feminine."

As a marginalized person, you feel you need to be twice as good to get half as much

Anyone of any marginalized group knows this feeling that "you have to be twice as good to get half as much."

That is certainly a pressure I feel as the first trans person to Triple Crown – I didn't want to hike these trails in the traditional way that most hikers do where you take six months, and drink beer and make friends when you get to town. There was this pressure of, "I'm going to prove that I belong, by being the best and I can leave no rock unturned. There cannot be a shadow of a doubt that I did not earn every bit of this title."

There was a section in the Sierra mountains where we got caught in a snowstorm and part of the reason that we didn't turn back is because we didn't want anyone to be able to say that we quit or we weren't tough enough to get through it. We put ourselves in a very perilous situation, due to the potential of other people's opinions. So I'm working within myself to deconstruct that fear of judgment and that need to prove myself. But unfortunately, part of the reason I can do that is because I already did accomplish what I needed to.

I did break down when I finished my Triple Crown. I had plans to finish other big trails but I was just miserable and so worn out that I ended up coming home and said to myself, “This can wait. This is not sustainable. I'll finish what I put my mind to because I always do but my body is forcing me to take a break.”

It’s unsustainable to push yourself that hard and it comes with a very high cost to your mental health.

We need to get to a place where people don't have to do that to get respected – we don't need to understand trans people to respect them. We don't need people of color to be the best doctors to trust them as medical professionals. We shouldn't need those things.

A huge part of asserting my identity as a trans person is to take up space

Not to brag, but I’m a really good athlete and often found myself being better than most girls in school. I was always the fastest runner and didn't have other girls to compete against so I was always competing against boys, which I loved because that's where I felt most comfortable.

But it was also challenging – to begin to carve my gender identity that young as being "the only girl". I didn't have the language of being trans and non-binary until I was an adult. I always felt like I never fit in. There was a constant pressure of having to prove myself, having to prove my masculinity and prove my worth as an athlete to men and boys. It compelled me to be really good at sports but I also felt a lot of angst for being gendered as a girl and considered weaker.

I found it easy to relate to boys, and challenging to relate to girls and their lived experience. It was this strange double consciousness because the boys in my life didn’t identify with me. So my life in athletics has a lot to do with my understanding of my gender and my experiences of that sort of gendered socialization – always feeling othered.

One in four trans youth attempt suicide. How do you make it through adolescence? How do you make it through youth athletics without becoming part of that statistic and preserving your mental health? I think a lot of it is about skill acquisition – self-advocacy, self-love, self-esteem, self-respect. This is a skill that I think is good for everyone to cultivate. It's just harder for certain demographics, and that's a huge ask of a child. I can't even do that as an adult.

People misgender me and I just let it go, because I'm scared or I'm lazy, and it's just constant. It's so much pressure. And what I hope for young people navigating these athletic spaces, is that they are encouraged to cultivate those skills sooner.

If you’re prioritizing winning over someone's humanity, reconsider your priorities

So much needs to happen before we can think of sports as a space of comfort as opposed to surveillance. There has to be a massive large-scale culture shift and it's extremely encouraging when I do see it happening. I'm a high school teacher and my students understand things about gender that I had no idea about when I was their age. They have a vocabulary that just wasn't accessible to people my age.

It certainly makes a world of difference to have a collective understanding of trans identities, trans bodies, gender-affirming healthcare and spaces. It helps kids to be able to grow up as their authentic selves while averting the trauma that older trans people had to go through. And we need to let kids play on teams that align with their gender identity.

There is a huge reckoning of values happening in the athletic community at large where you have to ask yourself: What are we here for? Why are we even doing this? Why do we compete in sports?

There's a different reason for everyone. But what I can say objectively, is that if you are prioritizing ‘winning’ over someone's humanity, you really have to reconsider your priorities.

To non-binary kids, as a coach, I say, “Unfortunately sports has not evolved fast enough to be able to accommodate you. That's not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you. I'm going through the same thing. Unfortunately, you do have to compete on either the boy’s team or the girl’s team, but you decide what makes you feel less dysphoric and less invalid. Just know that your teammates and community support you and we know who you truly are. The system does not reflect anything about you.”

I think just having agency over where you are, how people perceive you, feeling like you have control over that -- that can make a huge difference for students.

People who consider themselves liberal hold a very trans medicalist perspective

There's this expectation that medical transition is the only legitimate form of transition. Now, I do plan to medically transition as a part of my journey but access to healthcare is a privilege in America. It shouldn't be but it is.

With my current situation, I don't have immediate access to medical transition. There are lots of trans people being policed in states where that's illegal, or they're low income, and they don't have access to medical transition.

In terms of athletics, there's this very deeply racist and classist element where the NCAA and Olympic regulations require a medical transition. That's just a deeply transphobic and reductionist approach to take. You look at trans athletes competing in those spaces, and a lot of them are being denied these places in athletics that they've earned because they lack ‘enough medical transition’ or because they're not ‘visibly trans’ or because they're not ‘trans enough’ for cis people in these positions of power to deem them trans.

It’s like sports organizations want to play God, and you see that in a lot of spaces. It just comes down to misogyny such as reproductive rights and policing of women and gender nonconforming folks' bodies.

In all these spaces, it is all about the power that informs our collective consciousness around the way we understand transness because most people who would even consider themselves liberal still have a very binary and trans medicalist perspective of who gets respect in the trans community.

These perspectives inform our policies and inform how we treat each other. It becomes the root of transphobia and it's painful.