Growing up, I noticed how the way that people acted on the field mirrored the way they acted off the field. Through middle school, I was at the Italian school before switching to a bigger school in New York, which was definitely a good decision for a lot of reasons.

There was a strong concept of gendered behavior even in that tiny community in the Italian school. The boys were super rude and disrespectful to everyone, including themselves and each other. They had this insult-based humor, where the more you could burn someone, the more social status you had.

As they got older, the jokes became increasingly sexual, which made the girls very uncomfortable. They even made jokes with the teachers, which was just horrible to experience, but the boys never seemed to be bothered by it. Even at summer camps, which were mostly co-ed, the ones who were more rude to other feminine-presenting players were also rude off the field. So navigating these sports spaces definitely had a huge impact on my understanding of gender and gender expression at the time.

An issue for me was struggling to identify with these two very binary groups. I am trans masculine, I'm gender fluid, sometimes I'm more nonbinary, and sometimes I'm more man. But generally I identify as trans masc.

Even though the boys were being really disrespectful all the time, I really wanted to identify with them, and this desire to be like these boys who were super mean to me, caused a lot of internal conflict as I didn’t know I was trans.

The girls would pick up on this and thought I hated women, because I didn't want to play their games with them. But it’s just that I wasn't interested, and I also wanted to play sports with the boys because the girls weren't playing. It was a very binary culture when I was growing up, and I didn't have a positive example of masculinity.

It was a struggle for me to reconcile this very different notion of masculinity. I thought that the only masculinity there was was the toxic kind, and discovering that there was more than that was a bit of a shock.

It's still something I'm working on. I've made a lot of progress, but I still struggle to express masculinity or to see masculinity in other people without immediately being put off because of the associations I have from my childhood.

If I could travel back in time, I would tell my younger self, "First of all, your gut feelings are right. This isn't the way things should be. There are other people who feel the same way as you. There are better forms of masculinity. Even if you don't have access to those positive spaces right now, just know that they exist.”

People treat feminine-presenting folks very differently in sports

My family is Italian and I went to a very small Italian school in New York, which had maybe 20 kids in the whole year. There was a lot of after-school soccer activity in the playground near our school where all the students would go to.

It was a pretty gendered situation. All the boys were playing soccer and all the girls were doing other stuff. As someone who was perceived as feminine, I was one of two 'girls' who played soccer with the boys in elementary school.

I had short hair and was hanging out with the boys more than the girls, and did a lot of after-school soccer. I played for my school's team and joined the girls varsity soccer team in high school. That was really fun but it was a very different experience to be on an all-girls team than it was to play in co-ed.

This is definitely a very common experience — when you present as feminine in any way, people treat you completely differently in sports. They don't pass you the ball, and if you do get it, they're yelling at you to do stuff.

I did a lot of summer camps, including one in Italy when I was 12, where I was the only feminine-presenting person in the whole camp, and all the kids were incredibly disrespectful in every possible way.

I did get my own locker room and room, but it was the same treatment – they’d never pass the ball, and would yell at me for making a mistake that the cisgender boys could make with no consequences.

I decided to play as goalie to avoid all these problems — no one would have to pass me the ball, which meant they wouldn't avoid passing the ball. I'm also just pretty good at it, and it's fun. But people do get really angry with goalkeepers — there's so much pressure to not screw up.

This got better on the all-girls team, but I still wasn’t connecting to them as I didn't realize I’m trans until I was 16.

We need dedicated spaces to talk about social issues in sport

Sports spaces are often in a state of surveillance with the pressure to conform. There are a few simple things that can be applied to any gendered space to improve that.

For example, normalizing introducing yourself with pronouns, and normalizing conversations about how sports is a very binary and gendered world.

Even just opening these discussions allows people to express things that they have been thinking about, but maybe felt alone in thinking about because the conversations are so hard to have, and there's no dedicated space to have them.

Maybe it can start with a soccer club at a school hosting a non-play meeting, where athletes just hang out, get to know each other, and have an intentional conversation about the social issues surrounding sports.

In the US, soccer is a very class-based sport with its associations with upper-class girls and soccer moms. There's very little room for these conversations because the underlying social dynamic dynamics present in who plays the sport and it already creates a sort of hegemony of, "Well, everyone must think the way that I do."

So people don't talk to each other because they don't know what's going on in other people's minds. It's sort of a self feeding loop.

Sports have always been a celebration of natural difference

For the future, I hope for gender abolition in sports. I think it's pretty silly to have gendered professional or non-professional sports.

Anyone who knows what they're talking about can say that women are just as good at a sport as men — not as an exception, but as a standard. There is no real reason why sports are gendered, except tradition.

You can say "men are stronger" but that's not really categorically true. There's tendencies, but it's not a rule.

I think any sort of analysis of whether someone is physically fit for a certain category is destined to fail, because we've already seen how it's race-based. People of color and athletes of color, get punished for having certain physical traits that white people would never be criticized for.

These conversations about whether someone is physically fit to compete in a category, are always going to be influenced by the personal biases of the person doing the categorizing.

So if someone is racist, they're going to say that people of color can't fit into a category, even if they are cis. Any sort of categorizing, is completely ridiculous. Sports have always been a celebration of natural difference.

If you're not naturally strong — well maybe your strength lies in your strategizing or in your technique. Sports is about celebrating and overcoming our physical challenges, not about boxing people into micro-categories like ‘trans-specific’ leagues, which defeat the purpose.