As a kid, I just never felt like I fit in. I grew up in a household where playing sports was really pushed, and my parent had a habit of getting so outrageous at games that they would get kicked out. That was really embarrassing, to the point where I stopped doing mainstream sports and ventured off into the more extreme sports like rock climbing, cliff jumping and snowboarding.

I was very clumsy as a child because I was just growing so fast. I thought that since the professional NFL athletes did ballet, it would be okay for me to start doing that. When I brought it up to my parents, they took it as "Okay let's get her some form of training that will get her better coordinated" and decided to get me speed and agility coaching which was nowhere close to what I wanted or for why I wanted it.

Unfortunately, I grew up in a household where conversion therapy was very much a threat if I were to go ahead and decide to show my true colors as a kid. I was surrounded by these misconceptions of how certain things were just for girls and certain things were just for boys and couldn’t really afford to be open with my parents.

Cheerleading was a big no-no for guys to be doing, but one of our family friends was a really big cheerleader. It was always a relief whenever she would ask me to be the base of the pyramid, or to help her practice with her gymnastics and cheerleading activities.

There were a lot of different reasons for fear that prevented me from being able to tell my parents that, "Hey, I wanted to do cheerleading, not go play football. I wanted to do ballet because I wanted to actually be a ballerina."

These were all things that were still very much policed by gender and feel like still to some degree are.

For over 20 years, I wanted to have nothing to do with my body

One thing that you hear amongst athletes is their ability to kind of get into this zone in which just everything just seems to flow and click and they're just very much in sync with their body and everything that's going on. That has been something I've never been able to achieve because of my dysphoria and because for the longest time, I didn't even have any relationship with my body prior to my transition.

Now I'm finally starting to understand it and attempting to learn to love it. It's still very new and hard to do because for over 20 years, I wanted to have nothing to do with my body. I didn't even want anything to do with this reality.

I am feeling a little bit more at home in my body, but the downside is the gender roles that people put on women’s bodies and femininity. That's been a whole other world of stress, and that’s not just something trans individuals are facing, but it’s something that affects womanhood as a whole – this unhealthy need to keep a certain body mass and to make sure you conform to a certain image.

It's definitely gotten better than what we were pushing as far as the pressure on female body types in the early 2000s and such, but it's really weird.

It's upsetting to now deal with this whole new issue of body imagery and things that only exist for the women in this culture to the degree that it does. Sports have made it worse – my anorexia and my bulimia are now a constant struggle, with all these new rules and regulations that are especially targeted at trans women’s bodies in sports and competition.

I’m not only dealing with gender role changes and imagery, but I'm now also being forced to meet certain physiological standards – no matter if I wanted to or not. At this point, my transition doesn't feel like my transition.

Competing doesn't change the trauma by outside forces controlling our bodies

The amount of testosterone that I now carry in my blood is only at that level because I feel like I'm forced to maintain that level of below-five nanogram limit that they're putting out there – and it's not just for trans women. This is something that's put in place amongst women everywhere, because everybody is subjected to being told that their testosterone levels are too high, or that they're not meeting some type of ridiculous rule about how bodies should look and function.

So I have to deal with this body police to get that tiny bit of a reward of being allowed to compete. Being able to compete doesn't change the trauma that's associated with having these outside forces being so controlling over our actual bodies, and to not having a full say in it.

It's going to take a lot of relearning to transform sports into a space of comfort as opposed to surveillance. It takes a lot of relearning and reframing to understand why it is that we're doing this. At the end of the day, I'm not running for a medal. I'm not really doing it to be in some Michael Jordan level league. I'm doing it because by going out and running as myself, my physiological, mental and emotional state are better for me.

I’m better able to handle stressors in my life, better able to exuberate confidence. It's a form of mental and physical health and wellbeing.

Yes, there can be competitive aspects to it, but I'd say for at least 90 percent of the people out there, that's not the case. They're not competing to be some elite, Michael Jordan-like athlete. They just want to be able to know that they set a goal and achieve it. You don't really need to police that, you just need to encourage that healthy growth.

Our gender or built should not be used to make us feel like we’re lesser than 

I got back to running during the pandemic in Illinois, where we weren't allowed to leave the state without being in quarantine for at least three weeks. So, I had to find some kind of outlet for myself, that made me still feel like I was keeping fit and getting a release.

Trans Run is a fitness group that I started in Chicago, to provide individuals resources & safe places to live a healthy life. It’s my attempt to make the idea of physical workout and sports something that the trans and non-binary community can feel welcome in. Because right now, we're not really welcomed, which can be very problematic and sometimes unsafe with how people treat us when we go to the gym or into athletic spaces.

Trans Run is trying to build these safe spaces for us. It's been very hard, because most of my members don't want to be seen outside. They're probably like me for the most part, where we don't even want to leave the house. So a lot of the involvement on it tends to simply be from when I'm able to post workout videos. That seems to be the main way to engage right now. Just because none of us feel comfortable in society still.

In the long run, I want the benefits from a mental, physical and emotional standpoint of what sports have done for me, to be something available to anyone. Simply because someone is a certain gender or they're built a certain way, they should not be made to feel like they’re less than someone else. I just want to push that inclusion.