I signed up for whitewater kayaking in 1990 while attending a boarding school that used experiential learning as part of their environment-based teaching methods in the mountains of Colorado. I'd never done it and had no idea if I was going to like it, but Colorado turned out to be a great place to learn. I was really lucky as the instructors at the school were great kayakers. I had this amazing training and soon fell in love with whitewater kayaking.

Whitewater kayaking is not a particularly hard sport, but it requires balance and fortitude – at the end of the day, you're just in a kayak on a river, doing everything by yourself. There's nobody to hold you up. There are people there to save you and help talk you through it, but if you fall out of a kayak or flip over, it’s on you to roll back up.

I slowly progressed and became a pretty fantastic paddler of quite hard water. Straight out of high school, I went to Nepal and worked as a raft guide and safety boater. In the mid-90s it was kind of radical and pretty insane that I just got on the plane and did that.

I got to paddle some amazing hard rivers in Nepal and met a lot of great people who continue to be my friends ever since. Then kayaking just became part of my life as I went through regular progression – college, jobs, graduate school. It wasn't always something that I could do depending on where I was in the country, but I did when I could.

Around 2007, I moved to Washington DC, which has an amazing community around whitewater kayaking at a very extreme level, 20 minutes outside of the city. You can ride your bike from the city centre of the nation's capital, right out to extreme Whitewater. I got certified and started teaching kayaking to beginners and it became a way of life for me. But then everything collapsed, my whole life went to hell. I got divorced and experienced severe depression — all of this tied into being trans and not dealing with my identity.

For a lot of us who are trans, the first step comes with trying to reject our transness rather than accepting who we are. And that causes a whole bunch of problems that show up in a lot of different ways. For me, it was almost debilitating depression.

While coming out of those moments of distress, I moved back into a house I'd inherited from my family in upstate New York and tried to rebuild my life and career while still not being out as trans.

I was still broken and trying to figure everything out, but I was able to connect with a group of advanced kayakers who became my friends. In the first year, I was on the river for 100-120 days – essentially a third of the year – physically paddling on the river, which makes for extraordinarily hard and extreme paddling.

I was terrified about starting HRT, but I needed to accept myself and get on

In the Adirondacks Mountains of upstate New York, every valley, drainage and watershed has another potential river creek that you can go paddling in when there's enough water. So that's what we did.

There's a core group of about six of us who would meet up at least every weekend, sometimes in the middle of the week to go paddling on whichever river had water – there are some rivers that always have water.

So that's all I did – kayaking and work. I didn’t have a social life, because I'm living in a very rural, distant place where there isn't much else to do. My friends all live hours away from me and are all over the country. It's not like I can just go down the street and see some friends or go to a restaurant — there are no restaurants to go to without driving for 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

Around the same time, I was finally getting through to myself about my transness – that I needed to change and accept myself and get on. The first step was understanding how I could get on hormone replacement therapy. I am extremely lucky that there's a gender clinic in the regional city that's 20 minutes from my house. Unlike many people in rural America, I have the resources down the road.

I called them up and they said, "Come on in".

They prescribed HRT, 'diagnosed' me as having gender dysphoria, and I started that process on 2nd November 2021. I was terrified about that whole process. For me, picking up the phone and talking to the receptionist — not even to a doctor — but just talking to the receptionist was the hardest part of that journey for me.

Because I knew that when I started that process, so much else was waiting to happen. Starting it meant admitting that it always had to happen.

I couldn't possibly live and not have access to whitewater kayaking

I'm 46 years old and I'm the first from my high school and college friends to have come out as trans. I'm sure there are others, but nobody's told me.

The first group I came out to was my kayaking crew. Extreme whitewater kayaking and paddling through a rapid – that’s the moment when my whole mind gets clear of all of the stuff in my head. I just focus on that moment of going through extreme whitewater, because there's no space for anything else.

It's this amazing clarity, and I couldn't lose that. I couldn't possibly live and not have access to that environment. So, it was important to me that the first people I told were some of those people that I went out with all the time.

Whether you first start coming out or have been out for a while, it's always hard to tell another person: "Hey, by the way, I'm trans."

It sucks – we're always coming out. There are all these stories of people being rejected, friends ditching them, and being absolutely horrid. Though these are my friends, I liked them and thought they were going to be okay, that fear persists.

I knew my kayaking crew would be okay as there was already a nonbinary trans person in the group and they came out as trans five years before I did. When I first started paddling with these people, I had no idea about pronouns, because I don't think anybody has a clue until you're confronted with either a friend who's transitioning or you yourself are.

The next step was to tell a group I met while working as a professional sailor, and who have become my best friends of 25-30 years. They basically said, "Awesome, this is great. Come hang out with us."

My arms feel like spaghetti: It’s challenging to see HRT’s effect on my strength

I'm a pretty extreme whitewater kayaker and consider myself to be an extreme athlete in this field. It's an incredibly niche sport.

The vast majority of people who go kayaking, go on a lake or in a river where it’s completely flat and safe. But I'm out here putting on elbow pads, helmets and lifejackets. I’ve sliced open my hands on rocks and broken bones. I go off waterfalls and if I make a mistake, things can take a turn for the worse quickly.

There's a level of extreme paddler that's well beyond where I'm at – you see these videos of Dane Jackson or Nouria Newman going off insanely high waterfalls and doing crazy, hard rapids on Red Bull TV. They're amazing people, they're amazing athletes. There are only a few people in the world who can make a living out of doing this because one, it's such a tiny sport and two, there are only so many people paying for it.

I wouldn’t put myself in their class of paddlers. I’m in the next class of not quite as extreme paddlers. And, as I'm going through transition, HRT is affecting my strength and I'm having to face new challenges.

I've never been the fastest paddler or the strongest, but I've always been solid — I could paddle literally for eight hours straight in a day with no problem. And this summer, all of a sudden, I couldn't. I'd get done with two relatively short, easy runs, and I'd have nothing left. My arms would feel like spaghetti, and it’s been a challenge to see how hormones are impacting my strength.

Even though I didn't think I was relying on my strength to be a good paddler, I'm having to readjust and replan. This winter, for the first time in my life, I need a weight training routine to maintain the type of skill and strength necessary for the type of runs I want.

Kayaking is a space that I've never associated with gender at all

I'm not super competitive and I hate competitive situations. That isn't to say I don't occasionally race. I like racing because it's a different mindset. It's a different type of river running, and that's the main thing I get out of it.

If I do race, I would be in contention for first place or second place in women’s categories, depending on my strength and skill and how much paddling I've done. And so the whole trans athletes sports debate suddenly became very real for me when I was like, "Oh, yeah, I could be in that category."

Kayaking is a space that I've never associated with gender at all. One of the things that I least like about sports in general, is what I refer to as the “bro culture” in basketball and football. It has an attitude of how, "You got to suck it up and be strong and never show emotion" and all that crap.

For kayaking, it's terrifying. I learned to articulate this better as I started teaching. If you're brand new to kayaking, the first thing we're going to do is get you on a boat, not with a skirt — typically you'd wear a neoprene skirt to keep the water out of the boat.

But we don't even put that on and you go out in a little pond or flatwater section where it's super safe. And you flip over out of the boat and you learn how to get out of the boat when you're upside down.

It can be terrifying for a lot of people to be upside down with their legs encased in a plastic boat.

What I disliked about the bro culture in kayaking was how they don't admit that that's terrifying — being flipped over by the current unexpectedly, can be terrifying to somebody who's not used to it and hasn't built confidence in themselves.

I've always been conscious of how we approach people's feelings in water

I’ve always rejected the gendered notions and bro-culture around kayaking. It isn’t just a men-only sport – a lot of people that I've met over the years who learned kayaking came across it when some friend of theirs who said, "Hey, let's go, tear down this river in this kayak I've got, and you'll learn on the way."

And it’s often a brutal and horrible experience for them. I'm amazed if they enjoy it. If you're not an over-the-top, amazing athlete who just charges at extreme sports, that kind of attitude is pretty off-putting.

I've never operated that way. I've always been very conscious of how we approach the water and people's feelings on the water while giving space for emotions. I worked a lot with women along the way, because strangely, it tends to be women in this space who pay for actual training to learn the sport rather than just going out there without training.

It usually takes two to three years to advance to doing class four or five kayaking. That process requires not just being skilled and balanced, but also a lot of mental workout – learning how to confront fear, admitting to yourself that things could go wrong, knowing that it's only you who's there and learning how to articulate that fear.

When we’re looking at a big, crazy rapid, with water exploding and waves crashing against rocks, we have to break it down to acknowledge, "I'm afraid of this. What's going to be the outcome? If I go into that and stuff goes wrong, what happens? How do I survive that?"

Sometimes the answer might mean swimming out to the side, sometimes it's “I need to put people in the right place, who will throw me a rope or jump in after me and pull me out of the river before I get hurt.”

That's not about gender, that's about the conscious thought of confronting fear and working through it.

On the river, you're looking to people for safety – no gender there

When I'm kayaking, my mind goes completely blank, so all of those thoughts of feeling wrong just disappear.

You're out in the wilderness, it's gorgeous, and it's not all extreme whitewater — there are flatwater sections down the river. You're paddling down and you see bears, deer, and fish jumping, and then you get to the whitewater section.

There's often a tendency to split competition into men and women, because of historical beliefs in skill level.

It's fine to want to compare yourself to the other women that you're running with to see who's fastest and leave the men away, or vice versa. But I'm picking on running because, if you're not actually in a race, it doesn't matter if you're 'male' or 'female' right?

Our concept of sports is really about professional sports, and how they're presented in this competitive environment.

There's slalom whitewater, which is an Olympic sport and again, it's gendered. You're still on the same course when you're training, you're with everybody, you're not training alone. It's not a team sport. So you're not with your 'all female' or 'all male' team, you're just on the river waiting for your chance to go down, and then you're hanging out with your friends.

And at the end of the day, you're looking to the people you're on the river with, to be your safety — when you make a mistake when something goes wrong, and things do go wrong, they're who you rely on.

There's no gender there, it's just skill-based, where you're all working to improve. I think that's what we bring — that it's the same for everybody.

Right now in the whitewater space, I would say that one of the top extreme whitewater people is Nouria Newman, like she blows people out of the water in terms of skill. There are only three or four people who are at the same level as she is. That's not about gender, that's just about pure amazingness.

It was emotionally hard coming off that river that day

The challenge I'm facing right now is I'm starting to lose so much strength, that it's really impacting my ability to paddle. That's messing with my head.

I've been a very advanced extreme paddler, who had the capacity to just go all day long. Not having that now, is really messing me up, and I actually got injured this summer because of that.

I did two runs on an easier river and took about three hours for each one. Then I went to another really hard river in the afternoon, crashed my boat and had to buy a new kayak for about $1,600, which I didn't have. I've got photographs of huge bruises on my body from those crashes. Those crashes are also huge ego-crushers — I have this idea of who I am, and suddenly I'm thinking, "Oh, maybe I'm not as good as I always thought I was."

This is totally different from being trans. This is just like, "Wait, what happened? Why am I not doing so well? Why did it go all wrong?"

It was emotionally hard coming off that river that day. Fortunately, there were two women who were on the river with me, and they just came up and gave me a hug. It was so nice. The guys I normally paddle with are great friends, but they're not doing that. They're not coming up and giving me a hug. So I loved that moment. I just needed that because I was just emotionally devastated after breaking the boat, getting hurt, losing my gear, and doing this in front of like 30 friends, so they all saw the failure. It was hard.

That was scary because I was in an extreme environment, pushing myself to do a river that's kind of hard, that I hadn't done in a while.

Horribly homophobic language in playgrounds at the height of the AIDS crisis

I've been careful in how I think about my transness, and coming out and coming to terms with that. Because it's far too easy to say I have regrets.

I'm super excited when I see people figuring out that they're trans in their teenage years, or earlier. I think that's the best thing ever. I didn't have the language or understanding of what that could have meant for me when I was in grade school. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, and the language on the playground was just so horribly homophobic and anti-gay — I cringe at what we just said amongst ourselves.

Now, I'm just blown away that people now have the language and understanding, and there's a way to go forward. For those of us who didn't, it took a lot longer.

I have two young children and when I told them that I was trans, my daughter was like, "Oh, cool!" because she already had some friends who are trans and nonbinary, who are like 13.

If I could travel back in time, I’d tell my younger self to just own it. I can't regret anything. I'm doing what I need to do. I'm doing it now on the path I needed to. I followed the path that made sense to me. It wasn't as fast as I might have liked it to be. But I can't see how I would be able to do anything differently.

I had to work through the problems to get to where I am. I did a lot of thinking when I was paddling. It was boring sometimes — when it's flat and you’re paddling, two or three miles to the next rapid — you're not talking to your friends because you're working.

My mind would go clear: "Yeah, I'm actually trans. I don't know how I'm going to tell anybody this.”

This was without me getting angry at myself, it just bubbled in there, because my head was finally clear.

Kayaking’s often been for white men, inaccessible to women, people of color

Ultimately, my goal with everything I'm doing in kayaking is to keep growing the sport, because I think it's an amazing space and an amazing way to interact with the environment. But it's traditionally been for white men. So women and people of color have avoided it.

There are a lot of issues both with machismo-type things that turn off a lot of women and also with cost and expectations like camping in the woods, buying outdoor gear, knowing what to buy, and having a resource to help you get there — that affects people who didn't grow up already going out camping, or boating, or have friends who are in this space.

One of the reasons that I'm so out and telling my story, is to help create that space.

There are other trans whitewater kayakers, even in my friend group. One of my friends paved the way up here. They’re nonbinary and had some run-ins initially, but at this point, everybody loves them.

I have this friend, Maddie, who lives in Vermont. She came out to New York, and we got her on the river and kind of pushed her to get better, and she herself has found kayaking was one of the ways that she dealt with being trans. It gave her the freedom to be both active but also be in her head and do her thing.

I also made a new friend this fall at a river festival that I hosted with my crew, for 450 people — we had people from all over the US and Canada come to this festival. For three days, I was standing at the gate, taking people's money and giving them directions, telling them what rivers were running, and where to go, while being 100 percent out.

It's not something I imagined even a year ago, that I could comfortably stand in front of hundreds of people, and just be me. And to the community's credit, nobody even batted an eye, it's really wild.

My hope for the future of sports is that we just stop caring about gender. Apart from some very minor caveats around taking performance-enhancing drugs, can't we just dump this, just not care?

The person who's come out as trans in my mind, is not concerned with performance, because they're taking care of themselves. The sport they do is what they love. The vast majority of us who are going to come out as trans are never going to be on the podium. The one or two people who are, are going to be there, because they're truly amazing athletes.

And at the end of the day, I'd prefer not to even be like, "Oh, here's the male, the man who won the race and the top three men and the top three women."

Instead, I'd really just like to say, "Holy cow, here are the top five people who finished first."

It has taken me a long time to realize that I'm not just a weekend warrior. I'm an athlete – I've literally been a professional, teaching kayaking and I've paddled at extremely high levels.

If I could travel back in time, I'd tell my 18-year-old self getting on that plane to go to Nepal, “This is going to be with you for your life. You don't have to be too worried about it. It'll be there when you need it, you can step away, and then you can come back.”