As a child, I was always very active and loved being outdoors in nature. My father was a runner and a great athlete. He passed away suddenly when I was six years old. Running felt like a great space to stay connected to him, to myself, and to the people who've been on the trail before me.

I find it very spiritual and grounding to be out on the trail because I'm not the first person to be out there. When I see the tracks of various animals or insects, I think about all the different life that has touched that space.

I played a range of different sports but always felt that there was this part of me I was holding back and that I couldn't fully be the athlete I wanted to be. I thought I was just being an awkward, self-conscious teenager. It wasn’t until the last seven years that I started to piece together why I felt so held back. I've never felt like I got to tap into my potential and I’m exploring how to push those boundaries for myself now.

The biggest eye-opening experience was during my yoga teacher training. Yoga invites so much self-reflection through the cueing and philosophy that frees us up in our physical body. While contorting my body in specific ways, I was able to bend, mould and expose.

I started to peel back some of those layers and recognize that I was denying so much of what made me myself, which was taking away from my being able to live authentically as an athlete, person and human being.

I found this freeing connection that's very much been part of my athletic journey. As athletes, we have to know ourselves. We have to be ourselves fully, and that's not just about muscles, strength or speed. It's about who we are at the core.

Rigid boxes in sports prevent us from seeing the true potential of an athlete

I was raised Christian, and there are a lot of things in Abrahamic religions that are very confining, in my experience. In college, I studied comparative religions and part of my study was to purposely be in other cultures — studying the Quran, going to a Buddhist temple, spending time in a Sikh service, and learning all these different cultures and experiences.

The more I studied, the more I saw how fluid the spirit is in Eastern mythology. Learning about the transformation of various gods made me think about myself as a person.

In religion, there are specific rules in order to be part of a certain religion, which is why more of the younger generations coming up are claiming to be more spiritual, not religious. Part of that is because people see religion as very conservative and rigid, without any space for coexistence.

Similarly, as athletes, we get placed into rigid boxes that prevent us from seeing the true athlete and the true potential of the athlete. Yoga facilitated my ability as an athlete to see athletes beyond the binary and beyond the rigid boundaries of each sport.

People see trans or nonbinary athletes as outside of the rules they’ve attached to sports because they're like, "There are very specific rules of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, and we must fit in this context."

If you go outside of that binary context it "confuses'' people because we are conditioned based on the ‘traditions’ we’re surrounded by. The reason sport has such a difficult time with gender is because you'll hear, "It's just tradition. That's just how it is. That's how it's been."

Why can't we adapt and change? Is evolution not a thing? Has nothing adapted? Have we not grown?

It's shameful how militaries used our transness and then tell us we don't exist

There are more than 60 cultures in the world today that still recognize more than two genders. Most of those genders have been limited down to two genders or sexes, because of colonization. Meanwhile, so many different militaries have used trans and nonbinary people as spies or as people of the military, unbeknownst to most people because there was that ability to be beyond the binary.

It's such a shameful part of anybody's military history, that they’ve used trans people but at the same time tell us that we don't exist.

My stepmother has a picture of Dick Tracy, a comic detective who would talk to his watch. If you look at the picture, it's essentially an Apple Watch. People back then would be like, "Oh, that's science fiction.”

But now it's not, because we've adapted, and we can do that in sport too. People are always fearful of the unknown, and that's why I think people have such religious persecution — it's easier to say you look different, you pray or practice differently, and so as a result, you must be something that's against me.

I've studied more than 25 religions and if you really study their teachings, I hate to break it to you, but it's all pretty much the same. There are just different characters in each of them, and I'm not putting down any religion. I'm just saying that we have more in common than we have different if we are willing to step outside of ourselves and see the capacity to grow as one.

How can we fully show up for a race if we’re disconnected within ourselves?

Whether it's as a teacher in yoga, as a coach for athletes, or as an athlete or student myself, I feel the most joy and happiness when I can honestly show up as myself.

As teachers of movement, we need to recognize how certain things are restrictive so that we can better gain the capacity to heal people and let them thrive as human beings.

When you tell somebody to open up and be expansive, it's really hard if they feel dysphoria around their chest. I’ve had so many students show up in a yoga practice, who are afraid to get an adjustment because they're afraid someone might feel their binder or they’re concerned about whether they’re passing as cis or not.

My euphoria comes from recognizing other's space, tuning into what makes them comfortable, and creating that euphoric sensation and connection.

There are a lot of people like myself, who spend so much time rounding their shoulders forward and trying to cave in the chest because we’re trying to hide it.

How can we fully show up in a yoga practice or on the starting line as ourselves, if we’re afraid of every photo that is going to show the chest we might feel disconnected in?

A lot of rhetoric on social media implies that to feel euphoric as a nonbinary or trans person, you have to look a specific way. So even within the community, we're starting to create a little bit of a box to put people in.

There's no one way to be trans or nonbinary. That euphoria around our body doesn't have to be about what we aesthetically look like, as much as how we feel internally and how we can communicate that to other people so that they can receive it and also treat us with that same respect.

It's hard to deny someone when you have a conversation and learn who they are

I would want my younger self to know that everything that they went through was not in vain. It made them a stronger person and stronger in the conviction of what it means to stand in this moment as myself.

I would tell them:

Go through life, and keep doing what you're doing. Keep asking the questions and know that asking the questions and failing over and over, is only going to make you stronger in your convictions. It will bring you to a greater state of understanding that maybe nobody else will be able to resonate with, but that doesn't matter. As long as it can resonate with you in a way that is true to you, you will see happiness you didn't know you could have.

If there's anyone queer, trans, nonbinary, who's trying to understand their place in athletics, I’d want them to know that it's not about them finding a place in sports — you've always had a space in sports and in this world. You don't need to force your way through.

We just need to come together as a community, and let others start to see those pieces of ourselves that have always been there because that opens up the door.

It's really hard to deny someone when you have a conversation and learn who they are and what they value. You'll see that we really aren't different. We have so much in common. Sports and athletics are just one way for us to experience our bodies. If you’re not being given access to experience that, don't let it keep you from still moving your body and moving the energy and finding your joy.

Because the time will come, we will have our place. People like myself are trying to advocate for those who might be afraid to speak up, not ready to speak up, or have been silenced.

We promise as a community to hold the line until we make that progress. So just keep being you, being the beautiful and amazing you. And we will get there.