I grew up being perceived, and accepting that perception, of being a cisgender man, and was never comfortable with it. After I went to university and had a bit of a vocabulary to understand myself, I came out as neither cisgender nor heterosexual. I know now that I’m nonbinary.

My journey with sports started back when I was like a microbe, at the age of four, navigating a pretty Desi community in the United States. I'm from a decent amount of privilege that gave me access to a lot of sports opportunities. I moved back to India later, and started going to an Academy.

The way cricket works in India, is that if you’re talented as a kid, they fast-track you into a world where you start dreaming and fantasizing about playing sport professionally. The coaches and the world around you encourage those dreams, and become a driving framework for them. From the age of eight up until I was 20, I was training and playing with the intention of making the sport a profession.

Somewhere along that way, I realized how unrealistic or far-fetched that dream was. Still, I played regularly and passionately for a long time. Eventually, the toxicity started creeping in, and that toxicity wasn’t specifically centred on queerness – I know a lot of non-queer people who were victims of it too.

A lot of it is gendered, particularly when people go through puberty and physical attributes like your height, strength and masculinity, are no longer neutral categories. They inform how you are perceived in terms of being capable or talented. It's a currency that you need to live in that world and to make your way through it. Even before I came out, I struggled with that because I wanted to play the sport. I loved it, I still love it, and I was pretty good at it.

But we were expected to be aggressive or assertive, and we had to be comfortable with an environment of misogyny, to demonstrate and prove our masculinity in ways I couldn’t.

I never became the athlete I was expected to be in that environment

The toxic masculinity and environment of misogyny led to me dropping out of cricket, and they remain an obstacle that prevents me from feeling comfortable with playing again, whether it is semi-professionally or even just recreationally. I wear nail polish now, and it's been a difficult experience to be visibly queer when I go to games. It's obviously varied, and spaces do vary in how accepting they are, and how they are framed around a type of masculinity.

I was an all-rounder in cricket. At first, I was a batter and medium-pace bowler, but as I matured physically and in my self-identity, I never became the athlete I was expected to be. I realized that if you want to be a pace bowler, irrespective of your statistics and skills, you are expected to be big and aggressive.

In selections, it's very much about what you can perform in five minutes with maybe three of four balls. They take you to a selection trial with like 1000 other kids, and you're all jockeying for the eyes of like four or five mildly uninterested people. In each of those moments, people are visibly looking for certain attributes that might not necessarily seem related to gender, but are inexplicable from gender.

I realized I wouldn't fit those screenings and I became a spin bowler, which is more about skill and craft, rather than sizing you up physically, which was always one of the biggest barriers for me.

In competitive sports, you’re first seen as an athlete rather than as a person

A lot of the stress or the harm I went through was because I was so attached to a particular idea of sport. I wish we had fewer expectations and fewer stakes. If I’d taken it less seriously, maybe I wouldn’t be as hurt.

I think the world around you spins this fairytale of how if you work really hard, you will reap rewards. While I don't mind the idea of sort of hard work or commitment, it's just not a good idea for kids to be thrown so deeply into something. A broader failing of a lot of competitive sports is that you're not seen first as a person, you're seen first as an athlete.

When I look at women's cricket teams, they seem a lot more wholesome and accepting of diversity. There are a significant number of queer couples on the Australian, British and South African cricket teams, and there's no such space among "men's" sports.

Forget coming out, there's no space where you fully express yourself or talk about your feelings. This has often made it difficult for me to continue playing sports, and made it difficult to feel like I’m able to be a full person in those environments. The toxic masculinity in those spaces clarified who I was not and who I didn't want to be. After I came out, I was in the US for a while, exploring whether I would play for the national team. There were a couple of youth training camps, and I found the same toxicity and misogyny there.

I think we’re shaped and informed by the experiences we go through, and these experiences told me something about myself. Ultimately, I realized that this was not something that I wanted to do.

I’m still grappling with how some places have inculcated a really strong love for sport. I’ve made friends and enjoyed with people, who I wouldn’t have connected with without sport. But I guess it ultimately becomes inadequate because of the type of space you’re in.

Every month, coaches would ask us to take off shirts to measure ‘progress’

I’m on an ongoing journey with body image because there's a particular type of way you're expected to look that conforms with gender, along with fatphobic notions of what fitness looks like. For example, while I was playing actively I was pretty fit, and that isn’t the case right now. I wasn’t the lean, tall, six-pack dude that athletes are expected to be, and there was continuous pressure even when I was fit, to look that way.

We'd have coaches every month, who would ask us to take off our shirts to physically show how much we have transformed our bodies, and how much we’re working towards those set ideals. I was always dead scared of them because I was doing whatever training was expected of me, but I wouldn't show the same results – different people's bodies work in different ways.

This is baggage I'm still working through, where right now, I want to motivate myself to be fitter, but I don't want to motivate myself not to be slightly chubby. There's a lot of conditioning that I have to unlearn.

If you give me a blank canvas, I would want all these spaces to be gender-free. For some of us, we're queer because gender means something very specific to us. For some of us, we're queer because maybe gender means nothing at all. But I think I would like to see a genderless sporting world where none of those categories are important – a space to be yourself, to do something you love, to challenge yourself.