I’ve always been very competitive and sporty since I was a teenager. I did Taekwondo and so many other sports, but I never liked going to the gym, with people watching over me. I consider myself masculine, and there was a lot of paranoia that came from dysphoria — ‘you are shorter, you are skinnier’. But I understood that this stigma comes from people who don't do sport, or don't go to the gym.

I lost myself for more than a decade – I was on drugs, substance misuse, traveling and in toxic relationships. When I decided to completely change my life, I started going to the gym about three years ago, instead of going to pubs. I started training instead of getting drunk every afternoon, and now I master every machine in the gym.

Little by little I started to see how I got stronger through exercise, and started linking it to nutrition. Earlier, I’d get many fake opinions about protein and supplements since there’s a really huge stigma prevalent amongst people who don't do sports, who believe that people take supplements just to build muscle.

I'm a trans man, and I've been on testosterone for eight years now. My experience taught me that hormones and supplements are not enough to build muscle. I started building muscle and progressed in a physical way two years ago — that has nothing to do with hormones, nothing to do with supplements.

I'm just so sad to read news where they just focus on hormones. Transgender people, in many places they cannot participate because they are on hormones. And again, hormones don't create any difference by themselves.

Sometimes people will tell me, ‘Oh, your hormones work, so you're getting muscle.’

I respond by saying, “I'm getting hormones just to be like you... Do you have muscle or do you need to go and work to build that muscle?”

It’s not the testosterone that’s building my muscles. The testosterone is helping me and supporting my work in what I want to be, what I want to feel. But it’s the work that I'm putting in, that is helping me build muscle.

There was a lot of paranoia that came from dysphoria in the gym

I'm very free, I don't like labels and I always thought the gym was a place for only masculine people. But it soon became a space that brought positive change for my mental health.

I think that sports and every kind of activity that makes you move, can be an unsafe space. In the gym, we always see people who are there just for their appearance. But I feel that people who go to the gym for real, for improving, will not make you feel that the place is not yours.

I still avoid small family-run gyms where there is much more stigma around gender, labels and appearance, and everyone is just too masculine.

When I see a group of people performing the same type of masculinity, I don't believe they’re being true, because we are all different.

If you're a person that can sink into a place where there might be some of that fakeness, then that can be fine. But for me, being around people who won’t show themselves wasn't good enough, so I just stopped going to smaller gyms. As a transgender person, I never had any problem with bigger gyms.

To young trans kids, I would say: ‘Move on, there are better places’

My hope for the future of gender and sports is a shift in public opinion by creating more awareness. The media often misrepresents a transgender person by falsely linking hormones to sports and performance.

To the young trans children who are facing this misinformation spread by news or public opinions, I would say: “Move on. If there's no space for you, if you're not accepted, then they are not worth your presence. Just move on, because there are better places, better people.”

I also think sometimes we just look around our people, our surroundings, which is very wrong. We have a gift, which is technology. We use technology for so many things that are very toxic to ourselves. But we can also use it in so many ways that could benefit us for who we really are, as authentic people. We could use technology to look out for people, for places.

We don't need to meet physically, but there’s still so much we can share with each other.