I think of myself as trans feminine. But gender is something that is always moving. Some days I feel like I'm everything, all genders at once. Some days I feel like I'm a consciousness.

I was 12 years old when I started going to a single-sex school. I wasn’t very athletic, but the only social currency I had in that school was from playing a sport. So I joined the track team on a whim.

Not only did I turn out to be good at it, but it was also something that I was seeing steady improvement in. The more I practiced, the more I would show up, I would notice, "Oh, I have new muscles or my body is going faster than it used to."

At the same time, I was starting to amass a group of peers around me at my school, which was something that I didn’t have before. I knew I could walk down the hall with people who were not thinking terrible things about me or going to say something awful. I had allies and was starting to actually see myself less as an 'other', which played a big role in getting me to stick with running.

Fast-forwarding to the isolation of the pandemic, I joined a queer running group in New York City, and running again became my source of community, when I needed one outside of bars, outside of apps, and these toxic, transactional ways of meeting people.

At first, I was one of the only nonbinary people, and thought, "This is not for me. It’s for a very particular kind of gay man."

But sometimes the right people gravitate towards you, and I was met with a flood of being the featured nonbinary runner in publications and ads. I didn’t expect this visibility would be part of my story. But here we are.

There's been a lot of celebration and joy with a recent ad, where I really got to feel witnessed for who I was. It was beautiful. But by the same token, it attracted negative comments, which I want to preface with: anything that has been written negatively about me online, is not a thing anybody would say to my face.

I've heard everything from "you're in the pocket of Big Pharma" to "you're what's wrong with America" to "go cry to your therapist".

It reflects a deep fear and self-loathing people feel about themselves. When they see somebody who is comfortable in who they are, who is happy, and is embracing their joy, they go into a spiral of their own. So much so that they need to write about it – multiple times.

It troubles me how some people in the LGBTQ community say, "I've been married to my husband for 20 years. I've been a member of the gay community, and I don't associate with feminine people or trans people like you. I'm very uncomfortable around that."

It’s illuminating a larger conversation within the queer community: "How do we take care of our own and embrace our own? What are some stories we've internalized from the dominant society that make us self-policing?"

I take none of it personally. If you can get through a certain part of your adolescence and life, shouldering the negative comments being like, "Yeah, whatever, I'm going to do what I want," then as an adult it doesn't mean anything. But it is information, for sure.

When I run, I shape-shift to become this super human creature

When I run, I feel like I become this super human creature. It's as if my body grew wings, claws, these cool muscles, and I shape-shift into another machine running through the world. It's always had that big, epic, mythical feeling to it. And now, I just get to do it more freely. I get to do it in a skirt, or in a sports bra, and that makes it fun.

I won my first award as an adult last spring for this one race in Manhattan. I wore a tube top and tennis skirt while on the stage with the winners, holding my little trophy with my little tan lines too – it was cute.

My mom asked, "What does it feel like to do that, when you wear that up on that stage?"

I said, "It feels powerful.”

I would assume for people of other genders, that there are other ways that that power gets expressed. For me, it's owning that creature that I've always been, in a more visible way.

In the midst of the pandemic, I literally didn't know what to do with myself, so I started running on the reg. It was also when I was in the beginning phases of transitioning socially – new name, more feminine pronouns, wearing dresses and skirts – not as a special occasion, but just as a thing that I did every day. Once my body started to take a certain shape, suddenly it all just lined up: the clothes felt right, the body felt right, the expression felt right, the name felt right – so many things that started to lock together at once.

It's all headspace, right? Dysphoria can come from a myriad of different directions and social cues. But when we're in a good headspace, and our mind and our body are really synced up, it has way less power over how we exist day-to-day. It becomes easier for us to feel good about ourselves.

It takes a lot of energy to be the first representative of your kind

I've had so many moments, within the last like three years, living alone through the heart of the pandemic, being like, "I need some kind of sign outside of myself, that there is some purpose for all of this, for feeling all of these things that I'm feeling and going through what I'm going through."

In the last year, so many people and so many reflections of me and of my own heart have materialized in my life in ways that are just like screaming at me, "You are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone."

There's no way I could tell that to my younger self, and that they would believe me. The only thing I could say is "You have to keep going. You have to keep going."

I'm in the process of learning that it takes a lot of energy to be the first representative of your kind, in any space. It sometimes feels daunting and we might think "I don't want to have to do the work of explaining this, and this, and this to people. I don't want to have to take that on."

And that’s a legitimate feeling.

Personally, my experience is when we do go that extra step to explain who we are, or show up as who we are and live in the example of people like us, it does a lot for people who don't have the context, vocabulary or language on how to think about us. It does good and gives permission for more people to occupy that space. As a people, we just have to keep going.

We can feel frustrated, we can feel like people aren't seeing us for who we are. But the bottom line is, if you start a race, you got to finish it.

You wouldn't get so close to the finish line to tap out. So power over the finish line.

Decompressing from barriers in sports: What can I make of this situation?

Run group plays a big role in helping me decompress from the binary systems imposed on athletes – you go to run group, you catch up with your friends, you find out who's dating who, and you talk about other things.

For my job, I'm a singer, and a writer, and I feel like I get to channel a lot of the conversations that I'm having in this space into writing – these questions and moments that are coming up about internalized policing of the self, or how we show up for each other in community, even if we've never met before, and how we advocate.

Those are things that I carry when I sit with my notebook, or sit at the piano. I get to write out those feelings as art, and think about what that actually means in the scope of everyday life and living as a connected person in this world.

The effect that these anti-trans sports barriers have never really leaves me. But I do transform the energy from one that's more activated in how "I got to do something about this" to one that's more reflective in "What can I make or take from this situation?"

As trans and nonbinary athletes, we’re part of a larger network than we realize

I ran my first marathon a few months ago, and it was a marathon that was including nonbinary runners in in the race for the first time. I signed up, and I wrote to them beforehand to be like, "Hey, you have prize money for men and women, but you don't have prize money for nonbinary runners. What's the deal?"

I didn't hear a response. Still, I ran the race, and was sitting in the warming tent after, because it was freezing. I was going through this app to find my results but they only have results for men and women runners. I couldn’t find my race results, I didn’t know how I did, I was cold, tired, and hungry – I'd just run a marathon, and all of these feelings were coming up.

Turns out that the app could only support two genders in race reporting. All of the nonbinary runners, regardless of how they identified, were put in the men's category. This was a particular concern to me, because with the time that I got, I qualified for Boston – something I was really hoping to do. I was concerned that if I wasn't correctly reported, I wouldn’t qualify for the next race.

So I'm writing to my race team, and so many nonbinary running organizations and people wrote to the race directors on my behalf, when I felt like my voice was not being heard. It took three or four different groups of people pushing the button to get their attention.

What I take from that is that community has been so important. As trans and nonbinary athletes, we are part of a larger network than we even realize. We’re all seeking each other, and seeking to create those connections and allyships, because it really does take four different groups of people writing on our behalf to get the attention that is owed to us.