I started skating by joining a roller derby team at the end of 2018 and later got into park skating, which got me my first skate sponsor in 2021. In the quad scene, there are only four or five trans women or trans femme skaters who have a sponsor, so it's humbling to be among only a handful of us who have one.

But navigating the scrutiny that the cis-het gaze puts on trans trailblazers is hard. I don't do a lot of competitions and there's couple of reasons for that.

I don't know if it’s in my head, but I do feel that as a trans woman, I have to work almost twice as hard to gain the same recognition as a cis-presenting woman skater would.

I don't want my hobby to turn into something that is a competition. I don’t want there to be a burden of pushing only towards the competition instead of pushing towards actually enjoying it, having fun, seeing how much I can do and how far my body can go.

For a long time, I was a lot more reckless than I had the talent for, which brought me a lot of recognition. I've been able to do a jubilee video where they were talking about cis versus trans athletes, and got to fly out to LA to do that.

I got interviewed by some companies who did trans spotlights and I've been able to draw some awareness to the skate community, which has been great.

For the most part, quad roller skating is fairly progressive. It hasn't been absolutely terrible, but you do have older school style skaters that definitely scrutinize you for being a transgender individual.

I think that changes geographically as well. I'm on the East Coast, so it's not as prominent of a skating scene as the West Coast or Florida would be. So it's definitely been hard, but it's also brought a lot of really cool experiences along the way.

[To be continued under ‘Support’]