I can't speak for trans masculine or non-binary folks, but in my experience as a trans woman, the biggest barriers I’ve faced in sports are men's locker rooms.

I started playing sports at a very young age – from soccer and baseball to martial arts, for some 15 years. I was never 100 percent comfortable in a locker room, going back all the way to high school – it just wasn't quite the right place for me. The banter wasn't for me, the masculinity wasn't for me, and that was definitely significant in impacting my understanding of gender identity and expression.

I found hockey in college and within a couple of years, I was playing, coaching and refereeing – I was eating it up. Then my transition started and some of those things started to fall off, in part because of time but also the locker room attitudes.

I just wasn't comfortable in some of those situations anymore.

When I was starting to come out, I remember being in a hockey locker room, and hormones started doing their thing. I started wearing a sports bra to hockey and a friend of mine was like, "Why does it look like you're wearing a sports bra?"

And I was like, "Uh, cuz I am."

This wasn't an attack by any means – thankfully the response was, "Oh, okay, cool."

But, there's a lot of discomfort that comes from that suddenness of a moment like that.

Locker rooms are made unwelcoming by cis male athletes and many cis males period, who tie their masculinity to sports.

They tie being good at football, to how good of a man they are. There’s often a direct comparison of, "Hey, my manhood depends on being good at sports" or, in worst cases, "My manhood depends on my child being good at sports."

It creates this bravado, candidly bullshit, environment that just isn't welcoming to anybody who isn't that cis-normative male pedestal person.

[Continued under ‘Support’]