After top surgery, I started running as a volunteer for a youth organisation, where I suggested that we should have a mechanism for helping trans youth with their mental health.

Running really helped my confidence and my self esteem. It made me feel more productive and better overall so I thought it'd be really good for young people to have a chance to engage with that as well, and it's been going really well.

My understanding of this comes from when I was a teenager, and many of the young people that I work with have mentioned similar experiences – that being in school is really hard because of how everything is gendered.

If you have physical education, you have the ‘girls room’ and the ‘boys room’ and usually that means that you will get split by what sports you're allowed to do as well. When I was at school, girls couldn't do javelin, rugby, contact sports and baseball.

The school was like, "Oh, you can't do that. You can do rounders, and you can do tag football or indoor basketball."

It was just weird.

So I thought we could work with some young people who would benefit from spending some time outside, getting some fresh air, being able to communicate with people about their needs, while learning how to run safely in a binder, or running safely while maybe having other things going on.

A year and a half later, they still meet and run every week. It's done a lot of good for then to have access to sports.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]