I was raised Christian, and there are a lot of things in Abrahamic religions that are very confining, in my experience. In college, I studied comparative religions and part of my study was to purposely be in other cultures – going to a Buddhist temple, spending time in a Sikh's service, and learning all these different cultures and experiences.

The more I studied, the more I saw how fluid the spirit is in Eastern mythology, and learning about the transformation of various gods made me think about myself as a person.

In religion, there's specific rules in order to be part of a certain religion, which is why more of the younger generations coming up, are claiming to be more spiritual, not religious. Part of that is because people see religion as very conservative, very rigid, and that there's no space for coexistence.

Similarly as athletes, we get placed into rigid boxes that prevent us from seeing the true athlete and the true potential of the athlete. Yoga facilitated my ability as an athlete to see athletes beyond the binary, and beyond the rigid boundaries of each sport and movement in general.

People see trans or nonbinary athletes as outside of the rules they’ve attached to sports because they're like, "There are very specific rules of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, and we must fit in this context."

If you go outside of that binary context it "confuses'' people, because we are conditioned based on the ‘traditions’ we’re surrounded by.

But there's so much variability if you look at sports culturally. In Europe, it's football and in America, it's soccer. So what determines the ‘correct term? Is it based on time? Is it based on who did it first? Or is it based on these specific rules and regulations, that are always changing depending on where you are?

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]