I first discovered ice hockey in college, and later got to meet Team Trans – the first all transgender ice hockey team in the world (and not the only one anymore, which is fantastic).

The uniqueness of Team Trans immediately reignited my love for hockey and made me a lot more comfortable with the sport. I've been playing regularly again, and go to every event.

Finding that family has been arguably one of the highest points of my entire sports career, and I’ve been exploring other queer spaces while getting out of the more toxic masculine spaces that were just not personable for me, because I just don't have a lot in common.

When I started playing flag football, I hadn't played since high school, back when I hadn’t been very good at it. My growth spurt happened in college, and I’d stopped playing before I grew a little bit taller, before I could run a little bit quicker.

I started playing for the San Francisco Women's Flag Football league, and there was a little bit of transphobia at first but that quickly was addressed and went away. It's been a lot of fun because it's a sport that I am very knowledgeable about but had stopped playing.

It’s also been great to be playing sports in spaces that are either explicitly trans in the case of Team Trans, or are queer like the Earthquakes.

I am the only woman on the Earthquakes if I remember correctly, so that is a fairly masculine locker room but it also is a fairly queer locker room, which makes that a little bit more of a safe space.

For the San Francisco League, there aren't locker rooms or anything, you just show up for an intramural league type of thing.

I'd say the only place that I still kind of encounter some of the more toxic notions of masculinity are if I sub for a different adult hockey team. It's something that I've kind of gotten to live with.