I experienced a lot of toxic masculinity, just from being around a lot of Type-A, super dominant masc men.

I got a lot of toxic masculine traits imprinted onto me, that I carry around and am trying to unlearn now myself.

In the soccer world, anyone can play soccer, you don't have to technically be intelligent for it. So there there are a lot of really weird coaches running around in these circles.

I've had a lot of coaches throughout the years who have made really bad comments about my body, or my playing style, and tried to compare me with my men teammates on dimensions that were really inappropriate.

They generally tokenized me and took advantage of having me on the team by saying, "Oh, see, we have a girl who plays on the national team. Look at how great of a coach I am."

When they didn't really do anything to have me there. Nor did they let me play or give me enough playing time, or support me as much as they should have.

So it's been like a lot of tokenizing, and people love always hearing the story of, "Oh, I was the one girl on a guy's team, and I had an awesome experience. I was one of the bros."

Yes, but it's not easy. There's a lot that goes through your head every single day. There have been lots of practices where I was crying, and didn't want to go because I didn't feel comfortable on teams.

I moved around a lot, switching to different guys' team because as I got older, the culture would get more toxic as the guys were realizing that I was eventually going to have to switch anyway.

I had to continuously justify and explain my existence, when I should have just been accepted. They should’ve been happy to see some diversity on their team because otherwise these teams are super heterogenous.

Still, it did open a lot of opportunities, so I don't want to completely discount the entire experience.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]