I’m in an ongoing journey with body image because there's a particular type of way you're expected to look that conforms with gender, along with fatphobic notions of what fitness looks like.

For example, while I was playing actively I was pretty fit, and that isn’t the case right now. I wasn’t the lean, tall, six-pack dudes that athletes are expected to be, and there was continuous pressure even when I was fit, to look that way.

We'd have coaches every like month, who would ask us to take off our shirts to physically show how much we have transformed our bodies, and how much we’re working towards those set ideals.

I was always dead-scared of them because I was doing whatever training was expected of me, but I wouldn't show the same results – different people's bodies work in different ways.

This is baggage I'm still working through, where right now, I want to motivate myself to be fitter, but I don't want to motivate myself not to be slightly chubby.

There's a lot of conditioning that I have to unlearn.

If you give me a blank canvas, I would want all these spaces to be gender-free. For some of us, we're queer because gender means something very specific to us. For some of us, we're queer because maybe gender means nothing at all.

But I think I would like to see a genderless sporting world where none of those categories are important – a space to be yourself, to do something you love, to challenge yourself.

None of those are incompatible with a genderless sporting arena.

I don't see that as proximate, but I do see that women's sports across geography has certainly less of a lot of the gendered norms I found in my teams.

Sports gives me enjoyment and balance, but little scarred and I would be scared if I had to go back to an all-men’s sport.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta]