A lot of people don't care to hear the stories of trans athletes, or look at the evidence. I hope that the people debating about us can realize that we're fucking people.

If your issue is that there might be a 'disadvantage' in competing for scholarships, I think your issue really is that we should have free education, instead of playing some type of Hunger Games thing, where we presume that some might have an 'advantage'.

There's so much to this that could be debated away.

One of the arguments against someone like me is that, "Trans women have bigger frames."

But there's plenty of cis women with big frames -- are we going to disallow them from competition?

That's the thing -- no one's really arguing in good faith. They just see something they don't understand and want to exclude them. They see us living our best life, and want to drag us down with them because their life is miserable.

When I was trying to pass as cisgender, I was miserable. I found my joy, and now people want to take that away from me, and it pisses me off.

I hope that we can just find a way to include trans athletes and especially trans youth athletes. That's such a hard time in their life, and to try and take away something that might spark joy for them. It's tragic.

I would want trans youth to know: "As hard as it seems right now, this is the safest, best, most accepting time for trans people in history. It's hard, and here's pushback and all that jazz. But at the end of the day, the future is going to be looking a little brighter. That horizon is on its way. So just keep at it."

It's very easy to get caught up in a lot of the nonsense and the negativity out there. But it really is a good time. As long as we keep fighting, it's just gonna get better for us. So we got to press on.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]