Practicing sports should be empowering, strengthening, inclusive. It shouldn’t be such a fight for anyone to take even the first steps into any type of sport. If you want to keep sports fair and honest, like so many anti-trans voices out there claim, you welcome trans and intersex people – both in amateur and elite sports. Banning someone from participation is as far removed from the olympic mindset as can be.
Full of energy from feeling suppressed by society’s expectations for an entire decade, I became visible and decided to dedicate my life to making the world a more queer friendly place.
One day after Trans Day of Visibility, Els Van Doesburg, alderman of N-VA and new columnist of De Morgen, decides to open an attack on trans athletes. Her starting point? Reducing trans women to mediocre men’s bodies who will walk away with medals in women’s competitions. A bad 1 April joke that calls for a basic lesson in gender and sport.
In the meantime, I am 27 years old and since mid-March I have been telling my loved ones and the outside world that I fall in love with men and not women. Quite a step, which was accompanied by doubts and a little fear. After my first conversations with the team and my loved ones, it turned out that this was unnecessary. For people who experience the same fear as I do, I would like to tell my story.