Somewhere right around adolescence, I lost the word "tomboy" - it's that rare gift of a word in our language, insofar as it is descriptive, apt, known, positive. But by the time I was twelve or so, it wasn't possibly to wriggle out of the expectations of being a girl by shrugging and saying I was a tomboy. So I had to find something new.
Thus began my time being a jock.
I took aspects of this identity and put them on my character, Ron, in Continental Divide. Ron is a basketball player and has been his whole life. When he lived as a girl, he was viewed as a top-tier player. But once he transitioned, he went from being seen as athletic and strong to being kind of small and wimpy. It's a massive shift in identity.
For me, I wasn't ever a "natural" athlete. I wanted to be. But primarily, sports were a place where I could be aggressive and strong as a girl and not be scolded. I played soccer and basketball and ran track in middle school. When I went off to boarding school, I was introduced to ice hockey and lacrosse and played goalie on the varsity teams in both sports. I don't think I was particularly good. What I really liked was lifting weights, training hard, putting on the padding, getting to wear a helmet.
So there I am in this picture, in all my hockey gear, my hair grown long and in its perpetual ponytail. I think in this picture, I am in the middle of my 11th grade year. I am out to myself and my friends as a lesbian. I am sweating my way through pre-calculus and US History.
In a year's time, I will be living as a boy, but I will still be playing ice hockey on this girls' team. With short hair, there will be games when I take off my helmet at the end and the other team will protest: no fair, you have a boy on your team. It will make me smile. And a year after that, I will be off in college, and I will make the decision not to play on a women's team... It will seem like too much of a compromise as I try to forge my life as a boy. (I will relent, in my senior year, and play a season on the ice hockey team at Harvard.)
Being a jock as a girl was wonderful, and I missed that feeling of athleticism and strength and camaraderie tremendously when I came out. As a guy, being athletic is something entirely different... it's a fancy game around status, identity, and ego that feels entirely alien. And it's something that both I and Ron, my protagonist, try to negotiate as trans-men.