I can hear it ringing in my head.

I like to imagine that most who’ve seen Miracle can do the same. Kurt Russell, playing legendary coach Herb Brooks in the best film ever made about hockey, bellows at his Olympic team in a pivotal scene, personifying the culture that hockey strives for:

“When you pull on that jersey, you represent yourself and your teammates, and the name on the front is a hell of a lot more important than the one on the back! Get that through your head!”

I've come to identify as a “hockey person,” so I am well aware of the hard-headedness that can be found in ice rinks.

Over the course of 31 years of my life, I’ve worn many hats (and helmets) in hockey: player, fan, winger, junior league season-ticket holder, instructor, in-game host, center, critic, captain, assistant, defender, scratch, penalty killing specialist, power play net-front, pest, even goaltender, and now, writer.

However, my personal development, inside and outside the rink, drove me to a crossroads with the sport of hockey.

As NHL headlines scrolled in late 2022, when individual players made deliberate anti-LGBTQ+ statements by refusing to wear Pride uniforms, I found myself slipping into a chasm of questioning: at what point does putting the team — putting hockey — before yourself become problematic?

At what point does the resulting pain lead you to walk away? Or, more personally: if I identify as a hockey person, I probably can’t also be a trans woman … right?

I was fortunate to have Toronto-born neighbo(u)rs share their favorite pastime with me and other young Texans in suburban Dallas, where I first played street hockey around 1999, when the Stars lifted their only Stanley Cup.

By third grade, I had signed up for organized hockey and found my life's greatest love. I quickly understood that hockey was founded upon respect.

The binding thread for this shared activity — some of us grinders, others snipers, others shut-down defense, and then whatever the hell goalies are doing — the diversity of perspectives on the ice, the basis for respect across the hockey world.

Respect for your teammates, for your opposition, for your coaches and officials, and for yourself. Weapons strapped to your feet, you’re told to master this surface, relearn how to walk and run, before you can even compete.

From there, you're handed another weapon and told you can only swing it at the smallest object on the ice. The speed and the empowerment those weapons bestow inevitably culminate in the inherently violent sport of hockey, with bombastic collisions between sticks and pucks and boards and players.

The weapons, the ice surface, the mass in motion, also all bring increased risk.

Without respect, hockey probably would not be deemed safe for humans. And yet, hockey was my safe space. Growing up as an upper-middle-class white boy, I easily found a respectable niche in hockey. I earned respect for practice and skating stride-work excellence, relentless pressure and body contact (despite consistently being one of the smallest players), and a jabber jaw ready to offer an honest analysis for my own game or that of any other player.

Like so many people this sport sinks its claws into, I embraced the physicality and reactivity, the depth of camaraderie, and the endorsement of sacrifice and grit.

Quite the visceral safe space, born of body contact and brouhahas, but if anything, to me, it felt real. You work hard at the rink, and you get rewarded.

Hockey is not yet for everyone, sadly.

I had seen the treatment of marginalized individuals and groups within hockey spaces. Not everyone gains respect for simply stepping on the ice. As I was ingrained deeper and deeper within the hockey ecosystem, even before feeling confident enough to speak up, I saw a glaring lack of respect.

My favorite players are typified by unmatched work ethic on the ice, so when I championed players like Richard Park, Manny Malhotra, and Wayne Simmonds growing up, I received derisive comments from teammates, but it was nothing compared to the racial comments used toward those players.

Granted, I got to pick my conversations and go back to being a white forechecker. Those non-white forecheckers faced discrimination for simply existing in hockey spaces.

Being in locker rooms, I’d hear teammates berate the handful of girls seen at tryouts or on other teams; hear them describe how they would go out of their way to body-check any girl, if only to prove their mettle on the ice. I've seen the same stain, gross rites of passage, replicated online and in-person, with men gatekeeping hockey knowledge and fandom from girls and women.

I'm well aware of hockey's longstanding history with homophobic and misogynistic language and actions. In naïveté, I used those words just as frivolously as a youth before swearing off the stuff (and sticking to tried and true, gender-neutral curse words – I am still a hockey player!).

Even before maturing to understand intersectionality in adulthood, I could see and understand why Indigenous and people of color, women, or anyone of queer identity would not feel safe or comfortable in such a space.

That hit closer and closer to home as I came to understand that I was one of those queer people myself.

What’s Left to Prove

I have slowly but surely lost respect for hockey, and for that part of my identity.

The torment of being perfectly acceptable up until my personal life clicked is searing. The self-loathing is visceral: why give up the safety and comforts of being white male-presenting? Can’t I remove my mascara, take out my earrings, dress androgynously and skirt the discomfort of feeling someone doesn’t want me there?

Why the hell is it now, at the visible pinnacle of homophobia and transphobia occurring in the NHL, with the league protecting a handful of bigots at the expense of social acceptance of LGBTQ+ communities, that I’ve come to this point? Why do I feel the need to prove myself in hockey?

Ask a hockey player why they block shots or play through pain. Ask a youth hockey player why they aren’t afraid to body-check players literally twice their size. Ask a Texas pest how they walked onto a university club team and rose from sixth-line forward to third-line grinder before drinking it all away.

Ask why I keep returning to this sport when it continues to shove the knife deeper, dismantling the heart that only wants to be given to hockey. This pain is like the lingering ailments that derail so many of our sport’s stars. I feel continually compelled to take stock of whether I can play through the pain, whether there could be some surgical action or within myself and my values, or if I needed to hang up the skates and walk away.

Since that first street hockey game in the late-90s Texas heat, until two days after I came out as a trans woman to my family on Valentine's Day of this year, I identified as a hockey person first. That changed on Feb. 16, when Anson Carter penned a piece in The Players’ Tribune. The NHL veteran of 11 years clearly laid out that it's not about what a hockey player is expected to look like or be.

What makes a hockey player a hockey player is that they play hockey. Here on the same screen that I am typing out this screed, Carter’s words empowered me for the first time as a queer person in hockey.

Here was evidence in the hockey world that being trans and being a hockey player are not incongruent.

To be a hockey person, you just need to be involved in hockey. It's taken serious time for me to compose this message, at least eight months.

How do you come out to an entity like sport?

My hockey hero and former coach still has not replied to messages sent in late February, describing who I've come to understand that I am.

Being a “hockey person” in the traditional sense sadly means that I have no expectation that I will ever receive a response. But hockey’s connection to the past can only take it so far.

And to be fair to my coach, they’ve probably never met a trans person within hockey spaces.

It’s easy to be afraid of things you don’t understand, and it’s hard to understand anything you aren’t in close proximity with.

So honestly, this is the only thing I have left to prove to capital-H Hockey: I identify as a trans woman and as a hockey person. I am part of this community, and, unless otherwise notified, I am not leaving. I am here to progress and grow, and help the sport I love do the same.

As our content manager often repeats during stressful times:I can’t change hockey if I leave it.