“Ex-Lesbian Soccer Player”

I got asked to leave my lesbian soccer team today. I feel bereft of identity and community. I had definitely begun to feel and see the changes in my body…but I hadn’t expected the only community I’ve felt comfortable in to ask me to remove myself because of my changes. Even though I have always known I am not a female on the inside, it was the lesbian women that let me feel at home, the tough ones and the feminine ones. I was just a queer to them and that was ok with me too.

Now I stand on the outskirts of the only community that held me. It seems so stupid, a stupid soccer team. But we were the only soccer team that came together as a gay social group, not really having any soccer experience, and played against the competitive lifers. We did something healthy and positive with our little group instead of the repetitive bars and parties. We were always talking politics and the shitty discriminatory policies of the local and federal government and here they go being hypocrites!!! Kickin me out because now I’m different. They marginalized me out of our marginal sub culture! I am pissed and sad and confused and betrayed.

I have tried to venture in to some of the transgender groups, b

ut haven’t found acceptance there yet either. According to them I wasn’t yet legit. My body hadn’t changed enough yet. There is a hierarchy in there eyes, those that go farther with transitioning, getting top surgery and bottom surgery, are better. You are a lesser transgender if you only do one, or none and just take hormones. I had no idea when I began my tradition that there would be so many partitioned identities I would have to wade through and negotiate to find one that “they” allowed me to have.

I had no idea there would be so many margins within what I thought were already small margins. 

I feel that I will always remain a queer. QUEER for life!! I hope I can find people that accept this label as enough. No matter what stage of transition I get to, or what I used to  or will be. I am queer, which to me, just means different then what most perceive as socially mainstream. It is a umbrella label that allows room for creativity the entire spectrum of the rainbow and beyond. 

Maybe I’ll start a QUEER soccer team, for anyone who feels to the outside of center! 

This is a fictional story that is an extension of an example of a person being rejected from an already marginalized group because of her changing gender from the book Queer Latinidad by Juana Rodriguez. It is my attempt to give a voice to someone who didn’t get to speak for herself in the context of the book.  

“Spring 1997. An FTM member of the women’s soccer team Las Diablitas is asked to leave after members of the team and the league complained that his newly emerging, hormone-enhanced, transmale body disqualified him from playing in a women’s league,” (p.44).