Why community sport matters so much to me as a trans woman

Roxy Tickle says playing sport as a transgender woman has ‘very likely saved my life’.

I am a woman, a trans woman if you prefer, but a woman nonetheless.

I was born with a body that didn’t match the way that I was meant to interact with the world around me. It was decades before words were coined that I could use to understand and describe myself. The bodily incongruence was confusing and discomforting and led to decades of chronic depression and a strong reluctance to interact with the world around me.

One of the few ways that I was able to interact with the world was through playing the glorious game of field hockey. I don’t remember ever not playing hockey when I was young. Minkey and junior hockey weren’t yet a thing, so I played backyard hockey with my family until I was old enough to play in the local competition in my mid teens.

My parents both played. Most of my aunts and uncles on my father’s side played. In fact, so many of my relatives played hockey in our small town, there was for a time a local mixed hockey team called The Tickles. Hockey was part of my family’s DNA. None of us were particularly talented, as I recall, but it gave us all great pleasure.

I played with four clubs between the ages of 16 and 26 as I moved from home to the University of Sydney. I then had a two-year break from hockey when I travelled overseas, apart from a single delightful game for a club in Yorkshire, England with a friend that I met whilst walking the West Highland Way in Scotland.

Roxy at hockey practice.

When I returned to Australia two years later, I fully expected to return to hockey. Yet I couldn’t. I tried. I failed. It took another 20 years to fully come to terms with being transgender. I was then finally able to admit to myself how uncomfortable I was playing in a men’s hockey team and being in the men’s change rooms. The sounds, the smells, the language, the personal interactions - everything except for the actual hockey had felt foreign to me. I hadn’t really belonged at all. I was just there.

My gender transition was a tumultuous time for me and those around me. It was unreasonably expensive in terms of money and time. It led to much stress and anxiety. I lost friends. Some members of my family had great difficulty in accepting my transition, which has resulted in estrangement. I am hoping over time these rifts will be repaired.

Roxy (back row, fourth from left) and her hockey team.

Community sport is exactly that - a sport played by a community. I am now very content playing in our lowest graded women’s hockey team, spending time with my female teammates, both on and off the field, and dare I say it, using the women’s change rooms. My team and clubmates enjoy my company too. There is no doubt that they consider me one of them. They even offered to adopt me when they heard of my family estrangement.

Joining my hockey club and playing as a woman very likely saved my life. I belong somewhere, finally. That the so-called Save Women’s Sport bill was crafted to take away from me the contentment and joy that took me nearly a lifetime to find is devastating. Utterly devastating. Please make it go away.

The Save Women’s Sports bill is a private member’s bill introduced to the Senate by Liberal Senator Claire Chandler seeking to exclude transgender women from participating in women’s sports. It has not received official government backing.