Every morning I get to pick up an oar is an afternoon I can do anything

As an athlete there are times you don't mind being a threat.

When you're trying to win it is okay to let the ruthlessness take over in the moment. Competition thrives on that moment when you know you're going to come out ahead of your opponent and you leverage it. Winning certainly isn't everything, and desiring nothing but it can be toxic. But, for some of us we do in fact play to win.

Just showing up however, the last thing I want to feel like is a threat.

But, for our new government I apparently don't have a choice in the matter. My desire to play sports deems me a threat because how dare I?

You see, being transgender and wanting to play sports means you've potentially played for both men's and women's teams. Transitioning implies a presence that defies the binary nature of how sport is categorized. We have men's and women's teams separated for important reasons.

Sport as we know it was reserved for only certain classes of people when it began to be organized - men. Then as time went on we allowed women access to these spaces and then created parallel structures for them to compete alongside the existing power structures. Inherently, the way we organized sport was for men to be the dominant group on the hierarchical structure. Its why we don't call many pro leagues "men's sports" but do call make sure to call their counterparts "women's sports."

Since men's sports were established first and organized the way they were, there have been few considerations for mixed gender sports or using different groups to categorize how sports teams are formed. Thus, for transfeminine people such as myself, transitioning from men's sports to women's sports is seen as purposefully moving down the gender hierarchy of sports and purposefully putting myself in a position to prey on weaker competition. To compensate for this thinking, sport organizers largely adopted strict criteria for transfeminine athletes to medicalize themselves in order to shape their bodies into what a perceived cisgender female athlete is like to compete fairly.

This perceived fairness is where our new government comes in. For years, debates have raged about how transgender athletes fit in with our sport structure and how and where they should be able to compete to ensure a level playing field. These debates have gone from elite sport to whether or not - at least in the United States - it is fair for young amateur school students should be allowed to compete with other students that match their gender identity. Government officials are now deciding if school sports teams - some of which may lead to potential college scholarships for sports - should have trans people on them if those trans students want to be around their peers.

For Republicans, this should not be allowed. Trans people's gender that they identify with does not matter. Whatever sex a doctor assigns a baby at birth is what they should be locked into. In what is said on documents. In facilities they can use. In sports, for fairness.

I remember the moment that my suicidality almost crossed that threshold into actuality, the most vivid.

I was standing over my roommate's desk, opening one of his drawers. That's where he kept his prescription pills. I was just going to empty whatever he had in there into my mouth and then ride whatever happened. For some reason, I paused. In my mind I knew I did not want to die, despite the last week of negative emotions trying to nudge me in that direction.

I was only 19. A sophomore in college. Staring at the abyss.

Knowing I had to either act now or my roommate would return, I realized that in a few minutes I would be late for crew practice. Despite suffering a total mental health breakdown weeks before final exams, its all I could focus on. I had gotten injured that year, and coach said a rower was useless doing nothing so he put me - a six foot two one hundred and thirty pound lanky mess - in the coxswain's seat that winter break hoping to make use of me for the spring semester. I was horrid at it, utterly incapable of juggling keeping a crew of people in time while steering a boat. But, I wasn't doing anything else and this kept me engaged and around the team while I worked with doctors to rehab a back injury.

I was not going to be racing in our two national championship caliber regattas, all that was left in a lost season for me. Yet, I still came to practice anyway. A dutiful teammate was something I prided myself on being. I had missed most of my novice year with a bout of mono and now I had utterly wrecked my back. I was even planning on studying abroad next year, knowing I'd miss another semester of rowing. Still, that didn't matter. You had practice at a certain time, and you damn well showed up because that's what teammates did.

So, I closed the drawer door and got changed. I still wasn't speaking to my friends - that week in 2011 I filtered all communications to people that cared about me through my roommate during my breakdown. It would take me some time to get over what had caused me to withdraw in such a messy way, but I had practice and I was not going to miss it when I did not have an excuse. That's what you did: you showed up when it mattered.

In short, rowing saved my life. I'm still here to relay this story.

The first time I shared with people how having rowing practice stopped my most credible suicide attempt they were shocked.

People did not expect the brash, cocky rower to actually be someone who struggled with intrusive thoughts wanting to die all the time. In the days after people would come up to me saying "I'm so sorry I missed this, I would have helped if I had knew," and all I could think was, well, I made it so you wouldn't know. That was the goal.

I have shared that story in the years since, many times over. Usually when I'm talking about sports and how liking sports has dominated my personality. For me, sports are personal. They have kept me alive.

Being on a team is something I take very seriously. Rowing, as a sport is designed to push people to the brink. But to be good at it you need to be in perfect sync, lest you just become a group of people moving in the same directly slightly off kilter.

The sport has instilled discipline in me, shaped my bodies in ways that I have felt control over while going through the last vestiges of a puberty that I didn't ask for and left me misshapen and afraid. Sharing that sport with others has been one of the joys that keeps me going.

Yet, our government wants to make it so that people like me - transgender people - don't get to participate on teams with people that are like us. In the name of fairness because of some concerns that I may be better than my peers because of how I went through puberty, regardless of what came after.

I am a good rower. I work damn hard to go faster than those around me. Not because of some innate skill, because I want to. Because I know how to push myself and turn off the pain in my brain to ensure that when we race I'm one meter ahead of you. Not because I was assigned male at birth and had a testosterone-fueled puberty.

My collegiate rowing experience was six semesters of mediocrity, and two semesters of being an athlete. That did not make me into the machine I strive to be on the water. My drive did.

But, because some people still view transness and its implications through a theoretical lens, there is a "debate" over the perceived fairness of transitioning and competing. Those not vocally aligned with the incoming Republican government, have taken bad actor concerns and let it warp their view of how gender and sports mix because of this notion of fairness.

Elite sports are not fair. They never have been. The whole point is to create a field and let those who have shown they can push themselves furthest fight each other to see who is at the top. Just getting there means overcoming more obstacles than the general person should not know exists.

We impose rules and order on this chaotic system because we want people to want to participate. And then we sell it as entertainment, and that sale and the vested interest behind them is what drives this need for perception.

I do not love bringing up my own life to try and convey just how bad potential anti-trans laws are in the United States.

I've got a robust support system, have actively been working through my mental health challenges and am in a sport where in the U.S. at least there is a governing body that wants trans people to be rowers at least at the masters level where I compete.

I also hate bringing up my past suicidality as a way to show the stakes for something as simple as sports are higher than anyone realizes.

Suicide is a weird thing to write about, and suicidality is a weird thing to live with. I don't like that my brain tells me to end my own life. I also know I have the tools to make sure this does not come to pass. Yet, for others they may not be this lucky. Especially with a policy that targets children and college students, looking for an outlet during one of the most formative times of their lives. I still am very close with many of the people I rowed with in college. Including some who were on the team that year I was at my lowest. One was in my wedding party!

But for some reason sports are clearly one of the last areas of society where people unequivocally view trans people as the gender they identify as. While the fairness doctrine reigns supreme with justification, for many going down this route means seeing me as a different person the second I start competing for a sports team because I went through a male puberty. Nevermind that my endocrine system looks like that is very much like that of a cisgender woman when I get blood tests. Because I went through a certain type of development from the ages 12 to 21, for a lot of people in society I cannot compete as a woman in a leisure activity I take very seriously.

I've always believed sport to be a reflection of a society's culture in how its organized and shown. Here, people are more worried about a potential trans person using a locker room changing area to cause harm, rather than uproot a culture of abuse that has taken over youth sports and made a recreational activity into a billion dollar industry and for many the only opportunity to reach certain educational opportunities. They are also worried that cisgender people will lose access to the benefits elite sport gives because a trans person will take their place. No one likes to admit that the celebrations of sporting valor we lionize are built on the backs of those who are defeated along the way. There aren't stories told of the losers of the middling games that many have to go through before they can compete for championships. But those athletes have stories, and many of those stories are they just weren't ever going to become the best of the best. And that's okay. Getting the opportunity to play, and to compete and grow as a person? Everyone should have access to that.

Is using a panic over a certain class of marginalized people potentially having success in that area to police their lives in a stricter sense worth it? To preserve a certain measure of what sports should be the answer is unequivocally yes for many, without considering the knock on effects of how this definition of trans people could be expanded to many other areas of daily life.

That terrifies me in the sense that if someone can define me as a man the second I step on a soccer field, what is to say they cannot define me as a man elsewhere even if it runs counter to public opinion? The answer is there is much to say, I feel like.

But what also terrifies me, is what my life would have been like if I did not have a sports team to fall back on? Why are we trying to make it harder for anyone to have that access, especially some of the most vulnerable kids in America today?