‘We Just Made History’: The Story of Hockey’s First Ever Team Trans - How a group of 17 trans athletes came together to make history.
On a Friday in a little Cambridge, Massachusetts, ice arena, as a gaggle of middle schoolers lingered after a game and two men’s league teams were taking the ice, 17 hockey players were huddled in a corner, getting ready to make history.
Jessica Platt’s excitement shone in her eyes as her teammates on Team Trans, perhaps the first-ever all trans hockey team to play a game together, dug through a stack of blue and pink uniforms to find their own. Platt, a 30-year-old former CWHL player, said she had stopped playing hockey in her early 20s because she was uncomfortable with the overly masculine attitudes of the male players who surrounded her. “I pretty much had to be careful how I presented myself,” she said. “I got really good at putting on the facade of who I thought I needed to be, and I tried to stick to that as closely as I could when I was in that area. I was a little bit more myself around my friends, but definitely not in the hockey scene.”
Platt traveled from Toronto to play with Team Trans, which was taking part in the 2019 Friendship Series tournament hosted in November of that year by Boston Pride Hockey, New England’s largest LGBT hockey association (not to be confused with the Boston Pride of the NWHL). About five years before, she finally felt comfortable enough with her transition to enter a women’s locker room and return to hockey. Though she had never met many of her new teammates, they bonded quickly around the familiar fear and anxiety they had felt to play a game they loved.
th-803544781.jpg
th-2307701418.jpg
th-2307701418.jpg
th-153098765.jpg
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/w...=pocket-newtab