As a kid growing up in Midwest America, there was always an equal playing field for Chris Mosier. He felt confident anywhere he could score a goal, cross a finish line or make a play. The minute he stepped up to compete, the only distinction between him and any other athlete was ability. “At any point in my life, regardless if I was confused about who I was or if I didn’t know the language of what I felt, the one identifier that never changed was ‘athlete,'” he says. No matter how his hair was cut, what clothes he wore or if people called him “he” or “she” – there was no confusion about his competitive edge.

But decades later, when he qualified for the 2016 Team USA roster at the sprint duathlon national championship and became the first out transgender man to make a U.S. National Team, the place where Chris Mosier’s athletic prowess was valued over his personal pronoun – that equal playing field–changed. “Suddenly, the most gratifying area of my life became the most contentious area of my life,” he says.

It’s not the anatomy that matters, it’s the hormones

Locker rooms he’d been using for years were suddenly inaccessible. The pool where lap lengths had stretched into miles of training shorted him admission. At a Team USA qualifying race in North Carolina in June (which decides the 2017 roster), Mosier couldn’t even use the restroom due to thecurrently standing HB2 law. He was the same person, the same athlete, but one sentence had changed everything. “I knew that the minute I said, ‘I’m a trans athlete,’ that I would never get away from it,” he says. “But I asked myself, ‘Why does it matter?’ Well, it matters because there was no one else out there saying it.”

Image: Photo by Phillip Lee.