I used to have a t-shirt that said, “Hockey is Life, the rest is just details.” Well, I was much younger back then… The details are everything now; and hockey has been a casualty until now.

A lot has happened in my life since I have written anything personal here. That simply playing hockey with my friends is such a big deal is but a hint. I used to play all the time, but as my feminine life took over, anything that required me to assume a male role kinda fell by the wayside. Now, as you can see by the photos, hockey no longer requires me to be a guy. And, reading between the lines, the other message is that all my old guy friends know that I am transgender and have been wonderful in accepting me and keeping me involved in our group.

No small thing that. How lucky can a girl get to have such lovely friends?

So, for those who have been following me for a while, that’s one piece of big news: I’m out! No more secrets!

The backstory to that is that I want to be out. That’s a big and long story that will have to come out in a series of posts.

But, returning to the hockey thing for a minute – I have to confess that I can’t help but feel a bit weird about playing hockey with my old friends.

We have known each other for a long time and my relationships with each of them and as a group have evolved patterns of their own that may not be appropriate any more. I think we are all conscious of that, and we go back and forth between falling into those “ruts in the ice” and remembering that we need to check ourselves.

But, more significantly, I am not one of the guys any more and I don’t want to be. I’m a woman, and I am quite certain that none of my old friends truly thinks of me as female. I know that no matter how wonderful a girl I am, I would not be part of this group and I wouldn’t belong in this group but for the fact that I was their guy friend before, and on some psychological level still am. In actuality, I don’t belong in the group, no matter how much we all try to make it seem normal – no woman does.

And, I am not about to allow anyone to mistake me for the guy that I was, so yeah, I felt I had to wear makeup. To be fair, it wasn’t just for their benefit; there is a fear I have of losing myself in my formerly male pursuits, and the knowledge that I had on bright red lipstick, to match my jersey made me feel better, as did the gentle waft of my perfume. Silly, I know.

I wonder if all of this will somehow evolve or something and sort itself out, or whether it is a nice try, but will fizzle out.