I am cisfem, I wrestled for 6 years ending my junior year after copious amounts of harassment and a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against one of my coaches. Fun! We moved around a lot so I experienced a lot of attitudes around it. Not all bad, some of my coaches were super into having me, one was having a baby daughter with his wife and followed my career to the end! I’m sure she knows all about me!

These days there are girl’s programs for that all over the place, but back then my choice was to be on a boy’s team or, if offered (never was) gymnastics was supposed to be a physically equivalent sport if the school had both, so had I gone somewhere big with both gymnastics and wrestling I could have never gone nearly to state in wrestling and been offered tryouts for the olympics.

I didn’t place well enough, because I come from a shitty country that trains people in yokel wrestling and not what they do everywhere else, but that’s not the point. I didn’t want to do gymnastics, I’m not coordinated. I have no interest in something where I can fall and hurt myself, other than climbing trees and short buildings. I’d never have been good enough to try out for the olympics as a gymnast. Most of my wins were mat technique or pins, and I created a cradle nobody could mimic or get out of if they got into it, because they were too lanky to have leverage, because they were adolescent boys, I had flexibility and “stopped growing at 12 and started training” short girl muscle.

Thanks for letting me rave about my long past history :)