PORTLAND, Ore. — The football trainer regarded out at two dozen or so of his gamers and felt anxiety path via him like a rip present. His center pounded, and his voice felt unsteady.
Kaig Lightner (pronounced “Cage,” a phonetic shortening of his initials — Okay and J) have been pondering of this second because the summer season of 2013 when he based the Portland Community Football Club, a program for instructing football to most commonly first- and second- -generation immigrant formative years who lived in his town’s maximum distressed neighborhoods.
In the 4 years since, Coach Kaig had transform a pal, an best friend or even, to a couple of his gamers, a father determine.
How would they react as soon as he advised them he have been raised as a woman?
He had at all times requested his gamers to be open and truthful about their lives. That he had now not modeled such deep honesty stuffed him with regret.
The election of Donald Trump — who had promised to nominate conservative judges and whose vice chairman, Mike Pence, had adversarial homosexual rights and was once observed as supporting conversion remedy — had ignited a way of foreboding and uncertainty throughout the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender group. Lightner indisputably felt it. He frightened that the gamers — tweens and youths in this afternoon — would depart his membership. Or that their households would narrow ties, regardless of how just right this system have been at mentoring and offering a secure area to develop up in.
Lightner regarded as all of this, took a deep breath and knew he had to talk up.
“I haven’t totally shared with you something about myself.”
“It’s an important thing for me to share with you because we all should be who we are.”
“I am transgender.”
One participant chuckled nervously however walked over to Lightner for a hug. Most regarded immediately at their trainer in one of those marvel and awe.
Born Katherine Jean Lightner and raised in a at ease suburb east of Seattle, not anything about Lightner’s youth was once simple. Lightner, who consented to using his former title and gender id all the way through this text, recollects a paralyzing concern that started round age 4 that he was once a boy caught in a woman’s frame. When his circle of relatives referred to as him Katie, he protested. It sounded too female. Kate was once higher through a coloration. He refused ballet classes. His mom purchased him a adapted get dressed. He wore it as soon as, then vowed to by no means put on it once more.
As the years went on, Kate preferred dishevelled pants, sweats, billowing T-shirts and baseball caps became backward. A favourite birthday present was once a vivid crimson Michael Jordan baseball jersey.
“The way she presented, she didn’t look like a typical girl,” recalled Leslie Ridge, a pal who attended highschool with Lightner within the Nineties. “And because of that, she was made fun of constantly, especially by boys. It was brutal to see how painful that was for her.”
The bullying taunts and sense of uneasiness ignited a terrible internal storm. “I began to think of myself as a freak,” recalls Lightner. “The feeling was that I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in any space.”
Sports became a refuge.
An excellent softball, basketball and soccer athlete, Lightner found that on fields and courts he could be judged solely based on performance.
“Sports kept me alive.”
After rowing group on the University of Washington, Lightner moved to Portland after commencement within the early 2000s. There he coached football for youngsters between 8 and 14 on a workforce that first of all regarded a lot the similar because the white, prosperous ones on which Lightner had grown up enjoying.
After converting his title to Kaig, Lightner approached a fellow football trainer he thought to be a faithful good friend and defined that this was once a primary step towards changing into a person.
The response was once laughter.
“It didn’t take me long to realize that coaching as an out trans person at that time, in the years around 2005, ’06, ’07, was just not going to work,” Lightner mentioned. “I was not going to be safe.”
Lightner left training for some time. He flew to Baltimore for breast removing surgical treatment and started weekly classes of hormone substitute remedy. His voice deepened. New layers of muscle wrapped round his shoulders. His jaw grew sq., and his face sprouted the beginnings of a beard.
Eventually, he took a task as an trainer for after-school techniques within the working-class outskirts of Portland, house to the town’s inhabitants of immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Central and South America, and Asia.
Lightner briefly noticed that the ample sports activities alternatives within the town’s wealthier communities slightly existed for the youngsters he was once now operating with. He had at all times felt like an interloper and now noticed that the gamers he coached — the kids of working-class immigrants in one in all America’s whitest towns — considered themselves in a lot the similar means. Considering how he may just highest lend a hand, Lightner considering what had saved him going via all the ones years of adolescent angst.
“Soccer had been my main way of finding healing and connection, and I wanted that for these kids, too,” he mentioned.
After a yr of cobbling in combination seed cash, Lightner shaped the Portland Community Football Club in 2013 with grant investment and donated apparatus from Nike. The membership was once a rarity as a result of everyone had a spot. Nobody were given reduce. Lightner emphasised growing professional gamers greater than turning out stars. Families paid $50 to sign up for, however lower than that was once OK. Not paying a dime was once nice, too.
At his first apply, held in a worn nook of a public park, 50 youngsters confirmed up. Soon it was once 75. Then 100. The membership performed all the way through the wintry weather, spring, summer season and fall.
“Coach Kaig became a constant in our lives,” says Shema Jacques, some of the program’s early stalwarts. Jacques, now a 22-year-old Marine, first picked up the fundamentals of football in a Rwandan refugee camp however honed his sport at PCFC “From the start, I could tell he believed in us. He would be there for us for anything we needed. I had never experienced someone being like that before.”
Lightner was open about being a transgender man to everyone in his life except the players and families of PCFC, and the dissonance ate at him. So on that rain-swept day in 2017, he gathered every player who had shown up for a chat before practice.
“I want you guys to know about me, and I also want you guys to know that I’m still me,” he mentioned. “I’m still the same person I was five minutes before you all knew this, right? I’m still the same guy who comes out here, gets you guys to be better soccer players, gets on you when you’re not playing hard, loves you no matter what.”
He saw nothing but acceptance as he looked into his players’ eyes. One of them was Jacques.
“Suddenly, hearing that, it all made sense,” Jacques said. “This is why he knows what it is like for so many of us—not being accepted, trying hard to fit in. I actually felt more connected to him as he spoke, and I am not alone. He was still the person I looked up to and wanted to be like.”
Six years later, the only thing that has changed about PCFC is its growth. There are more coaches and a smaller administrative staff. The roster of registered players has swelled to 165. It is also about more than just soccer now. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Lightner received a grant that allowed PCFC to provide its families with fresh groceries, rental assistance and help tapping into social services.
“None of the families abandoned Kaig once he spoke his truth,” says Carolina Morales Hernandez, whose younger son and daughter have grown up in this system.
“Sometimes folks sign up for, and they’re going to name me and say, ‘We heard this and that about Kaig,'” she adds. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s true, yep. The head of the PCFC is a transgender person, but that changes nothing. Everybody is welcome here.’”