Olympic Rugby Champ Ellia Green Comes Out as Trans Man
Ellia Green, a member of the 2016 Olympic champion women’s rugby sevens team from Australia, has come out as a transgender man.Green came out in a video shown Tuesday at a summit on dealing with homophobia and transphobia in sports, held in conjunction with the Bingham Cup rugby tournament in Ottawa, Canada.“Imagine not being able to do what you love because of how you identify,” Green, who is keeping the same name post-transition, said in the video. “Banning transgender people from sport, I think, is disgraceful, and I think it’s hurtful.
The rates of suicide and mental health [issues] will get even worse.”“Toward the end of my career, I was having some difficulties with my mental health,” Green, who retired last year, continued. “One promise that I made myself [was] that when my career ended I would live the rest of my life in the identity and the body that I should have, and it’s a really difficult thing to do in this time and day.
I mean, all you have to do is turn on the TV or go on social media platforms and you can see the amount of bullying, harm, and discrimination that goes on about gender identity.”“For someone to be open about [being trans] in the public eye is absolutely daunting,” he went on. “So I spent a lot of time after I finished up my career with Australian rugby just in the house, in a dark room.
I hadn’t been picked for the Tokyo Olympics, so I felt like a complete failure, and this was heartbreaking.“But the one thing that kept me positive was the fact that I had planned my surgery, my top surgery, and it was something I was literally counting down the days with my beautiful partner.
