The story of Roy Ohana has recently caught the media’s attention in Israel. Being dubbed as the first transgender Israeli soccer player, Roy was interviewed over the weekend by Israel’s Channel 10 News. In the interview, he spoke about transphobia in the Israeli society in general and in sports in particular.

Roy Ohana told Israel news channel 10 News, “I went into the bathroom and there was a man there near the urinal, and he goes, ‘oh it’s you the transvestite from television so you can’t pee here, right?! Go to the women’s bathroom, that is where you belong.’” Soccer player Roy Ohana, 24 from Haifa, described his most recent transphobic incident in Friday’s evening news on Israeli Channel 10.

“We’re in 2018, and I’m supposedly the first trans man, in sports games, and in the state of Israel. How can it be? How did it happen? To me, that’s a badge of shame for the Israeli Soccer association, and to the state of Israel in general. Why do people have to choose between sports and living their lives? I feel the stares of people from the moment I enter the soccer field. It’s something that can’t be missed.”

Ohana currently plays on team Kiryat Yam and is waiting to get his professional male soccer player status. “It’s currently waiting for the approval of ‘The Union of European Football Associations’, it’s already beyond the Israeli association,” he says in the interview. “It depends on many bureaucratic documents and results of the hormones I’m taking. It’s an issue that is still in its early stages, there’re not many precedents in the world right now.”

“If people would tell me that I can’t play soccer, it’s as if they were to cut off my arms and legs. It would be the same thing for me,” he adds.

In the interview, Roy Ohana talked about his feelings growing up and shared photos of his transition from female to male.  According to him, since an early age, he didn’t know how to express who he thought he was, or what he felt. At around the first grade, he got beaten up really bad for being different and his mom was horrified by the incident. “At home, you can be whoever you want,” she told him, “ but there are people out there who still find it hard to accept.”

His father really had a hard time accepting his transition, Roy says that it was because he comes from a religious family. “My father, his world collapsed,” Roy said, “he told me, ‘listen, I used to beat up kids like you as a kid myself.’”

But today, Roy says, things are totally different. “If someone says something about the [LGBTQ] community he jumps to protect and defend it.”

After completing his military service as a combat soldier, Roy Menachem Ohana, 22, from a small northern Israeli town of Yokneam, realized it was time to say goodbye to Shirel, the girl he never was. Now he tells the moving story of his life, from kindergarten until today, sharing stories on his first crush and about his family’s reactions to the change: “I was privileged to be reborn, to get to know myself and moved myself every day.”

Ohana believes that playing soccer should never be about the personal lives of the players. “The struggle is not over until transgender men and women will go back to sports. Let’s be clear about that. I surfaced a problem here. The Israeli soccer association and the sports organizations are those who must give me a solution. To me and to the whole community behind me.”

At the age of 18, it was time to join the army. As a soccer player, I was at a crossroads, but it quickly became clear: army? Only combat! I saw it as a stamp of the feminist activist in me. Women can do everything. Today as Roy I can say that it was absolutely a clear masculine statement on my part. Make no mistake, today as Roy, I also have a commitment to females. I believe wholeheartedly that a woman is equal to a man. So I joined the army combat unit Karkal#33 – respect! I served there for over three years, and that was where I got the mirror into my soul, as they say.

I knew and I was exposed to so many people, and from each, I took something for myself. Among all those people, I also met the one who became my partner for almost three years. Three years in which I realized what real love is and what a truly genuine smile is. Happiness in all its varieties. Although it wasn’t easy in that relationship, I learned that we should not give up on ourselves, because there is no ability to repay the lost time when you’re not yourself. One of the results of that relationship that ended was my gender change, which I decided not to delay any longer. So each of us went our separate ways. I will use this platform to thank her and wish her infinite happiness.

Another significant figure I met in the army and who became a milestone in my new life was a good friend who came and declared to us: I am transgender! I still can’t say whether I felt a strong punch in the stomach or a substantial boost to get up and do this step myself. My conversations with him were like a puzzle, and from one discussion to another, all the pieces finally came together: I am trans. I was near the end of my army service, and I waited with the announcement itself until the end of the service. What now, coming out again? Though there never really was a closet, I’ve always been a man of my experience, my way of thinking and my behavior pattern. I don’t presume to define what is a man. I didn’t change anything from what Shirel was. Overall, I just became complete and preserved all the qualities Shirel had given me for 22 years in her body. Women, what’s sexier than a man who is connected to his feminine side? And yet, how do you go to your mother and tell her “I am a woman who feels like I’m actually a man”?

Luckily I have a mom who’s one of a kind, an elite. I didn’t have to say a word. She was just frying schnitzels in the kitchen when I walked like a zombie at home, a discharged soldier whose world was shaken and searching for himself, sitting on the counter and trying to find the words between bites. Luckily, with my mom, I talk in silence. She understood. She just knew. “I always felt I had a son and two little daughters,” she said. Those two little sisters simply reinforced her words: “After all, we always had an older brother, now it’s also showing on the outside.”

It’s hard for me to describe this feeling, this acceptance that surrounded me, especially after hearing countless heart crushing stories of lack of family acceptance. I am a son of an Ashkenazi mother and a Moroccan father. It was just not in him, and I bow to him for that. As time passed, he didn’t try to fight it, and even at moments when it was difficult for him to digest, he asked, tried to understand and to get answers. Today I don’t know a father who is as proud of his son as he is.

Immediately upon my release from the army, having no more frameworks and being my own boss, I knew it was time to be who I am. I started the change in environment; the gender reference towards me, the confusion at first, until the real moment of the beginning of taking hormones. Roy celebrates half a year. Six months of being a living person, but really this change is an endless process with moments of happiness and frustration. Actually, the process is especially filled with impatience. But more than anything, this process is my own personal gift to myself.

At the age of 22, to receive a chance like this to me is a gift and a privilege. After all, people who are born in the right body don’t have the opportunity for a sincere self-acceptance from infancy. Most people are born into a body that feels most natural to them, and just from an early age are exposed to the same standards of what is right or wrong for a boy or a girl. I was reborn, got to know myself and got excited about myself again every day. I experienced puberty again, this time as a man, also externally. The ‘bar mitzvah’ mustache which in another world I would despise. Hearing my voice changing. Excited by every single hair on my face. Did I say gift?

Always, I hear voices all around that wonder and implore: “You live in a bubble because it’s really not obvious, it’s not usually like this.” I listen to them and know that they are talking about my family and my surroundings. I listen and I refuse to accept it. It’s not me who lives in a bubble, not even my family nor the people around me. You are living in a bubble! What’s more natural than to live the way we want to? What is more natural than parents hugging and pushing their kid to stand up and be complete within themselves? I wish all of us, to get out of this fixed bubble, and simply accept, understand and love.