On Beginning This Blog: Trans-ing Arsenal

Hello! My name is Max, I'm a 21-year old trans non-binary woman (they/she pronouns), a college student... and a BIG Arsenal fan. 

Unfortunately, I don't have a nice typical story about how I fell in love with Arsenal. Many people I know have stories such as 'when I was 7 years old I watched a game with my dad and Thierry Henry scored the goal that made me fall in love with football!', but I don't. I simply do not remember how or when I began supporting Arsenal. 

All I know is that, by the summer prior to the 2014/2015 campaign, when I was 14, there was no going back. I remember eagerly following the transfer rumours of Alexis Sánchez and David Ospina coming to the club, laughing at Wenger's (sexy?) beach pictures in Brazil, and watching the unveiling event for the new Puma kit that summer, but I can remember nothing about my love for the club before then. I think I was excited when we won the FA Cup earlier that year, but my memory is too weak to say in any certain way.

However, I haven't stopped breathing, eating, dreaming, and living the Arsenal life since. To me, as it probably is for millions of other fans, no event has priority over watching an Arsenal game, my Twitter diet is almost entirely Arsenal content, my mood is highly dependent on what's going on with the club, I crave any information, interview, or picture of our players, and attending the Emirates on a regular basis is my dream (I've only been once! It was a lovely but very cold December afternoon!). My partner and I try to watch all Arsenal games together (even at 4am on weekdays before an exam! That's how it goes when you support from Asia), I attended my high-school graduation wearing an Arsenal tie, and every summer I obsess over what will happen in the transfer window—I try to keep track with incredibly detailed excel sheets following updates on every single transfer rumour out there (which probably attests more to my own neurodivergence than anything else).

Yet, all this must have started somewhere. I did not just wake up one day emotionally dependent on the club's performance and fully versed in the vocabulary of the Arsenal world. I learned to be an Arsenal fan instead. But, before that, I must have been drawn to support Arsenal for some reason I cannot remember. What is this reason?

At large, I don't really know, which is what I'm here to find out. But what I do know is that supporting Arsenal has been intimately tied to my own exploration of gender. I recently realized that in Arsenal I find a mirror to engage with narratives about my own life and my own journey of trans becoming. This blog is, in part, a space to explore this in an intentional way. I suspect that I was initially drawn to support Arsenal because I saw in it an opportunity to let my queerness flourish, even if I didn't know about it back then.

Being a trans (or simply queer) Arsenal fan is sometimes isolating. In most fan communities, queerness has to be left out or muted to fit in. In most queer communities, Arsenal rarely ever means anything other than a reminder of the straight and cisgender toxicity of competitive sports. It's hard to find overlaps and spaces where I can fully show myself in both ways, so shame is often attached to my experience of being a queer Arsenal fan. This why trans-ing Arsenal is a significant healing journey I want to embark on (and perhaps already did) and share in this blog.

Similarly, I have tried to connect remotely with other trans Arsenal fans, but we are hard to find. I hope this blog is not only a place for my own exploration of gender, but also a place for a Trans Arsenal community to find each other—we can only hope!  

Hope, after all, is what transitioning and being an Arsenal fan are about: learning to trust the process is key for our survival as both.