Pride Pioneer: Former pro football player comes out as trans, won multiple championships
Maven Maurer may be the first former pro football player to come out as trans. And she was a really good player with the CFL. The post Pride Pioneer: Former pro football player comes out as trans, won multiple championships appeared first on Outsports.
Mark
Maven Maurer very well may be the first former professional football player to come out publicly as transgender.
Maurer has been living publicly as a trans woman for a while on social media, and in her own life. Yet it wasn’t until she appeared at a ceremony for the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League earlier this year. The club inducted the 2000 BC Lions into their Wall of Fame.
Maurer showed up to the ceremony as a woman, which had not been the case when she was a fullback for the Grey Cup championship team.
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Maurer played under a different name for four CFL teams during her career: the Saskatchewan Roughriders, BC Lions, Ottawa Renegades and Edmonton Eskimos.
Just in the last few days, Maurer talked with Canadian Football League site 3 Down Nation about her gender transition. She shared an all-too-common story of fear about the potential reactions from teammates if she came out while playing in the CFL.
“I think the biggest thing was, what are my teammates going to say?” She told 3 Down Nation. “Am I going to be accepted? The whole reason why I kept on playing football was having that family, having those brothers.”
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For those who don’t know, Canadian football allows offenses only three downs instead of the four downs of football in the U.S. and most of the areas around the world, thus the name of the blog.
Maurer won another Grey Cup in 2005 with the Edmonton Eskimos. She was named the Most Valuable Canadian in that game. CFL teams are required to have a certain amount of Canadian players on their roster, and the league celebrates Canadian players in a special way.
The 3 Down Nation article is written with a lot of care and understanding. That comes to the fore when the writer, JC Abbott, talks about the struggle Maurer experienced with her wife and kids.
“The first person she told was her wife, in what was a difficult and tear-ridden conversation,” Abbott wrote. “After 20 years of marriage, their relationship would be forever altered. Their daughters were also forced to adjust but have been fully accepting of the transition. Nevertheless, Maurer was careful not to make her identity public until her youngest had graduated high school, making an effort to shield them from any potential ridicule from their peers.”
Part of Maurer’s mission aligns very much with that of Outsports. Our tagline — Courage Is Contagious —reflects the power of coming out in sports, and how each coming-out empowers someone else to do the same.
Maurer hopes that by sharing her story, she will empower other trans women and LGBTQ people in sports to find the strength to express themselves.
“I want to try to reach more people,” she told 3 Down Nation. “I want to be more visible. I want to use any voice that I have to raise awareness. One of the things I talked about with my therapist is when you shine your light and other people see it, it secretly gives them permission to shine theirs. Sometimes you don’t know that things are a possibility until you see someone else doing it.”
As a trans woman who was married to a woman while playing pro football, and with multiple children, her story can absolutely resonate, in much the same way Caitlyn Jenner’s story resonated with many people when she first came out publicly.
You can follow Maven Maurer on Instagram.
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The post Pride Pioneer: Former pro football player comes out as trans, won multiple championships appeared first on Outsports.
