‘Everybody Is Welcome Here.’

PORTLAND, Ore. — The soccer coach seemed out at two dozen or so of his gamers and felt nervousness course by way of him like a rip present. His coronary heart pounded, and his voice felt unsteady.

Kaig Lightner (pronounced “Cage,” a phonetic shortening of his initials — Okay and J) had been considering of this second for the reason that summer season of 2013 when he based the Portland Community Football Club, a program for instructing soccer to largely first- and second-generation immigrant youth who lived in his metropolis’s most distressed neighborhoods.

In the 4 years since, Coach Kaig had develop into a buddy, an ally and even, to a few of his gamers, a father determine.

How would they react as soon as he advised them he had been raised as a lady?

He had all the time requested his gamers to be open and trustworthy about their lives. That he had not modeled such deep honesty crammed him with regret.

The election of Donald Trump — who had promised to nominate conservative judges and whose vice chairman, Mike Pence, had opposed homosexual rights and was seen as supporting conversion remedy — had ignited a way of foreboding and uncertainty inside the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender neighborhood. Lightner actually felt it. He anxious that the gamers — tweens and youths on this afternoon — would go away his membership. Or that their households would reduce ties, regardless of how good this system had been at mentoring and offering a secure house to develop up in.

Lightner thought of all of this, took a deep breath and knew he wanted 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 to Lightner for a hug. Most seemed straight at their coach in a form of surprise and awe.

Born Katherine Jean Lightner and raised in a snug suburb east of Seattle, nothing about Lightner’s adolescence was simple. Lightner, who consented to using his former title and gender identification all through this text, remembers a paralyzing worry that started round age 4 that he was a boy caught in a lady’s physique. When his household known as him Katie, he protested. It sounded too female. Kate was higher by a shade. He refused ballet classes. His mom purchased him a tailor-made gown. He wore it as soon as, then vowed to by no means put on it once more.

As the years went on, Kate favored dishevelled pants, sweats, billowing T-shirts and baseball caps turned backward. A favourite birthday reward was a brilliant pink Michael Jordan baseball jersey.

“The way she presented, she did not look like a typical girl,” recalled Leslie Ridge, a buddy who attended highschool with Lightner within the Nineteen 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 unease ignited a horrible inside storm. “I began to think of myself as a freak,” remembers Lightner. “The feeling was that I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in any space.”

Sports grew to become a refuge.

An wonderful softball, basketball and soccer athlete, Lightner discovered that on fields and courts he may very well be judged solely based mostly on efficiency.

“Sports kept me alive.”

After rowing crew on the University of Washington, Lightner moved to Portland after commencement within the early 2000s. There he coached soccer for teenagers between 8 and 14 on a staff that originally seemed a lot the identical because the white, prosperous ones on which Lightner had grown up taking part in.

After altering his title to Kaig, Lightner approached a fellow soccer coach he thought to be a reliable buddy and defined that this was a primary step towards changing into a person.

The response was 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 teaching for some time. He flew to Baltimore for breast removing surgical procedure 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 job as an teacher for after-school packages within the working-class outskirts of Portland, residence to the town’s inhabitants of immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Central and South America, and Asia.

Lightner shortly noticed that the plentiful sports activities alternatives within the metropolis’s wealthier communities barely existed for the children he was now working with. He had all the time felt like an outsider and now noticed that the gamers he coached — the youngsters of working-class immigrants in certainly one of America’s whitest cities — considered themselves in a lot the identical manner. Considering how he might finest assist, Lightner centered on what had saved him going by way of all these years of adolescent anguish.

“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 collectively seed cash, Lightner fashioned the Portland Community Football Club in 2013 with grant funding and donated tools from Nike. The membership was a rarity as a result of everyone had a spot. Nobody obtained reduce. Lightner emphasised creating expert gamers greater than turning out stars. Families paid $50 to affix, however lower than that was OK. Not paying a dime was high quality, too.

At his first apply, held in a worn nook of a public park, 50 children confirmed up. Soon it was 75. Then 100. The membership performed through the winter, spring, summer season and fall.

“Coach Kaig became a constant in our lives,” says Shema Jacques, one of many program’s early stalwarts. Jacques, now a 22-year-old Marine, first picked up the fundamentals of soccer in a Rwandan refugee camp however honed his sport at P.C.F.C. “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 everybody in his life besides the gamers and households of P.C.F.C., and the dissonance ate at him. So on that rain-swept day in 2017, he gathered each participant who had proven up for a chat earlier than apply.

“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 noticed nothing however acceptance as he seemed into his gamers’ eyes. One of them was Jacques.

“Suddenly, hearing that, it all made sense,” Jacques mentioned. “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 one factor that has modified about P.C.F.C. is its progress. There are extra coaches and a small administrative employees. The roster of registered gamers has swelled to 165. It can be about extra than simply soccer now. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Lightner obtained a grant that allowed P.C.F.C. to supply its households with recent groceries, rental help and assist tapping into social providers.

“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 people join, and they will call me and say, ‘We heard this and that about Kaig,’” she provides. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s true, yep. The head of the P.C.F.C. is a transgender person, but that changes nothing. Everybody is welcome here.’”