Sometimes you have to wait a bit to find your home team

For many of us, one of the great pleasures of life is playing a team sport.

One of the things that makes it great is the locker room, a place we tend to feel safe, mainly, I would submit, because we are hanging out with our peers, people we feel are not all that different from who we believe we are, or would like to be.

It’s something most of us pretty much take for granted.

Or not.

Take Harrison Browne.

Browne never felt all that much at home–at least completely at home–in a whole lot of locker rooms.

Browne, it should be noted, was an excellent player–good enough to play NCAA Div. 1 college in the United States, good enough to play for Team Canada in the 2011 U18 Championship, a team that won a silver medal in Stockholm, good enough to play professionally with the Buffalo Beauts of the U.S.- based National Women’s Hockey League.

Brown’s first name then was Hailey.

“I didn’t feel myself at all when I would be announced as Hailey or they’d be saying ‘she’ had a good game, ‘she’ scored this many goals,” Browne told CBC News’ Lorenda Reddekopp in 2016.

“I didn’t feel connected to that at all.”

He asked the National Women’s Professional League to officially change his name, becoming the first transgender athlete in North American professional sports.

In March 2017, he retired to complete his transition.

But hockey runs deep in the blood of Canadians, so earlier this year when he was asked to join an all-transgender hockey team known as Team Trans, he accepted.

Named honorary co-captain, Browne took part in two games earlier this month against the Boston Pride, an LGBTQ hockey team.

Browne described the experience to Cassandra Szklarski of Canadian Press as “life-changing.”

I spoke by phone with Browne on Tuesday.

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