ABSTRACT
When I started playing football, I was the only girl on my street, school, or club team. Most of the time, I greatly enjoyed playing. However, it has also happened that boys got sudden ‘injuries’ when I dribbled them, that same-age kids and some of their parents supporting an opposing team shouted things like “Kick her down, that shrew!”, and that a boy with whom I regularly played football called me a transvestite. Only the latter got me angry because I felt let down by a friend. As opposed to this, in the other situations, I felt strong because I apparently played a good game; otherwise, these people would not have responded in the way they did. I absolutely loved playing football and, in my mind as a kid, football never was only men’s business. It was incidents like the examples above that made me aware that I was perceived as a girl before anything else, and that this had consequences for what I was and was not ‘supposed to do’.
