As I skin up a slope somewhere off Fremont Pass, I’m uncomfortably aware of Colorado’s record-breaking winter — or lack of it. I feel it in the pitiful snowpack underfoot, sugary under a fragile sun crust, sharky rocks and brush poking through. The mountain peaks look skeletal, their rocky ribs jarringly exposed for February.
These past two seasons, I have felt as if all the ways I love my body are at risk: legislative attacks on trans rights, dwindling winters with shrinking snowpacks, an administration eager to strip public-lands protections. I moved back home to Colorado in early 2025, uneasy about the state of trans rights in the U.S. What felt like vague anxiety then keeps me awake at night now. Since I moved, thousands of anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country. I’m lucky to live in a state that protects my rights, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the tension; my body is a constant subject of national debate, while federal pressure chips away at state protections for trans youth.
I shake off the gloom and remind myself that I go into the backcountry to love myself. Every vertical foot I gain is a reclamation, and, on this tour, I’m resisting both gravity and government.
My body complains as I head uphill from 11,100 feet, but it’s nice to hear it talk. Burning lungs paired with burning quads, cold-bitten toes squeezed into tight boots: I meditate on all the microfeelings in my body, rather than how other people see me.
The mountain’s quiet is interrupted by “shuush-clack,” the dry, abrasive whisper made by skins sliding against snow. At the top of my climb, I take in the view. The mountains across the way are wearing the kind of snow I’d expect to see late in the season, after the year’s last snowfall, not now in what should be midwinter.
This part of the climb is also called a “transition”: My gear changes from one thing to another. I reassemble my snowboard, unsticking the skins, removing my bindings and reuniting the board’s halves. I quite literally transition at this transition each week: Before I click in and start my descent, I sit on my board and pull out a syringe, needle and vial of testosterone. I go splitboarding for the same reasons I transitioned: They make me proud of the person I am.
I think society expects me to have a complicated relationship with my body. To get gender- affirming care, I need to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a distress related to the mismatch between my gender identity and physical aspects of my body. But the thing is, I am not unhappy or distressed about my body. I love my body, I love what it can do; my body takes me up mountains. I don’t feel that my gender is defined by what feels wrong. I’ve just always known that something else felt even more right.
I go splitboarding for the same reason I transitioned: They make me proud of the person I am.
Having a hand in creating myself is beautiful. I have known the distress of dysphoria. As a kid, the sight of myself in my Easter dress in the mirror brought on tears and fits. I couldn’t wait to ditch the dress for a bright blue snowsuit and go ride my board through the aspens. It wasn’t discomfort with myself; it was discomfort with how people saw me. Even now, I feel eyes tracking me through grocery stores, at gas stations and post offices. Perhaps people can’t help gawking a little. It’s hard to tell if they’re trying to figure out my gender, or hoping to ward me off with a glare. I don’t know how my community feels about me. I do know I’ve never minded the aspen’s eyes, gentle observers offering no scrutiny as I serpentine through them on my board.
I believe the best way to love your body is to use your body. Through movement, I’m aware of how beautiful my body really is. I’ve been snowboarding for 20 years now, and sometimes I feel like I’m better at sliding sideways than walking. I can feel the nuances of the snow through my edges and base. In open terrain, I flow across the slope, dive over knolls and leave precise lines in the snow. In tighter terrain, I weave through trees, my mind always ahead of my body, trusting it will do the work. I especially love pumping up and down the walls of little gullies, bouncing off the banks, my whole body activated in a dance with gravity. To me, backcountry snowboarding is trans joy. It is liberation. I use my body to express exactly what I feel.
And in this trans joy, I find resilience. And while, yes, bathroom bans, health-care bans, athlete bans, public-lands sell-offs and warmer winters loom in my mind, I choose to believe I won’t lose access to this.
The warming of our winters, the privatization of public lands, the policing of trans bodies — none of those are separate battles. They are all battles in the same war against the pursuit of happiness. Public lands offer respite in a world that demands profit, productivity and conformity from our bodies. In the backcountry, I find relief from the world’s expectations.
I love my body, I love what it can do; my body takes me up mountains.
As I come down the ridge and through the trees, back down the skin track and skate into the trailhead, I’m once again out of my backcountry sanctuary. The view on the trip home is jarred by rare earth mining, gnawing the range away. Once I’m back within range of service, my phone pings with a dozen new headlines about attacks on trans rights or the new historic low record for this year’s snowpack. Still, I’ll continue going out, climbing mountains, snow-sliding, laughing and loving. I use sport and movement to clear my mind and live in the body that I love.
In that way, the land offers me my own special kind of gender-affirming care.
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This article appeared in the April 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Transition point.”
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