“I became the first openly trans person to swim across Lake Ontario. It was euphoric”

I hadn’t always planned on becoming a swimmer, much less a long-distance one. Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I was more of a theatre kid than an athlete. For a long time, I couldn’t even run a mile. I joined a swim team when I was seven but quit three years later.

The truth was that I didn’t like exercise because I felt uncomfortable in my body. Looking back, I can see that my discomfort stemmed from gender dysphoria. But back then I didn’t have the language for it. I didn’t know that trans people existed—especially trans men. Also, I was always attracted to men, and I didn’t know that you could be both gay and trans.

People were unkind to me when I didn’t conform to gender norms, so I became very femme during my teens. I wore tights and heels, curled my hair and put on make-up every day for school. Dressing femme almost felt like performing in drag—which made it tolerable.

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I moved to Canada in 2013 to study opera singing at the University of Toronto—and to follow a boy. We had been dating for a few years, and he had moved here for university. In the city, I met folks who were queer and non-binary, an identity that was new to me at the time. I began to learn more about gay and trans history, which made me realize that trans people—and gay trans people—have always existed. Two years into college, I left my long-term boyfriend. Doing so gave me more space to explore myself, and I socially transitioned in 2015, when I was twenty. I got on hormone therapy two years later.

I eventually switched out of music and graduated with a degree in sexual diversity studies. The world of singing was too gendered, and I realized during college that I wanted to go to graduate school for social work. The application process was terrifying. I didn’t know if I would get accepted anywhere, which meant that I wasn’t sure if I could stay in Canada. I started long-distance running as a coping mechanism.

Fortunately, everything worked out, and by 2021, I had a steady job with health insurance that allowed me to get top surgery. Life had started to feel more stable, but I kept up with the running. I eventually realized I was running such long distances that I could probably run a marathon if I wanted to—and even an ultramarathon. I grew obsessed with the idea.

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Training for an ultramarathon was what finally got me back in the pool. I started swimming again in January of 2023. I just thought it would be good cross-training for my running, but much to my surprise, returning to the water after eighteen years away felt like a homecoming. The muscle memory kicked in. I did laps and laps of freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke. (Not butterfly, though. I never could figure out butterfly.)

I fell in love with swimming, but I knew that the pool wasn’t my end goal. When I learned about open-water swimming, something clicked. Although I hadn’t swam in a pool since I was nine, I had been in lakes and oceans on vacations here and there, and I was always very comfortable in open water. When I was eighteen, I visited Lake Champlain with my then-boyfriend and his family. I leapt off the dock into the water, and when I resurfaced, I couldn’t see the other side. Something about that endless stretch of water moved me, but I wouldn’t know what that meant for another nine years. By February of 2023, I’d made a spreadsheet of all the open-water races I wanted to try. I joined a swimming group that met at Cherry Beach every Saturday morning.

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The commute from my place in midtown took two hours, which meant that I had to leave home by 5 a.m. to make the beginning of the swim at 7. But the hassle didn’t put me off: making that group swim every Saturday became the most important part of my week.

A few months later, I heard that Kim Lumsdon—an ultra-long-distance endurance swimmer from Etobicoke—was training in Lake Ontario to become the oldest female swimmer to cross all 51 kilometres of the lake. I thought, I could do that too. Out of curiosity, I googled “transgender marathon swimming,” and nothing came up. I realized I could be the first openly transgender person to cross Lake Ontario.

As I planned the swim, I began thinking of it as more than just an athletic achievement. I wanted to increase the visibility of trans people in endurance sports, but more importantly, I wanted to find a way to materially support queer and trans youth in Toronto, a city that had given so much to me. I decided to use my swim as an opportunity to raise funds for LGBT YouthLine, a peer-support helpline I used to volunteer with. The fundraiser is ongoing, and we’re hoping to reach $18,000 by the end of the month.

That year, I did my first open-water race—just 2.5 kilometres—in my dad’s old bathing suit. Then I joined an LGBTQ-focused swim team, where I met my coach, Tai Hollingbery. I started training for the lake crossing in earnest at the beginning of 2024. Cold-water training began in April, and I routinely swam for twenty to thirty minutes in five-degree water. My endurance shocked even Tai: apparently people “just didn’t do that.” But somehow the cold never bothered me.

In the days leading up to the crossing, I felt more excited than nervous. My sister took a good portion of her vacation days to visit me from North Carolina, and my dad came up from Pennsylvania. A crew from Solo Swims of Ontario would accompany me in boats along the way to ensure my safety, and my family helped prepare all the food both they and I would need for the crossing. In the weekend leading up to the swim, I tried to get as much sleep as I could, but my excitement made that difficult. I spent big chunks of the day lying in bed, hoping to doze off.

I started the swim around 2 a.m. on September 2, from Niagara-on-the-Lake. The water was calm, and I could see stars strewn across the sky. It turned out I didn’t need all that cold water training: the water was 20 degrees the whole way. As I swam, I sang songs in my head—an eclectic rotation that included Martha Walsh’s “Carry On” and Charli XCX’s “Crash.” I dropped into what I call my “creature space.” I thought, I am just a creature, doing my creature thing. Every thirty minutes, the crew gave me something to eat. For some reason, the food I had planned with my dietitian repulsed me, so I had to survive on sports gels.

Everyone who has swum across Lake Ontario will say that the trickiest portion of the crossing comes at the end, when you have to swim against the current of the Humber River. Knowing this, in my runs leading up to the crossing I’d jog along the river, practising being near the rushing water. It was a way of psychologically preparing myself. I knew that the only way I was going to touch Toronto was if the Humber let me through.

At 10 p.m., after I had been swimming for twenty hours, my coach gave me some bad news. “You haven’t moved in the last two to three hours,” they said. “You’re in the current. You’re going to have to up your effort over the next hour.”

I took an Advil and some caffeine. I had known that the first portion of the swim, from the middle of the night to sunrise, was the warm-up, but I didn’t know when the main push was going to happen. Suddenly, I was in the thick of it, and I knew that if I didn’t give it everything, I would not finish. In endurance sports, all your training leads up to this moment. The good news was that I was well-prepared. I have always loved training. I crave those moments of solitude, enveloped by the vastness of the lake. And when I swim, I feel as though I have found my calling.

The final push ended up lasting for around four hours. When I’d done one of my 10-hour practice swims, my left arm had started hurting horribly in the last five hours. But, much to my surprise, during the actual swim I felt fine. I picked up my pace, which actually felt good because I had started to get cold, and reached Toronto at 2:40 a.m., 24 hours and 25 minutes after leaving Niagara-on-the-Lake.

As I climbed out of the lake, cheers rang out around me. Someone wrapped me in a purple jacket. I ate a cold slice of pizza a friend had brought and spilled the protein shake I was supposed to have. My heart was so full. One of my friends who had seen me off from Niagara-on-the-Lake was there to greet me. When I got home, I was still buzzing with adrenalin, and I couldn’t fall asleep until 6 a.m.

I am grateful for the media coverage that the crossing received, but one thing that has bothered me is the use of the word “gruelling” to describe my swim. I don’t find what I did to be gruelling. I was having fun, and I felt euphoric. I’m not tough because I did a hard thing—I just did a thing I loved to do. It’s also a trope to say that someone “conquered” a lake. But I didn’t conquer anything. I crossed the lake because the lake allowed me to cross and the river allowed me through the current. To me, the lake is like God, and for 24 hours, I was held in its hands.

I would like to do many more marathon swims around the world. I want to cross all five Great Lakes. I would also like to try the English Channel and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But I am so glad that Toronto was where I began my swimming journey. There’s a solid group of marathon swimmers here, and I feel lucky to have stumbled into this inspiring community. Toronto is also a city where I feel safe as a trans person, and especially today, I know that I cannot take that feeling of safety for granted.

I also know that, as a white, passing trans man, I don’t face many of the barriers that other trans athletes face. But I hope that my experience will still speak to other trans folks in some way. I am buoyed by the idea that the second trans person to cross Lake Ontario is probably watching, and I am so excited for them. I hope I can be part of getting them across.