Her turn to play

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

Maven Maurer stood in front of the bathroom mirror at a friend's home in Jasper, Alta., early one morning this spring, staring intently at her own reflection.
She wasn't nervous, not really. She'd stayed up late practising what she was going to say at the event, rewriting and reworking her speech, making sure everything was exactly how she wanted it to be.
She'd told her story before, but only in bits and pieces. This would be the first time she'd share it all in public. She had chosen her outfit carefully – a new black blazer with wide-leg pants and a sunny yellow shirt – and she'd applied her makeup with precision, blending her foundation, curling her eyelashes, covering her scars.
She thought about Mike. She knew some women in her position would try to forget him. Pretend he'd never existed, even. But Mike was so much a part of her that she didn't want to let him go. She was grateful to him for being so strong and fierce, for keeping her safe, for getting her to this place where she was finally ready to move on without him.
'So many people in the trans community kill off their former self, they erase any sort of history of their former life,' Maven said. She couldn't do that. Her past was too visible to leave behind completely, and she wouldn't want to even if she could. 'I had some of the most amazing experiences. I fathered three magnificent daughters, married an amazing woman, and we built a pretty incredible life,' she said. 'And I didn't want to wish it away or have it be any different.'
Instead, Maven's therapist had suggested another way of looking at it that made sense to her: What if her body were a vehicle that Mike had been driving all this time? Now, with gratitude, it was Maven's turn to take the wheel.
Sometimes it's described as an egg cracking open. The experience of realization that changes everything. For Maven, it happened when she was 44 years old and living as a man named Mike. It came in the wake of a near-death experience, and after a lifetime of trying unsuccessfully to make herself fit into her own life. It was 2020. Around her, the world itself was changing in ways that were previously unimaginable.
Maven's transition felt equally unfathomable. It took her a whole year just to get her mind around it. Mike was an acclaimed professional football player who'd won two Grey Cups. An MMA fighter whose nickname was 'the Wolverine,' because of his ferocity. The very picture of a certain kind of masculinity, body roped thick with muscle, fashioned in the image of Conan the Barbarian, whom her father had once said was everything a man should be.
No longer living as Mike could mean losing everything: wife, family, home, friends and all the privileges a man possesses in this world. She would be the first professional football player to come out as trans, and one of only a handful of players to come out as LGBTQ+. As a trans woman, Maven could face marginalization, scrutiny and threat, all for a chance at happiness. And maybe, one day, the contentment that had always eluded her.
It was a gamble, but it wasn't a choice. It was a matter of survival.
Maven grew up in Saskatoon as Mike Maurer, a scrawny kid who was bullied and always felt different than the other boys. She learned early that the only things that helped were to be strong enough to withstand as much pain as possible, and mean enough to fight back.
In high school, she started playing football, where those qualities were admired and celebrated, and after graduation she did a stint with the army, aiming to go overseas on a peacekeeping mission.
She came back to football almost by chance after a scrimmage with her unit at Taylor Field, where the Saskatchewan Roughriders played in Regina.
She attended the Roughriders training camp in 1996 and joined the team the next year, forging an aggressive playing style that, as one former player described, 'wipes guys out all over the field.'
Even before her first game, she got into a fight with another player. She broke her hand but never missed a practice and still suited up for the game. It was the kind of mettle coaches loved, and the story spread. 'It just exemplified, I guess my character,' Maven says. 'You knew that I wasn't going to take any shit.'
She says that attitude left her on the outside of locker-room teasing and bonding, but that's how she liked it. 'I kind of excluded myself,' she says. 'That's where I was comfortable. That's where I was my whole life. I was always on the outside looking in.'
She played 13 years in the CFL, a fullback and special teams player for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the BC Lions, the Ottawa Renegades and the Edmonton Elks (then the Eskimos).
In that time, she won two Grey Cups and gathered both accolades and injuries that come with that many seasons of serious football.
As Mike, she fell in love, married and had three daughters. But no amount of success or praise was ever enough. She hated herself for every failure, and felt disconnected from how she appeared in the world.
'It's hard when you're not authentic, and you're always thinking about how you're going to be perceived,' Maven says. 'Does this align with my tough guy image? A lot of it was like, how am I supposed to act?'
She thought of suicide, but she didn't want to put her wife and girls through that kind of loss. Instead, she fantasized about dying while saving someone else – the scenario that had drawn her to being a soldier and, later, led her to train to be an EMT and firefighter.
Through accidents and acts of recklessness, Maven did come close to dying more than once. At some point, she started to think about why she'd always survived, to wonder what her life was for. 'When I opened that door, it all came flooding out,' Maven says. 'All the memories and all of the hurts.'
She remembered playing with the girls when she was a child, laughing with them, sounding like them, and even feeling like them until the boys overheard and turned cruel.
'I wasn't allowed to cry,' Maven says. 'I had to toughen up. I wasn't allowed to grow my hair out.'
Then there was the pep-rally drag show in high school, when, as Mike, she'd dressed in a bobbed wig and a long black dress. She remembered how one of the other football players said, 'Holy crap, Maurer, you're hot,' and how it felt so good to face the rest of the school like that, to hear the cheers and applause. Later, she knew it had felt too good, and told herself, 'I can't do that again.'
Decades later, she put a photo of Mike into the Gender Swap app. She instantly thought: 'I love her.'
Meditation, therapy and journaling brought her to the truth. She was a trans woman. The first person she told was her wife, Hayley.
It was more than a year after her revelation that she ventured outside for the first time as a woman. There were three places she felt safe to go in Regina: a pot store, a board-game shop and Safeway, all within a few minutes from her house.
People knew her in the city, and they had ideas and expectations of who Mike Maurer the football star was. After she began hormone treatment, Maven and her family decided she should move to Jasper, to start a new life surrounded by the water and trees and mountains, in a place that spoke directly to her soul.
Her first day living full-time as a woman was when she started working as a train conductor in January of 2023.
'When you go through the whole hormone change, you almost go through another puberty,' she says. 'You're a trans baby at first, and everything is new.'
Maven made friends, spent time in nature and worked at converting an old school bus into an off-grid home.
She lived quietly and privately until last summer, when she was invited to Vancouver to celebrate the BC Lions 2000 Grey Cup team being inducted into the BC Place Wall of Fame. About half her old teammates would be in attendance.
They would be honoured during a televised game, and Maven tried to imagine how it would go. How would she be announced? What would the other players think? How would fans and the media respond?
She booked a plane ticket the day before the event.
She was standing in the middle of the field with men all around her. Her hair was long and straight, and she wore a BC Lions bomber jacket over a silky orange shirt, her fingernails painted to match. She lit up when she heard her name, 'Maven Maurer.' Her Grey Cup ring glinted as she waved to the cheering crowd.
'My teammates welcomed me with open arms, and it turned out even better than I could have imagined,' she says. 'Them embracing me as Maven healed parts of me I didn't even know needed healing. Hearing my name being announced, my real name, while out on the field in front of the fans with my team present, was pure euphoria.'
Maven Maurer strode into the Legion hall in Hinton, Alta., on a sunny spring morning, and picked up a name tag from the table at the door. She wrote down her name and pronouns – she/her – and adjusted the lanyard against her yellow shirt.
She was one of the featured speakers at the Unity Summit, a gathering celebrating stories of inclusion, equity and resilience in the small Alberta community.
Maven was still healing from a breast augmentation, but after all she'd been through – all the accidents, years of football – the recovery barely fazed her. It all felt natural and right, like when she started hormones. She felt strong and healthy and good.
Her transition had revealed many things. She'd lost people close to her, but so many others had surprised her. Friends and football heroes had chosen to stand at her side.
She tried to ignore the negative comments some people posted on social media, brushing off the hatred she saw and felt directed at her and the trans community.
'Do you know how much you have to love yourself to withstand that?' she said. It still surprised Maven that she could love herself so much.
'I want to be that person that uplifts people and spreads the joy and the love, because I was not that before,' she said. 'I was mean and snarling. I was the Wolverine, and it was all a projection ... because I had been bullied and I had been the outsider and I didn't belong.'
Maven and her wife had decided to pursue the next chapter of their lives apart. But they remained best friends, and they'd been texting throughout the morning. Hayley had helped her choose the outfit for the speech, and had bought the gold chain Maven was wearing – a pendant that spelled out 'Maven' in script. Their divorce had recently become final, and even though it was raw and deeply painful, it felt like another form of love to let each other go. Maven's wedding band remained, tattooed on her left hand.
Maven took a deep breath before walking onto the stage.
'My name is Maven Maurer, but that wasn't always my name,' she told the audience. Pictures played on a screen beside her. She liked to show people the two parts of her life side by side. Mike, rugged and scowling. Maven, smiling and joyful.
'I discovered myself at 44 and began my transition at 46, proving it's never too late to find your true self,' Maven said. 'Every day we get to decide to be the best version of ourselves. We can choose to remake ourselves – rebuild ourselves using the best parts that we want to keep and letting go of what no longer serves us.'
The crowd rose to a standing ovation. Later, people flocked around Maven to share stories about trans people in their lives, or to talk about how much courage it takes to be who you are, whoever that is.
'You're really brave to do this,' said one woman, Deb Bird. 'And you're beautiful.'
When Maven was asked how she chose her name, she said it was because it means 'one who understands,' and is a variation of Maeve, a powerful figure in Irish mythology.
'Queen Maeve was a warrior queen, and that's how I picture myself in my mind's eye,' Maven said. 'Warrior queen. Here I am.'