To his 35,000 TikTok followers, professional cross-country and alpine skier Nicole Powers is a breath of fresh air. 

“Thank you for being our voice,” one commenter said about a video on saving women’s sports. 

“I’m so grateful that there are trans women like you who care about women,” said another. 

Despite identifying as transgender and presenting as a woman from a young age, Powers is firmly committed to preserving single-sex sports and spaces – a unique perspective in the transgender community. In fact, in an interview with IW Features, Powers revealed that he has come under fire from supposed allies for sharing these beliefs online. 

“When I took to TikTok, I shared this idea that I was a conservative trans woman and received terrible hate and death threats to my family,” Powers said. 

Family played a central role in the development of his own athletic career, according to Powers. A multi-sport athlete who built his identity around sports, he enjoyed tennis, golf, snowboarding, and especially skiing with his dad. That never changed, even after Powers began questioning his gender identity.

“My parents raised me with the idea that there were important things like school and family and sports – we never talked about pronouns,” he said. “Everything that came to me about my [transgender] identity was organic, and I’m very grateful that I wasn’t pressured into ‘discovering’ something about myself that wasn’t actually there.”

It was during his high school career, when he was still competing on boys’ teams, that Powers began the “transition” process by taking puberty blockers. At age 19, Powers said, he began taking estrogen as well. 

In the midst of this change, switching from men’s to women’s sports seemed like the natural choice. So, according to Powers, he decided to play women’s professional golf during his college years at Florida State University. 

“When you build your identity around being an athlete and then put [identifying as] a trans woman on top of that, you definitely want to have that continued assurance that, ‘Oh, I am a woman. Look at me. I’m playing women’s sports,’” Powers said. 

It was during those years that he had an “awakening” about the importance of single-sex sports, he said. 

“I didn’t necessarily win any tournaments, but I realized I don’t belong here, and that’s okay,” he said. “I would consistently ‘lay-off’ on many of my drives and shots to appear like I didn’t have a strength advantage.”

Coming to this realization around 2018, Powers said, his eyes were opened to the growing push for forceful male inclusion in female spaces. After reflecting on the issue, he “realized this is going to be the end of competitive female athletics as we know it.”

That realization is a major hurdle for transgender-identifying athletes to overcome, Powers said, because the desire to equate gender identity with sex is so powerful. 

“It’s going to be very difficult for this new age of trans people to understand, because you start to build your identity and [want] to do all these womanly things,” he said. “You can continue to remain who you are but play in an equitable scenario.”

As an adult, Powers said his athletic career revolves around cross-country and alpine skiing, where he competes against men – not only out of a sense of fairness, but also to show other transgender-identifying male athletes that it is possible to be competitive in men’s categories. 

“If I can go out and be in the top 10 of men in these events, it really speaks volumes because I’ve been on [female] hormones for 10-plus years,” Powers said. “I’m going to be doing everything I can to be as competitive as an athlete as I can for the next five years.”

While documenting his athletic journey and sharing his beliefs on social media, Powers said he has dealt with hateful and threatening comments from far-left activists who see him as a threat to the transgender movement.

“Since I am part of the LGBT community, if I do or say something against what they’re pushing, they think, ‘Everything is discredited from us now because a trans woman is saying what we’re doing is wrong,’” Powers said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. If you say something against them, there are soldiers from their side that will do everything in their power to make sure you aren’t heard from anymore.”

But despite activists’ best efforts, Powers refuses to be silenced and hopes to advance the cause of single-sex sports beyond social media –– starting with a push for lasting policy change. In the wake of the Biden-Harris administration’s recent changes to Title IX, for example, which open the door for boys in girls’ sports, powerful voices such as Powers’ are more important than ever.

“If you are born male, you will not and you cannot play women’s and girls sports,” Powers said of his policy stance. “Holding that steadfast approach to your policy and position is the only way to make real change.”