When Nilla Fischer looks at the younger faces around her in the Sweden dressing room, she sees evidence of a sport growing more comfortable in its own skin. “There’s both a good side and a bad side to it but they don’t have the same respect for the older players,” she says, with a half chuckle. “It doesn’t matter to them who they tackle or go up against. They’re just focused on winning and they want to show off, in a good way.”

Sixteen and a half years have passed since Fischer, who should win her 161st cap when Sweden begin their Euro 2017 campaign against Germany on Monday, first played a senior international game. That is almost exactly how old she was at the time, too. She admits to being “really nervous and scared” as a young player; perhaps too happy simply to be there, too deferential to those with greater experience and lacking the self-confidence to make her voice heard.

Times have changed, both for Fischer and for women’s football as a whole. Now two weeks shy of her 33rd birthday, the Wolfsburg centre-back is one of the sport’s most important voices in support of gender equality and LGBT rights. It has not always been an easy road here and her journey, to an extent, mirrors the progress made by her sport over the past decade and a half. Perceptions are changing and so are important issues like professionalism and infrastructure; Fischer believes she has a responsibility to push for better and hopes others will follow her lead.

“It shouldn’t be a demand or an obligation but of course it would make an impact if more and more people spoke out,” she says. “Now that I’m over 30 I know who I am, know what I can do and also know that my opinion counts. It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay or whatever – you can still give your opinion and it would really help if as many people as possible did.”

Actions, rather than words, took the lead when Fischer wore a rainbow-coloured captain’s armband for a Bundesliga fixture against Bayern Munich in March. Nobody in Germany had previously done so; the DFB (German football federation) had not been willing to countenance the idea but Fischer pressed on with the support of her club and found that the response was – a tiny minority of troubling exceptions aside – overwhelming.

“I think the DFB realised it was actually a good thing and they didn’t say anything about it after the first time,” she says. “I got a lot of good media and there were a lot of really positive comments on it. Of course I got some shit as well but most of it was stuff like ‘Just keep on doing it.’”

Fischer will do but the “shit” was not of the throwaway variety. In an interview with the Swedish magazine Offside she revealed that one Facebook message in particular read: “Diversity is all good but lesbians, gay men and other perverts are not worthy of living. You should die.” They are shocking words and yet more evidence of the permissive, inadequately policed social media world in which we appear bound; sadly they are not a one-off but the biggest mistake, Fischer believes, would be to force a change in her own behaviour.

“I have to suck it up,” is her response to such remarks. “There are always going to be idiots but I still want to put things out on social media and there are a lot more good comments than bad ones. There comes a point where it’s kind of sad [to read offensive comments] but that’s the way it is; you have to keep working on it and I think it’s important not to give up.

“Other players in the team have dealt with similar things, also women in the media and so on. It’s a hard climate: I get bad comments but I’m not getting the worst ones, so when it happens to other women I’m like ‘OK, I have to be strong for the rest of us’.”

It is some burden to take on and Fischer said in the interview with Offside that her mindset changed when, in 2012, she moved in with her partner Mika – now her wife – and received a reality check that the conditions in which female footballers exist should not be blithely accepted. Mika and her sister, Sanna, were both avowed feminists who had worked with domestic violence victims; the lot of a football player may not be as distressing a topic but both women impressed upon Fischer that she and her peers should stop settling for second best.

Nilla Fischer arrives in the Netherlands for Euro 2017, 16 and a half years after making her Sweden debut. Photograph: IBL/Rex/Shutterstock

“It’s a fight we have to continue working on for ever,” Fischer says. “Even though I have a lot of better opportunities as a football player nowadays, and everything around us is much better, it’s still different when you compare me to a man. I don’t think we’ll ever get in that direction, we’ll never get the same, but I think we have to fight all the time to improve everything around us – economic factors, training times, everything, and all the questions around equality and LGBT issues.”

Fischer would be keen to bring these issues to a more exalted stage. A logical next step would be to wear a rainbow armband, or one bearing a slogan like “Say no to sexism” during a national team game, but she is under the impression that – certainly in the latter case – it would not be permitted under current Uefa regulations.

“I haven’t had any contact with Uefa about it but I’d be very interested in talking to them,” she says. “I think their opinion is that it would be a political statement but ‘Say no to racism’ is also one if you want to compare the two. Racism is a really, really important issue and a particularly big problem in the men’s game but I’d be really interested in hearing why they will allow one and not the other; I’ve not asked to talk to them but, if the opportunity was given, I’d love to discuss it.”

Uefa did not respond to a request for clarification. In the short term Fischer’s attention is trained on that European Championship campaign in Hollandthe Netherlands. She is the third-oldest member of Pia Sundhage’s squad and there is a clear goal: to win the competition for the first time since 1984. For a country like Sweden, rightly regarded as a trailblazer and leading force in women’s football, that seems a very long wait; Germany have won the last six European Championships, though, and will present the sternest of opening Group B tests in Breda.

“It’s better for me and the team to go straight into that than the pressure of having a game where you have to get the three points because you know Germany are up next,” she says. “So hopefully it’ll be a positive start for us. There’s no pressure, we can just enjoy it and try to get the win. If we play really well and at our highest level, then we could win the Euros, but everything has to be at 110%.”

That would be a crowning moment in Fischer’s career. Injuries, illness and loss of form all conspired against her at major tournaments either side of the turn of the decade, but she is a cornerstone of the team and last September scored the first goal of the Rio 2016 Olympics in a win over South Africa. Sweden finished runners-up to the Germans; there is time to put that right but it might be limited. Mika is expecting a child and the often-fraught existence of a footballer will need some balance.

“It’s kind of hard to take in at the moment,” she says. “I’ll have to put another person first, not myself, and I think it’s going to a change a lot of things in my football. I don’t want to be a parent that’s not home or taking care of my family. I always say that my family comes first, but football is such a big part of my life so it’s not always been like that. As soon as we have a kid it’s going to be different and I’m totally going to put my family first. If it affects my football playing, then that’s how it goes. It has to come to an end at some point, but I hope it’s going to be possible to combine it all.”

When retirement does come, she will leave a different world from the one she entered. “If I tried playing now in the shape I was in when I was 20 it would never work,” she says, musing again about the athletic, relatively cocksure generation that will hopefully use their own voices to effect change, too. Fischer’s will not be silenced any more, however far from the pitch life takes her.