Harrison Browne hadn’t worn a women’s bathing suit in years. He sat in the hot tub in the backyard of his family home in Oakville, Ont., dressed in a sports bra and board shorts. His short, dirty-blond hair was soaking wet, and he was propped up on a fake rock in the tub when his father, sitting on a nearby chair, noticed that his daughter looked upset. “What’s wrong?” his dad asked. Browne fought through tears. “I’m not happy with my life,” he said. “I don’t want to grow up to be a woman, to be a mother, to be a grandmother. I don’t want that. And I can’t have that.” Hearing this, Russell Browne began to sob. “We’ll get you some help,” he told his youngest child, then known as Hailey. “We’ll find you someone to talk to.”

That was two years ago. “Everybody cries when they find out,” Browne says, taking a sip of water at a Starbucks in downtown Buffalo, N.Y. The 23-year-old looks across the table at his girlfriend, Carly Racusen, who has tears in her eyes. Racusen smiles and puts a hand on his arm.

Harrison Browne has shed countless tears of his own, but to say there’s a weight off his shoulders today is a colossal understatement. On Oct. 7, hours before he started his second season in the National Women’s Hockey League, Browne announced to the world that he’s a boy, making him the first publicly transgender pro hockey player in history. It’s his life’s biggest exhale. The Buffalo Beauts left-winger couldn’t believe it when he found out the league was on board with his identifying as a man. Hockey has always been where he’s felt most like himself, and never more than today.

Still, Browne feels incomplete. He wants to have hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery, but he can’t do that and keep playing professional women’s hockey. And so he is making a choice between the two biggest parts of his identity. He is sacrificing the chance to be who he really is so he can do the one thing that’s made him feel most comfortable while he’s stuck being a girl.