HOMME FC
Homme FC is a transmasc football team and creative community where people can find empowerment through sports, movement, and friendship. We are a team where trans people of colour are not only participating but are actively leading and shaping its growth.
artwork by Areena Ang
What inspired you to start Homme FC? Tell us about how it started and what it is now.
I started playing football for fun in October 2024 with a few Asian mixed gender teams in London, at the same time when I was beginning to feel like my gender was shifting. What I found really inspiring about those teams was that they were led by creative people: artists, designers, writers, and chefs. I had never thought that was a possibility.
I ultimately didn’t feel comfortable playing in women’s spaces - and while there are a lot of trans inclusive clubs, I wanted to make a transmasc club! The idea sat in my head for months, and in May, I bit the bullet and started it.
I loved playing with those teams, but I ultimately didn’t feel it was my space, not that it has to be. I had this joke that there were 3 trans people in that team (myself included), and me and this butch trans girl would find each other at the pub after every session and gossip over our love lives. I think trans people naturally have that kinship with each other, so why not make something just for us.
As an artist, how do you see the connection between football and art? Do you bring your artistic practice into the way you organize the team or envision Homme FC’s presence?
I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it’s a socially engaged practice, but it definitely came at a time when I wanted to do something more collaborative. It’s something I do because I wanted something else to love, to put effort and time in - and I also love being around people. As a painter, you’re working yourself to the bone, by yourself most of the time.
There’s an aliveness to football, specifically the relationship between the spectator and the ‘performer’, that mirrors the transformative experience of looking at art. Football, being the most famous and culturally relevant sport in the world, has actually captured the interests of many artists.
I’m very interested in bringing many diverging things together. Conceptually, football, contemporary art, and transmasculinity are kind of random- but I’m invested in randomness, like in Roland Barthes’ - What Is Sport, spectator relationship, bridging sports trans masculinity and culture, seeing direct impact immediately and in the material ways community can help people - also I just wanted to make cool stuff for transmascs that I haven’t seen before.
It’s a football team, but this is also a jumping-off point, and the possibilities are endless. I saw what my friends did with Athene Club and Muslim Sisterhood, how they evolved and changed but kept the mission at the heart.
When you’re coming out, you’re trying to figure out how to be a boy - what feels exciting and right for you, the things you find sexy and want to emulate, what you don’t. There’s an aspect of this where I’ve built up skills in drawing and image making.
Cognitive science research shows creativity often comes from blending distant concepts into something new and I would love to use my skills in other ways or even build new ones. I have an idea for a fun animation video I want to do for it.
You mention the desire for kinship among transmasculine and butch-identifying people. How have you seen that play out on and off the field?
This has been a soul-changing experience. I sound really dramatic - but being from the art world, you often see examples of really fractured forms of community, on direct exchange of social or economic capital. It was really important for me to make a space where the premise was quite simple, and just about having fun. Living in the world right now is hard as it is - and it’s especially hard as a trans person to feel like you belong anywhere. It’s crazy to me that in 3 months, we’ve already seen people form real friendships and even go on dates. Like I’ll be watching Instagram stories and see people hang out outside of football, and be like “Whoa!” I feel really lucky to have even made real friends from this, too. I barely had any transmasc friends when starting this, and I started this completely alone, which was daunting. Then Kri, Maya, and Reuben were like, “Hey, I’ll help”, and they became really integral to building and shaping the team. We have a full team now that just works on grants, and we have people who stepped up to coach.
I think my dream is to eventually do events and actually fundraise for people and to begin to help people in material ways if they need that help. I want to start putting people on too, like, if you wanna DJ, do a reading, a workshop or design something, let us help you do that.
How do people get involved?
Follow us on @homme_fc, sign up in our bio if you’d like to play. Message us if you’d like to do something creative, contribute a poster or whatever!