power in visibility: zeke (he/him)

This Trans+ Awareness Week (13–19 November 2026), Not a Phase is sharing the stories of ten trans+ community members. These are people living ordinary lives across the UK. Each was given a disposable camera and asked to document a single, simple prompt: the “power” they’d want the world to recognise in them. The resulting images, alongside short interviews in participants’ own words, are below; 

Zeke is a trans man and musician in Birmingham who is rekindling his love of football and wants to be seen for all of who he is.

Recently I’ve been going to the gym a lot more. So last year, I had top surgery and I’ve been using that as a little bit of an excuse to not go back into the gym. I was very heavy in the gym before, but now it’s almost been a year since I’ve had top surgery. No…. I think it has been a year, and I’ve still not got back into the gym. So recently I’ve been going and it’s been really nice. 

I have no anxiety whatsoever. It’s crazy. It feels like a playground now, which is nice. It doesn’t feel like a chore. Instead of, like, looking at my watch going “oh, I’ve been here for 40 minutes, I’m supposed to hit an hour”, now it’s like “I’ve been here an hour and a half. I’ve just messed around”. It’s just been like getting comfortable in the gym again, with all the equipment and stuff. So now I’ve actually been enjoying it, doing chest presses and everything like that. Just movements I never thought I’d be able to do.

I mean, now that I’ve actually started to do a plan, the plan has been more “I’m going to train”. I’ve started to call it training and not going to the gym anymore. It’s just like I’m going to train. It’s actually really important. And I end up saying, “oh, I’ve missed this schedule. I have to stick to the next schedule now”, and it’s been like 2 or 3 days since I’ve actually been. I’m like, come on, just, just go, just go and mess around. Just go play and yeah, it’s been nice.

How do I feel about being part of this campaign? Well, I’ve always liked to spread a positive message about trans+ people. I think it’s really important that we combat everything negative at the moment. And it’s just nice. It’s a nice campaign for me to put my face on something actually positive for a change, rather than adding to the negativity. And it’s always good to make trans+ people as visible as possible.

I’ve recently come across Not A Phase from Alix reaching out to me, which has been great. That’s come from actually putting my image and just my positivity on social media. So now I’m actually able to get people to come and find me and I help them in turn, and visibility is so important for me.

I think putting myself out there has really helped other people see themself in me, like representation of intersectionality and everything like that has been really important.

I always think putting yourself out there is worth it. When I first started, I was getting so much hate. I was getting so many negative comments, and I was always saying to myself, I work in a little bit of social media now, so I was always like, “you got to push past the algorithm, push past the algorithm.”

We’re going to get there, going to get there, and the algorithm didn’t like me at first. I was sent across to the wrong people, maybe because of the gym content, maybe because of the football background. Previously in a past life, that’s how I say, and, I think it’s it’s always been worth it because I’ve always had the comments of you’ve helped me transition. I’ve even had parents say, you’ve helped me understand my child. And that has been what’s kept me going ever since.

That statistic to me does make me a bit shocked, if I’m being honest. I don’t think I heard that statistic that simply to understand it previously, because it’s always always said really in a bunch of jargon that doesn’t make sense. So to hear it that simply has opened my eyes a little bit because I work in creative industries now, so I put on gigs and stuff like that. I put on indie rock, sometimes metal, and a lot of pop gigs. I put basically every genre and the people that come through the door that have said, “there’s a trans+ person inside, they’re disturbing the audience”., indicating that they’re basically making a big deal of that, i.e. they’ve been called the wrong pronoun or they can’t access the toilet. 

It really hurts me because they’re saying that they’re reporting this to a trans+ person who’s put on this gig. I think people’s understanding of that trans+ person in that scenario and me as a trans+ person, they’ve just reported this to and not knowing that I’m trans+ because I pass pretty well, it does shock me. It shocked me. And I don’t think I can really comprehend how people’s perception of trans+ people really sits in their brain. I get people come up to me that are like really aggressive, they’re saying quite negative things about this trans+ person inside the gig. 

Then, to me it’s all like, “please, could you do something about it? They’re really, really annoying. They’re really like messing up the peace. I’m just trying to enjoy my night.”

Well, they’re just trying to enjoy their night as well. I’m here trying to enjoy my night of  putting on a gig and seeing the great work that I’ve put on to make this gig run. They’re bringing an issue to me that’s not really relevant to the gig itself. So, it just makes me quite shocked when I hear that statistic. 

Well, I have been a part of a lot of communities in my life. Obviously, there’s like black queer nights that happen, there’s, LGBTQ+ nights, as well as trans+ masculine nights that happen in and around Birmingham. They’re hard to find, but they’re there. There are a lot of communities that I kind of fit into, but again, I’ve kind of made a community my own. Music community, football community. I’ve always found myself really resonating with people, whoever they are, if they’re in that community, I really resonate with those people. And community is so important to me. Not just one big community, but loads of little ones, because you find a piece of you in them. And I think it’s just really important for me, it was building my confidence first to be a part of those communities. Now I have found my confidence and I’m who I am now, I’m able to put myself in this community a little bit more. 

I would say confidence really came to me overnight. Literally, I came out and I was all of a sudden much more confident in myself. I came out just as I was taking my GCSEs, so my GCSEs are in my new name and I went to college literally as a brand new person. I was confident, I had a fresh start. It was like the perfect time for me, so I’m quite lucky in that sense. I managed to find new friends who are guys, they didn’t know and I had to tell them. I felt like I had to tell them because that’s a piece of me I don’t want to hide and they just stayed my friends through that. So, yeah, I’ve really just found community, as soon as I transitioned, I really found community, found confidence, and I became myself through that. 

I’m quite lucky because I actually got to live through that whole thing, it changed my whole life. I’m really grateful for that, but honestly, community was the thing that got me through that. My friends, my family, the communities I found along the way, also the communities that I lost as well through that.

Literally, on the night that I came out, to my mum, it felt like I lost football straight away, which was really heartbreaking. I think that was a big factor I had to take in, as I already knew what that meant. Transitioning and coming out meant that I was going to lose parts of my life that I’ve literally surrounded myself around football. Football was my life. I was going to be a pro footballer, that was my thing. I’d work so hard as a kid, throughout my teenage years, to be that person. Not only was I signing the contract to become myself, but I was signing a contract to leave parts of me behind that I’ve literally worked my whole life for. 

For a while I did fall out of love with football, I couldn’t watch it, I couldn’t hear about it. I just didn’t know, I didn’t want to know about players anymore. I really couldn’t bring myself to talk about football or see it and because of that, I did lose touch with fitness a little bit. I’ve tried to get back into it o n not a professional level, but just lifting weights. It does something for my dopamine and it makes me really happy. It’s more of “I’m doing fitness now to look how I want to look”, so it’s not really linked to my football anymore

Recently, after the World Cup, football has, like, kind of, made its way back into my heart a little bit, which has been quite nice. I bought my first football again, I got my old football boots out, even though they didn’t really fit and I looked at my England shirt that I used to have when I used to play, and I just was like; “right, I’m gonna I’m going to do something with this”. So I mixed the two, I was like, you know what? I’m going to habit stack to get myself to do it again. I was like, let me make some content, let me make a video. So I made some content, made a video of me kicking the ball around for the first time. And that took off literally like over a million views on everything. I have had contact from lots of different  trans+ masculine football teams, and they’ve all reached out and I’m yet to join one. Mainly because I’ve had to take a little bit of a break from football, but there are lots of football teams out there which I didn’t know about. Now I’ve found them and they’ve kind of found me, I’m trying to go to them a lot more and rekindle my love for football. 

I’ve definitely found my visibility through posting online and I’m posting online about me, literally candid stuff about me. Obviously, I like the editing content part of it, that’s been a huge help, but now I’ve kind of put myself out there and the power in that visibility has actually brought people to me, which has been great. So I found that community through visibility. 

If I could say something to somebody who’s never knowingly met a trans+ person is; Don’t overcomplicate it. Seriously, being trans isn’t the entirety of who we are. It’s one part of us. We have other interests, we have other things. You probably don’t even spot us out in the wild somewhere. So, we’re we’re we’re not complicated people, come talk to us. Don’t worry about misgendering first hand, obviously, we’re very open to conversation. Just come talk to us and you can probably learn a thing or two. 

Well, as soon as I finished football, I was like, right, I have to do something with my life now because I’m quite big in education and stuff like that. I thought I needed to learn something. What do I go on to do? And I was music. Music has always been a part of my life. It’s always been a family centered thing. It was seen as very odd that I was quite sporty as a kid. It was like why am I not musical? 

The difference between my body playing football and my body when I’m doing music is that music is a very internal thing, whereas football is a very physical thing. Through my healing as a trans man, I’ve found that internal healing is really important, because you’re not necessarily liking your physical body all the time. I knew I was getting top surgery, but I couldn’t have it just yet. It was like I always had to wait. Finding healing in my internal self through music, through creative arts, has been so important to me. I didn’t necessarily have the love of football at that time, I wasn’t playing or training four times a week. I kind of had to find a new love to stay away from the physical aspects of my body that I didn’t like. I really just locked in, made some music, was like love this, I’m going to do something with it. I actually did music business as a degree and now I put on gigs around Birmingham. 

When I’m making music, I don’t really look for inspiration, I look for feeling and emotion first. I might have influences, I like certain artists and I like sound producers, and I might hear a sound of go, yeah, I love that, but really it’s more of an internal thing first. So, I play what I feel and then go off  that.

My dad is a musician and my mum is very musical, she works in the music industry. She actually runs festivals and events and stuff. It was just a natural thing for me to get into music. It’s always been there. If I wasn’t playing football, I’d come back and just fiddle on the guitar for a little bit and just learn a little bit of that. It’s always been surrounding me, if that makes sense.

If I could tell the person who lost football and became the person I am today, I would say “you may not be the same person, but everything that you’ve learnt and you work towards and you understood and internalized, is the same now. You still have the same principles. You still try to be a good person. You still try and look after your family. You still are creative. You can still lift some reasonable weight on a bar and you’re happy now. I just want to say I’m proud of you and how far you’ve come.”

I feel powerful when the other parts of me outshine being trans+. I’m proud of being trans+, but there are other parts of me that I love and I want to focus on. I might not necessarily remember that I’m trans in the moment, and I’m just focusing on making music or getting back into football or being with my family or walking my dog or something like that. It’s just now just a part of me that doesn’t hurt me anymore. It’s a part of me that I’m proud to be. 

When people meet me for the first time, I want them to see my success. I want them to see my passion and I want them to see me for who I am. So being trans+, but one doesn’t outshine the other all the time, my success doesn’t outshine being trans+. I’m a successful trans+ person, it all comes up together with me.  I’m all of those things, and I will never stop being any of those things and I want people to feel inspired by the passion, the success and, the transness and how I embody that.

I hope people can take away that there shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be any fear around visibility. You can be who you are. You can express yourself the way you want to express yourself. However, if it’s very masculine, very femme, or just be you. However you express  yourself.