“I’m committed to playing basketball, and I want to make it my career. That’s the most I’ve committed to for however long.”

Basketball Victoria confirmed this month that a transgender athlete had applied to join the NBL1 South basketball league.

Dr Peter Harcourt, Basketball Australia chief medical officer and Commonwealth Games medical adviser; Suzy Batkovic, a Basketball Australia board member and three-time Olympian; and Associate Professor Diana Robinson, a sports and exercise physician from Notre Dame University, are the three assessing the application.

Rodgers told the podcast about experiences growing up in the Melbourne suburb of Montrose and playing basketball and volleyball.

“It’s good to have a bit of a voice now, because when it’s this hypothetical person ... people are making a picture of what a transgender athlete looks like in their head,” she said. “One, I don’t think it’s me, and, two, I think it’s a bit harsh and people forget that there’s actually a person.

“If you don’t get it and you don’t know, one, don’t yell stuff on the internet about it because it’s probably wrong, and, two, go and learn about it.”

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Rodgers made the decision to transition during the pandemic, when she went through a relationship break-up and also received the news that her mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

“We broke up and that was really rough,” Rodgers said.

“Two or three weeks later my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. At that point mentally I just bottomed out, rock bottom. That was brutal.”

Rodgers gave an insight into how she had wrestled with her identity while growing up.

“It took a long time and it’s quite a long process,” she said. “In hindsight, I feel sorry for that young boy [who I was] ... when I was around 10, 11 and moving out of primary school, into high school, the start of puberty kind of age, I would get these feelings and tendencies that ‘I wish I was a girl’.

“A couple of times I would have a dream one night where I was a girl in the dream and it was like ‘Wow, that was great. That was awesome.’

“That [was] sort of escalating for a couple of years.”

Rodgers’ attempt to play as a transgender athlete in the women’s competition comes after World Athletics has banned transgender women from competing in elite female competitions if they have gone through male puberty, the sport’s governing body announced.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe last week told a news conference that the decision to exclude transgender women was based “on the overarching need to protect the female category”.

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