I have been asked who I support more times than I can count. Not in the easy, conspiratorial way football fans search for common ground. In the other way.

“Sunderland.”

The raised eyebrow. The pause.

“Properly?”

I have never quite known what that is supposed to mean. Properly as in I know the starting eleven?

Properly as in I have watched the clock and willed it to move faster? Properly as in I have walked back to the car in silence more times than I can count?

It is rarely said with outright malice. It does not need to be. The suggestion is enough. That there are levels to this. That some supporters are assumed and others must still demonstrate that they belong here.

For women who love football, it is a question we recognise immediately.

I did not wander into Sunderland by accident. Whether inherited or discovered, this club gets under your skin in the same way. I embraced it the way so many of us do. Completely. Irrationally. Permanently.

Stand in the Stadium of Light and look properly.

Look around at the women who have held season tickets longer than some players have been alive. The girls who know every chant word for word. The mams explaining offside without hesitation. The nanas who have seen more relegation battles and heartbreak than most of us could endure.

We are not new. We have never been new. What has changed is that we are perhaps a little more visible now, and a little less inclined to shrink ourselves to make other people comfortable.

Women have carried this club too. Through promotions and collapses. Through ownership chaos. Through League One nights when belief felt more like blind faith than optimism.

We were there when Saturdays felt heavy. When you braced yourself before checking the result and still went back the week after.

We did not disappear when it was hard. In truth, that is when Sunderland tends to reveal who its supporters really are.

I know that feeling well. I have felt the same dread in injury time and the same refusal to leave early. I have felt the same release when it finally goes our way. The noise against Coventry. The way the stadium seemed to lift rather than erupt. Strangers holding each other as the years of frustration finally gave way.

In those moments nobody asks if you support Sunderland properly. Nobody checks if you can recite the starting eleven from February 2012. You are simply Sunderland.

And that is the point.

The idea that passion has a default setting has always been flawed. There is no template for what a proper fan looks like and no single voice that carries love for a football club more legitimately than another.

You do not get to decide who belongs to a club that has survived this much.

Women have always been here. We have travelled. We have argued about tactics. We have mourned departures. We have planned weekends around fixtures and carried results into Monday mornings.

We were there in the lowest moments and we are here now. The difference is that we are less willing to apologise for it.

This is not about replacing anyone. It is not about drawing lines. It is about space. Space to care without being tested. Space to speak without prefacing it. Space to love the club loudly and without qualification.

Sunderland does not belong to one version of a supporter. It belongs to anyone who has felt their stomach drop at a late concession and still come back the following week.

That includes us.

Properly.

We were always here.

And we are not going anywhere.