BY WINNING A RACE, A TRANSGENDER B.C. CYCLIST HAS TRIGGERED CONTROVERSY JUST AS THE ISSUE IS THE FOCUS OF DEBATE BOTH AT THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE AND INSIDE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.
Both support, resistance from competitors
Despite following the strict rules of elite cycling to the letter, a Canadian transgender woman is at the centre of a political firestorm after winning a world championship race for women.
Rachel McKinnon, an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston from Victoria, B.C., won the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship in the women’s 35-44 age bracket in Los Angeles last week.
She was eligible because of rules that require athletes’ testosterone levels to be in a given range, which McKinnon achieves using drug therapy.
But because McKinnon was born male, her victory has taken on massive political significance, and she has been fielding media and public interest from around the world, some of it congratulatory, much of it derogatory.
“I see my win in this broader political moment where trans rights have made great strides and people are waking up,” McKinnon said in an interview.
But the episode has also served to expose animosity toward her and transgender people in general.
The bronze medallist in the race, Jen Wagner-Assali, complained publicly.
“It’s definitely NOT fair,” she wrote on Twitter, in reply to Katie Hopkins, a British far-right provocateur, who held up the presence of a transgender woman on the podium as evidence the “world is gripped by a febrile madness.”
Wagner-Assali later apologized, saying she had “unintentionally fanned the flames on a controversial situation, and that I regret … I made the comments out of a feeling of frustration, but they weren’t productive or positive.”
Silver medallist Carolien van Herrikhuyzen said the race was “honest” and if Wagner-Assali had a problem, she should not have raised it after competing and coming third.
The controversy comes as transgender rights are rising fast up the political agenda.
The International Olympic Committee is drawing up new guidelines for transgender women in its events.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has proposed dramatic changes to federal anti-discrimination legislation that would define a person’s gender as an unchangeable, binary, biological feature defined at birth by genitalia. Critics have pointed out that this would mean the law does not recognize transgender or intersex people at all.
In Britain, proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act have been criticized for going too far in eliminating an objective test, and leaving the legal determination of gender — for prisoners, for example — entirely to the person in question, with no medical or other evidence required.
McKinnon has been an elite athlete for several years and encountered a lot of pushback and skepticism, she said.
In the interview, she emphasized the role of the male hormone testosterone, and pointed to research that suggests it is not correlated with elite athletic performance. One study, for example, showed around one-sixth of elite male athletes had testosterone levels that were below the female average.
Regulatory bodies for sport typically take their lead from the IOC, which since 2004 has allowed trans athletes to compete in their legally recognized gender, but only if they had gone through extensive physical transitioning, including surgery and hormone therapy. That rule was changed in 2015 to remove the surgery requirement, but trans women are subject to testing of testosterone levels, which must remain in an approved range over the course of competition, and a year prior.
A new set of IOC guidelines is being developed specifically for male-to-female transgender athletes.
In America, the national cycling authority adopted IOC policy until last year. Now it only requires testosterone testing at its most elite levels, in which McKinnon competes.
She is not the first transgender athlete to achieve major success. Chris Mosier, for example, is a transgender athlete in duathlon (running and cycling), and in 2016 became the first American to compete with a national team in a gender different than what they were assigned at birth.
But McKinnon made the point that transgender women are regarded differently, and the question of possible biological advantages is harder for them to answer.
It is here that McKinnon draws a parallel — not a direct comparison — to historical efforts to exclude black athletes from some sports on the racist grounds of innate biological advantage.
Her point is that even if it were true that black athletes had some natural advantage, it does not follow that it is unfair for them to compete against athletes of other racial backgrounds.
She points to the Olympic charter, which calls sport a human right. “We are not going to go backwards,” she said.