A level playing field
Is Kate Weatherly a man ruining a women’s sport?
Kate Weatherly wooshes down a trail at Auckland’s Riverhead Forest, controlling her mountain bike like it’s an extension of her body. Fresh from winning the elite women’s division at the national championships near Wanaka last month, the 20-year-old is back into a busy routine of university study, training and part-time work at a Kumeu bike shop.
Weatherly’s sudden arrival on the women’s downhill scene in January came as a surprise to some in mountain biking – until the end of last year she’d been known as Anton and raced men.
When she won an event in Rotorua by more than 30 seconds, it set off a firestorm of online discussion and calls for her to be excluded.
She had an unfair advantage because she developed as a male, people said on bike forums. She could discourage women from taking up the sport, some complained.
Weatherly had previously competed in the men’s open division.
She hadn’t exactly set the world on fire – usually finishing mid-pack.
No-one knew that she wasn’t just competing against other riders, but her own body – the hormone blockers she’d been taking since 17 had reduced her testosterone levels to below those of most women.
‘‘I was losing strength and losing speed on tracks even though I was training and riding really hard,’’ she says.
But she didn’t want to come out as transgender, fearing hateful comments.
‘‘So I thought, I’ll just keep racing in the men’s field at a disadvantage.’’
She figured she’d look into switching to the women’s category for the 2018/19 season, but her plans were upended at an event last September.
‘‘Someone found out and went around telling people and kind of outed me, which was quite traumatic.’’
However, she was pleasantly surprised by the support she received.
‘‘I thought, oh well, everybody knows, I might as well switch’.’’
She got in touch with Cycling NZ, which like many sporting federations has adopted guidelines issued by the International Olympic Committee in 2015, requiring transgender female athletes to prove their testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nanomoles a litre for at least 12 months prior to first competition.
Weatherly was able to provide blood tests showing her levels were in the 0.1–0.9 range, a result of having had injections of the drug Lucrin when she started transitioning at 17.
She got clearance to compete in the elite women’s field just a few days before the first national series event for 2018 – in Auckland on January 9. She finished first – in a field of one.
A couple of weeks later at an event in Rotorua she was up against two other riders, including Shania Rawson of Tauranga, a former junior world number two.
Kate beat her by more than 30 seconds, which is huge in downhill.
It was quite an accomplishment for someone who was a non-sporty kid.
‘‘She was a sickly, undergrown child until she was intermediate age,’’ says her mum, Liz Weatherly. ‘‘She had a chronic lung disease – bronchiectasis – she spent a lot of her early life in hospital.
‘‘It’s actually a miracle that she’s an athlete at all.’’
Because of her ill health she didn’t start puberty until about 16 or 17, Kate says. She’d always felt something wasn’t right with her body and puberty was particularly stressful.
She saw psychologists, was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and began taking the hormone blockers – Anton became Kate.
In 2013, around the same time she was discovering her true identity, she found mountain biking.
‘‘I really enjoyed it, I saved up all my pennies and got a downhill bike for the 2014 season and started racing.’’
One of the reasons Weatherly was delaying making the switch to the women’s category was that the estrogen she had started taking in April, 2016 had yet to give her the results she wanted.
‘‘I have a lot of issues with the fact I don’t look as feminine as I want to – I’m still not passing 100 per cent as female in public.
‘‘I wanted to give the estrogen enough time to make me look as feminine as possible . . . I guess the more masculine I look the more stressful it is for people.’’
When she made the change before she was ready, the online reaction hurt.
‘‘One racer messaged me and said ‘You’re ruining the sport by competing as a man in a women’s field’.’’
She joined discussions on bike forums, explaining that she met all the criteria set by Cycling NZ and the IOC.
She told her critics how lower testosterone causes muscular atrophy, bone density and muscle fibre changes, ‘‘which shift the athlete’s physical abilities from that of a man to that of a woman’’.
She hadn’t had the advantage of developing as a male because she took hormone blockers when puberty hit, she pointed out.
She wasn’t winning every race – she came second to Rawson at an event in Christchurch – and if she was thrashing everyone all the time, she’d quit, she wrote.
Some remained unconvinced. ‘‘Sorry, Kate, I feel for you in this situation, but I don’t think it’s fair on the biological girls,’’ someone posted. ‘‘Maybe a new gender neutral class should be created?’’
That’s a common suggestion, but doesn’t appeal to Weatherly.
‘‘My thing is, I’m not gender neutral, I’m a girl. The whole idea of a third category invalidates my sense of identity.’’
When Weatherly won the national champs, beating Rawson by 13 seconds and the third placegetter by 47 seconds, it threw gasoline on the fire.
Rawson, 19, went public with her frustrations, saying the lack of a stand-down period between Weatherly’s change of categories was confusing and unfair and was one reason only five women turned up to race.
Rawson has stepped back from discussing the issue; her father Ash, says she’s received flak for speaking out.
Ash Rawson, a nine-time national BMX champion and current development coach, is scathing of the way Cycling NZ has handled Weatherly’s case.
‘‘There’s a massive lack of communication with the athletes and a lack of sympathy for the ladies concerned.
‘‘I have nothing against transgenders . . . but fairness in sport is what we’re all about.
‘‘Kate has developed as a male as far as bone structure, bone density, muscle mass, lung capacity – it’s why we have gender sports.’’
Cycling NZ took Shania overseas as a junior and she fears that if there is only funding for one person, she will miss out on selection for world events, her father says.
Cycling NZ chief executive Andrew Matheson said in a statement the organisation’s job was to ensure that where possible trans athletes are not excluded, ‘‘but at the same time our overriding sporting objective remains to guarantee fair competition’’.
He says Weatherly meets the necessary criteria and will be eligible for international competition if selected.
Matheson says it’s wrong to suggest there is a mandatory stand-down period for athletes switching gender categories.
The policy requires transgender female athletes to be below the set testosterone levels for at least 12 months and any longer period is assessed on a case-by-case basis.
He says Cycling NZ is ‘‘acutely aware of . . . the confidential nature of this matter’’ and believes the way it communicated with competitors – including speaking to all elite women riders before the national champs – was respectful of the individuals concerned.
So do transgender athletes have an unfair advantage?
Some physiologists think so. Steve Stannard, professor of exercise physiology at Massey University who is also a competitive cyclist, says there are clear advantages for transgender female athletes in strength-based sports such as weightlifting.
‘‘If you’ve competed as a male through puberty, you’ve had this stimulus on your body that has caused it to adapt, which is going to give you an advantage later on.’’
At the other end of the spectrum in sports such as shooting or car racing, gender is not so important, he says.
He suspects downhill mountain biking sits somewhere in the middle.
‘‘Weight makes you go fast downhill – if you’re bigger, you go faster.’’
Stannard believes the IOC needs to get its policy right.
‘‘If you’ve got one set of rules, they don’t fit all sports.’’
There’s a paucity of research on the subject but a 2016 US study of eight transgender middle-distance runners, comparing their times before and after transition, found they had no advantage in the women’s field.
A 2016 UK-based study, which reviewed 31 national and international transgender sporting policies, found most were unfairly discriminating against transgender people when there was no scientific evidence that they had any athletic advantage.
Beth Jones, of the school of sports exercise and health sciences at Loughborough University in England, took part in the study.
She says it can be argued that transgender athletes are at a disadvantage.
‘‘In terms of psychological wellbeing and the distress they have to go through, the barriers they face – changing rooms, discrimination, a lot of them have poor mental health – you could argue that puts them at a disadvantage.’’
Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley took the sport’s governing bodies and the IOC to court in Ontario claiming their policies surrounding XY female athletes were a violation of human rights.
Worley says it should not be referred to as a transgender issue, rather one of chromosomes.
An athlete who has had sex change surgery and is no longer producing hormones, essentially having to be ‘‘doped’’ with testosterone to stop their body shutting down, is completely different to a still-transitioning athlete taking hormone blockers, she says.
Worley says the IOC’s move to drop its requirement for XY female athletes to have had sex change surgery, instead recommending their testosterone be below a certain level, was not based on any scientific evidence.
She says the IOC doesn’t understand the potential impact on athletes’ health of ‘‘crushing’’ their endocrine system, which sends hormones to different parts of the body, because it hasn’t done the research.
‘‘You’re asking a young person to do this to their body to kick a ball, ride a bike or run around a track. No athlete should ever have to defend their identity, nor change their bodies to play a game.’’
She fears that Weatherly will face health troubles in the future.
‘‘I can tell you from my experience, she’s on a downward curve.’’
Weatherly says she will probably have to get a dispensation to have a small amount of supplemented testosterone at some point but isn’t too worried at the moment.
She says dealing with her dysphoria and getting her appearance to a point where she passes in public as female is far more important to her than bike racing.
‘‘I mean, I love racing and I want to be the best, but feeling happy in my body is more important to a long and happy life.’’
She hopes she can lift standards in women’s downhill.
‘‘I’m quite a confident rider, so I hit a lot of jumps, which some of the other girls don’t.
‘‘It isn’t just whether or not you have testosterone, it’s a confidence thing.
‘‘So if I’m hitting the jumps the other girls are going to have to as well, which is going to make the sport cooler.
‘‘It’s not about what’s in your pants.’’