Hi friends, today’s post is a written conversation between me and my friend Veronica from Veronica’s Second Act about efforts to prevent trans women from competing in sports. Veronica writes about her experiences and observations as a transgender woman at Veronica’s Second Act. If you like this post, be sure to read and subscribe to her work or find her on social media!
Veronica: Hey Ev, I’d like to ask you a question. Have You ever witnessed something that people thought was impossible?
Ev: I’ve seen the Waymos zipping around my neighborhood, if that’s what you mean… Have you?
V: Oh wow, Waymos have not made it to Chicagoland yet. I was thinking something a little different so let me set the scene that I witnessed. It's July of 1988 and I'm on vacation in Indianapolis with my father and older brother. I'm fourteen years old and we were lucky enough to score tickets to the US Olympic Trials in Track and Field. Our seats for the entire event were impossibly good seats, right up front just past the finish line. It's day one of the trials, and unbeknownst to me, I was about to see among the greatest accomplishments in the history of sport. The 100 meter dash at the trials was set up the same way as at the Olympics in Seoul that year, with four rounds. Heats and the quarterfinals on opening Saturday and the semifinals and finals the next day on Sunday. Sprinters who know they are fast enough to get through to the finals typically don't bring out their best in the early rounds. So opening Saturday is hardly the time that you'd expect a World Record to be set that has stood for more than thirty-seven years. But that's exactly what happened.
E: Omg. You got to see a World Record??
V: Yes, and it’s still seared in my brain. When I say we had impossibly good seats, we really had them! This was the photo in the article in Sports Illustrated from the trials in 1988 and the arrow is pointing to fourteen year old me in a Chicago White Sox hat in the crowd. I’m between my brother (who is taking a photo) and my father (who is blocked by the image of Flo-Jo except for his foot).
That’s Veronica in the crowd looking at the scoreboard to check the time after Florence Griffith-Joyner crossed the finish line
That week’s cover of Sports illustrated)
V: After a winded aided time that was faster than the world record in the first round, Florence Griffith-Joyner ran the 100 meters in 10.49 seconds in the quarterfinals. She absolutely shattered the previous world record of 10.77 seconds, set by Evelyn Ashford in 1984. Flo-Jo's time still stands as the women's world record. This was a 2.7% improvement in the world record. It's so uncommon that you'd have this much improvement in the world record in one race, and that's why the record has stood for so long. This record has its own lore of how it couldn't have been legit too. Some have argued that the wind, which measured at 0.0 (likely a crosswind) must have indicated that there was an equipment malfunction. Others have accused her of being on steroids to explain away the massive improvement. There has never been any evidence to back up these accusations, and the record still stands to this day.
E: Wow. That’s so cool that you got to witness that… It’s also very illuminating how eager people are to detract from women’s athletics accomplishments. Similar to the harassment of 2024 Olympic boxing gold medalist Imane Khelif.
V: That whole thing was so gross. Imagine getting to be the best in the world and having your moment taken over because you are being attacked by some of the wealthiest, transphobic people in the world like Elon Musk and Joanne Rowling. At the same time, we know that the people who argue that we need to protect women’s spaces so often are the same people that allow men to enter the women’s event at a poker tournament. The dichotomy between making women prove they are women with regressive witch hunts while laws in other events ensure that men are never policed in this type of way is so misogynistic. They ask “what is a woman?” but those same people will never ask “what is a man?”
E: All the hand-wringing about protecting women’s sports is fundamentally regressive. The 2025 World Athletic Championships just concluded in Tokyo, and for the first time since 1992 all female athletes had to undergo “sex verification” - by a genetic test for the SRY gene. World Athletics claims SRY is “a reliable proxy for determining biological sex.” Even putting aside the pseudoscientific nature of “biological sex,” they know that’s not true.
V: I’m not a scientist, but I know that there is no single definition that can reliably determine this. Every single test is fundamentally flawed. Can you tell me about the flaws of a chromosome test?
E: Human genetics is way more complicated than any single gene. That complexity, in part, leads to a spectrum of human sex traits. SRY is just one piece of the puzzle in influencing the development of genitalia. As a result, strict biological lines between “male” and “female” are farcical. World Athletics has a long history of ignoring this truth and exploiting women’s bodies in pursuit of “sex verification.”
V: I know many of these policies have evolved over time because they can’t get to a single test. Can you give me a quick recap of that history Ev?
E: In 1936 (ahead of the infamous Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany), the organization now known as World Athletics established a policy that allowed them to spontaneously pull aside any female athlete for a genital inspection. At the Berlin Olympics, an American sprinter and lesbian, Helen Stephens, was accused of being “a man” after winning the women’s 100m dash. Stephens passed her inspection. By 1966, genital inspections were mandatory, and the inspection process became known as a “nude parade,” given the sheer number of female athletes who were subject to examination. Eventually, sporting bodies like World Athletics shifted to chromosome testing to confirm that female athletes had two X chromosomes. Upon passing the test, athletes were given a “certificate of femininity” which allowed them to compete in athletic competitions. If the chromosome test returned an XY chromosomal composition, then the athlete was barred from competing.
V: And again, men have never had to undergo any of this.
E: Nope! And, to be clear, these women were not trans. They identified as cis women for their entire lives and were genuinely surprised at their chromosomal composition. These tests by World Athletics was the first indication that they carried an intersex, chromosomal difference. One such woman is María José Martínez-Patiño, a Spanish athlete who later successfully advocated for the elimination of chromosome testing. Martínez-Patiño grew up as a cis girl and was devastated by the public repercussions of these results: “I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I lost friends, my fiancé, hope, and energy. But I knew that I was a woman.”
V: Intersex people are more common than folks with red hair. Yet, this makes sense that Martínez-Patiño had no idea she was intersex. There are so many ways for people to be intersex and so often there is no reason for them to ever question their gender. It’s rare for people to undergo this type of genetic testing.
E: Absolutely. Martínez-Patiño eventually found out that she has androgen insensitivity syndrome. Due to a benign genetic difference, her body cannot respond to testosterone. Without the effects of testosterone, Martínez-Patiño was assigned female at birth. Her advocacy directly led to the elimination of chromosome testing by World Athletics in 1992. But in 2025, Martínez-Patiño would again be banned from competing.
V: So now let me pose this question for you. If the hypothesis is that trans women have a competitive advantage, why has a trans woman never held a world record in an Olympic sport? Not just a world record right now, any world record ever. If, as the fear based hypothesis goes, trans women have abilities that are more like men, shouldn't their performance be more in line with men's performances? Shouldn't trans women own a bunch of world records if they have a competitive advantage?
E: Yeah, that hypothesis is easily falsified.
V: Let me put this into perspective. So many men have run faster than Flo Jo's time of 10.49 seconds. The men's world record in the 100 meters is held by Usain Bolt at 9.58 seconds. When Flo-Jo shattered the world record in the women's 100, the men's world record was held by Carl Lewis at 9.93 seconds. So, over the life of Flo Jo's world record, there has been between a 5.6% difference and a 9.5% difference between the women's and men's world record times. Put another way, even in Flo Jo's shattering of the world record for the women's 100 with a 2.7% improvement, there was still more than double that gap of improvement for her to touch the world record in a men's event, and that gap has gotten much larger since 1988. There is just no way that any woman would be able to compete with a moderately good men's sprinter at 100 meters.
E: Absolutely, and that includes trans women.
V: Agreed. Let me show you two races. The photos look side by side, but imagine they are actually the same photo. These events are Florence Griffith-Joyner's World Record race in 1988 and the race in the Men's Finals of the 100 meters in 1991 when Carl Lewis set a new men's World record of 9.86 seconds.
Comparisons of Griffith-Joyner’s world record pace with Carl Lewis’ world record pace
V: The fields in the events are a bit different, with Flo-Jo running in the quarterfinals of the US Olympic Trials and Carl Lewis running in the finals of the World Championships. So the competition is nowhere near as stacked in Flo-Jo's race as it is in Carl Lewis's race. With that said, Flo-Jo is in lane five. One lane above her in lane four is Gail Devers who would go on to win the Olympic Gold medal in the women's 100 meters at both the 1992 and 1996 Olympic games. Certainly that's a world caliber opponent that Grifith-Joyner absolutely destroys in her race.
E: And at the same time, it looks like every male athlete would beat Griffith-Joyner at her world record pace…
V: They wouldn’t just beat her, she isn’t even close to their time. Despite this iconic performance, she would not even be in the picture of the men's race. Doesn't this just scream that it's absurd that people claim there is an advantage for trans women without holding any women's world records when there is this big of a difference in their performance? Any trans woman who was competing at an event like this before they transitioned would be getting such a major head start. And yet there are no world records held by trans women. There are massive changes happening to the body when someone medically transitions. I’m no athlete, but I found myself accepting help with physical tasks that I used to have no problem with only a few months into transition. Any trans woman that can simply compete at an elite level after medically transitioning, while having her testosterone levels regularly tested, with all the changes that happen to her body during that time, has my deepest admiration.
E: Yeah, these reckless policies are not at all rooted in reality. Concerns about fairness aren’t rooted in evidence. Plus, bans are really harmful! The Canadian province of Alberta instituted a sports ban and now requires that every female athlete older than 12 has to submit a gender confirmation form. Now, youth sports teams in Alberta are turning away cis girls who don’t have the form, and fewer girls are playing sports because of this policy.
V: Then there are all the school board meetings that start debating both trans athletes’ participation and the participation of girls who just get accused of being trans like the well publicized case in 2024 of a cis teen competing on the basketball team who had a school board member accusing her of being trans. We know why this happens. The people pushing trans athlete bans typically couldn’t care less about women’s sports and play into misogyny. We know people are interested in women’s sports at the same levels as the men’s game when it gets promoted in the same way. It’s not a coincidence that right after the NCAA was called out for disparities in how much they favored the men’s basketball tournament over the women’s tournament that women’s basketball’s popularity has taken off. It only took three years of true equity efforts for the women’s NCAA basketball final to outdraw the men’s final. Anti-trans measures in sports ignore the science and are rooted in suppressing women’s and girl’s sports.
If you enjoyed the piece, read and subscribe to Veronica’s work here or find her on social media!
from the archive
