Transgender sprinter set to compete in Paris Paralympics

The Paralympics will be embroiled in controversy next week, when sprinter Valentina Petrillo is set to become the first ever transgender athlete to compete at the Games in Paris.

The matter occurs just weeks after the Olympics was embroiled in scandal over the decision to allow athletes to compete in the Women’s Boxing competition who had failed gender eligibility at the 2023 World Championships.

In that case, Imane Khelif of Algeria was cleared for the women’s 66kg and Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) for the women’s 57kg category. Neither athlete was transgender, but both experience DSD (differences in sex development), meaning that they have XY chromosomes. The row exposed the controversy around the importance of keeping sports single-sex, and both athletes won gold medals.

However, in the latest controversy, 200- and 400-metre runner Petrillo, who competes in the women’s T12 classification for athletes with visual impairments, actually is transgender, and had even won 11 national titles while competing as a man. Petrillo is 50 years old this year, well past the age at which a sprinter would be expected to be at their peak.

There is currently no coordinated strategy around transgender participation in sport: within non-disabled athletics, for instance, transgender people are currently banned from taking part in women’s events, whereas within athletics for disabled people, there is no such ban.

Instead, under the rules of World Para Athletics, an athlete who is legally recognised as a woman is entitled to compete in whatever category their impairment qualifies them for.

The President of the International Paralympic Committee Andrew Parsons commented: “I do think that the sport movement has to, guided by science, come up with better answers for these situations and for transgender athletes. We need to, based on science, have a better and probably a united answer to this population.”

However, a number of scientists have commented already that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is unfair. Sports scientist Professor Ross Tucker, speaking to BBC News, said:

"Male advantage is created through development and so it is essentially laid down over years and years of exposure to testosterone. The solution that sport has tried to come up with is to say well if the source of that advantage is testosterone then let's lower it and then the athlete is free to compete.

"But that doesn’t work because there is an asymmetry there because some of the changes that testosterone causes, like the increased muscle mass, increased strength, the shape and size of the skeleton, those changes don’t go away...

"But the strength advantages, all the evidence that exists suggests that even when you remove testosterone in an adult those advantages continue to exist in that person. So therefore sport has to realise that it can’t take away that male advantage, reduce it slightly yes, but certainly it doesn't get removed. And the only conclusion you can then draw is that the person still has male advantage even when their testosterone is lower."