Transgender Track World Champion Defends Her Human Right—To Race

From Bicycling

THE HATE STARTED pouring in almost as soon as Rachel McKinnon hit “share” on Missy Erickson’s Instagram post. It was Friday, October 12, and both women were hanging out at the master’s track world championships, held this year in Carson, California. Erickson did McKinnon’s track bike fit last summer, and she wanted a pic with her client after McKinnon broke the 200-meter sprint world record for women in the 35-39 age bracket.

The record only stood for a few minutes until another cyclist-Sarah Fader of Boulder, Colorado-broke it again. Erickson noted this detail in her post, but it didn’t matter. Within minutes of McKinnon sharing her achievement online, negative comments flooded the post.

“You’re a liar.” “You cheated those women.” “Learn to deal with reality.” “You’re sick in the head.”

The next day, McKinnon won the 200-meter match sprint. “Once I won the gold and posted the podium photo, things exploded,” she recalled.

McKinnon is an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. She’s an elite road cyclist and track sprinter. She is also a transgender woman. And now, she’s a world champion-but one unsure of whether her sport really has her back, or if there’s a future for herself in cycling at all.

McKinnon said she’s now received hundreds of thousands of hateful messages on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “I’ve been a target of abuse in cycling and in general for years, so I was expecting some abuse,” she said. It’s something many members of the LGTBQ community know well: A 2013 study done by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network found LGTBQ youth were almost three times as likely to be cyberbullied than their peers. Still, “the scale caught me off guard,” McKinnon said. (She guessed that the nasty comments outnumber the nice ones 3,000 to 1.)

Things got even worse when her fellow competitors spoke out. In a since-deleted tweet on October 15, Jen Wagner-Assali wrote, “I was the 3rd place rider, it’s definitely NOT fair” (emphasis hers). Then Fader gave an interview to Velonews, where she revealed that she chose to drop out of the final 200-meter sprint rather than race a trans woman. That further energized trolls on the internet. Suddenly, people who had never heard of master’s track racing were weighing in with their “grave concern” for the fairness of the sport.

It’s been more than three months since McKinnon earned her rainbow stripes. Instead of basking in the glow of victory, she’s been spending her time defending her win and trying to get USA Cycling to take some sort of action against those harassing her. So far, she said, USAC has not acknowledged or investigated any of the formal complaints she’s made, and it’s been over a month since she’s had any sort of communication from the organization.

Two of those complaints are against Fader and Wagner-Assali. McKinnon feels that their behavior violates USAC’s anti-bullying policy, which specifically includes disparaging comments about someone’s gender identity as a form of harassment. “Their comments are a violation of USAC policy,” she said. “They are degrading; they are humiliating.”

A USAC spokesperson refused to comment on whether the organization is pursuing any disciplinary action toward Fader and Wagner-Assali. However, they added that because the master’s world championships are a UCI event, any complaint should be handled by UCI, not USAC. McKinnon, however, argues that “USAC's policy covers actions outside of USAC events; it covers anything done by a USAC member.” And both Fader and Wagner-Assasli’s comments happened after the UCI event was completed.

To be clear, nothing particularly abnormal happened the day of the 200-meter sprint final. The race went off without a hitch, minus the fact that Fader, the leader from the qualifying heats, scratched. Fader argues that she quietly left the competition and didn’t make any sort of fuss about withdrawing. “I didn’t tell a single person besides my husband,” she said. “No one in that arena knew. I told the judges I was taking my daughter to Disneyland.” It was only a few days after the race, when Velonews got in touch, that she decided to give voice to her concerns.

Fader said she supports trans rights, and considers herself an ally. However, she feels the science isn’t yet settled on what exact advantages trans women may have. She worries that the competition isn’t fair. But fairness is a tricky thing to argue in a case like this, and science is one of those things that’s rarely settled. USA Cycling could push back a decision on official race ruling for decades while they wait for data to roll in.

What we do know is this: Currently, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allows transgender athletes to compete in the gender on their legal documents. However, trans women must also prove that their testosterone is “below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to her first competition.” McKinnon has met this requirement.

It’s true that research is limited on how bodies change as they transition. But small studies do exist, like one 2009 paper in the Journal of Clinical Densitometry that showed hormone replacement therapy (the administration of drugs designed to align a transgender person’s physical characteristics with their gender identity) in trans women resulted in testosterone rates similar to those in biological women, plus a loss of muscle mass and increased fat mass.

That paper built on a 2004 study in the European Journal of Endocrinology where researchers found hormone replacement therapy lowered muscle mass in trans women athletes. When Joanna Harper, a researcher who is also trans, tracked the times of eight trans women runners as they transitioned, all slowed significantly. In Harper’s own case, the difference in her 5K time was a full five minutes.

Kirsti Miller, a trans cyclist from Australia who advocates for more inclusive sport, actually agreed with Fader in part, saying the lack of research hurts trans athletes. “The biggest problem is a lack of transparency and research and science related to the development of the policies,” she said. She worries that a one-size-fits-all policy may harm the health of trans athletes over the course of their lifetimes.

Miller began transitioning years ago. Before then, she was an elite athlete in the modern pentathlon and the aquathon. She’d competed at the world championship level, and been an athlete at the Pan American games. Since her transition, which included sex reassignment surgery, her health-and muscle mass-has steadily declined. Her VO2 max has plummeted. To see pictures of her from her teenage competition years to now is shocking. “I’ve been diagnosed as suffering from severe hypogonadism. My body is prematurely aging,” she said. “I haven’t even got the energy to get out of bed half the days of the week.”

When Miller underwent surgery in 2006, she lost her ability to produce testosterone. But cis-women athletes (athletes whose gender identity corresponds with the female sex they were assigned at birth) do produce testosterone, especially in response to hard training. Miller’s body doesn’t do that, and because of regulations which ban taking testosterone, she can’t give her body what other bodies naturally have. “It takes me about a week to recover from a single workout,” she said.

Miller predicted that other trans athletes will soon face similar issues. In fact, she worries that Rachel’s success will be short-lived. “Rachel, in another year’s time, if she continues to take androgen blockers, will lose performance as her body begins to break down.” If this speculation turns out to be true, it seems especially cruel to ban trans athletes while we wait for more research to be completed.

Miller’s main complaint is that we’ve set up an arbitrary system for dividing up athletes-and it’s not working.

Right now, athletes are separated into racing categories based on gender (how people present to the world, as opposed to sex, the organs they’re born with). This assumes that gender is binary, but it’s not. Around 1 in 1,500 babies is born outside our male/female system based on range of conditions, from hormone function to reproductive organ variation. People also don’t always identify as the gender of the sex they're born with. When and how a trans person transitions is complicated and adds further diversity to the gender spectrum.

Testosterone has been the focus of this binary system. But again, the science isn’t simple or clear. There’s a range of testosterone levels among women. For example, women with polycystic ovary syndrome can have mildly elevated testosterone levels, said Alison Heather, chair of the physiology department at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Until 2015, women athletes with hyperandrogenism-whose bodies naturally produced more testosterone than the average female-were barred from competition.

Some men have less testosterone than others too, however, “For males within the physiological (i.e. normal and healthy) range, there is no evidence that testosterone levels are tied to performance,” Heather said. Oddly, there’s no max amount of naturally occurring testosterone that will bar a man from competition. Still, testosterone is a banned substance because when taken as a supplement, it can boost performance through increasing muscle mass, red blood cell counts, and hemoglobin.

But some question why testosterone has taken this all-important place as the arbiter of who competes where in sport, when there are lots of other variations between humans we don’t account for. "Naturally-produced testosterone is the only natural physical characteristic for which we have deemed women ineligible for competition. And it's only women that are deemed ineligible, never men,” says McKinnon.

FADER ISN’T convinced. “I don’t have the answer, I wish I did,” she said. “The problem that I have is that we’re too quickly making rules that affect people in both arenas. It’s affecting females, it’s affecting transgender riders. We’re deciding that one category is more important than the other category.” Heather agreed, adding that when exactly a person transitions-and whether they elect to go through surgery or not-may change important variables.

One solution Fader suggested is a third “open” category, where anyone of any gender can compete.The problem, though, is that unless others joined on their own accord, a trans-only category would be tiny-maybe a single racer at some events. Even more troublesome is that it would “out” members of the trans community by forcing them into a special category. In 2017, at least 29 members of the trans community were murdered. Violence towards the trans folks is real; and outing them for the purpose of “fair” bike racing could hardly be considered as such.

Miller feels we should look towards the Paralympics for guidance, since athletes in those games are carefully divided by abilities. “The International Paralympic Committee IPC movement has taught great lessons, and shown what inclusion looks like when embracing human difference and appreciating human individuality,” she says.

It’s also important to note that trans women are not dominating their sports. That’s why McKinnon's victory blew up: It was the first time a trans woman won a world championship in any sport, ever, even though the IOC has allowed them to compete since 2004. And Fader beat McKinnon’s world record in the 200-meter heat. She and Jennifer Wagner also beat McKinnon in the 500-meter TT, where McKinnon came in fourth. McKinnon’s results are mixed; she’s clearly a great racer, but it’s impossible to know whether that’s due to grit, tactics, training strategies, her pre-race nutrition, or her physical makeup. It’s probably some combination of all of these things.

“There are probably 50 trans athletes competing in Australia, but you only hear about one,” Miller said, meaning the one who happens to be competing at a high level. She added, “we’ve been eligible to compete in the Olympics since 2004: Why haven’t we won a single medal yet if we’re that good?”

McKinnon further argued that because the IOC has deemed sport a human right, denying a trans athlete access to the sport is essentially stripping away a human right. “In order to take away a basic human right, like sport, you have to show that the policy is in service of a worthy goal, like fairness, and that the policy is necessary, effective, and proportionate,” McKinnon said. In other words, you must show that removing one group’s right to sport-banning trans women from the women’s category, for instance-outweighs the harm done to that group. “In my work on the topic I argue that the science shows that such policies do not meet these requirements. They are not necessary, they are not effective, and the harm they cause trans and intersex women is not proportionate.”

And the harm her win has caused is real. McKinnon asks friends manage her social media accounts, and she takes extra safety precautions in daily life. Before races, she has to surround herself with friends, to keep her from focusing on the folks that don't want her there. It's enough to make her even consider leaving the sport. But like the rest of us, cycling is what makes her happy. "When I am allowed to just race my bike and focus only on that, nothing makes me happier." She is going to continue racing-doing what she loves to do, which she has a right to do-no matter what internet commenters or competitors say.

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