In a world with some pretty complicated problems, clarity can be difficult to come by — but it can also help prevent some of those problems from becoming worse and affecting more and more people.
Now, I don’t know how to solve issues surrounding transgender athletes. That’s way above my pay grade. Maybe they should get their own category to compete under? I don’t know.
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What I do know is that there has to be a better system than what lets something like this happen.
Mary Gregory, a powerlifter from Virginia, has been stripped of her world titles after the U.S.’s governing body ruled that she’s “actually a male.”
Gregory had set four world records at a recent competition, in women’s squat, bench press, and deadlift, as well as the “world total record.”
However, the RAW Powerlifting Federation has reversed course and instead took away her titles.
RAW’s president, Paul Bossi, made a statement regarding the ruling.
“The Drug Testing Coordinator for this even performed the drug test at which time it was revealed that this lifter was actually a male in the process of becoming a Transgender female,” the statement read. “Our rules, and the basis of separating genders for competition, are based on physiological classification rather than identification. On the basis of all information presented to the Board of Directors for this particular case, the conclusions made is that that correct physiological classification is male.”
So, because she wasn’t female at the time of the competition, Gregory was disqualified.
As she told Outsports , she didn’t see any of it coming that day, and even though the official she spoke to when she arrived was surprised at first, she received a warm welcome.
“He seemed really supportive of me and so (were) the rest of the staff there,” Gregory said. “They gendered me correctly. They called me ‘ma’am’ or ‘she’ and ‘her;’ they used the correct pronouns.”
Gregory said the other weightlifters treated her well, too.
“The other lifters were fine,” said Gregory. “You know, I was a little surprised at first, but once I started talking to them, I was congratulating them, I was helping them, I was getting high fives. They started doing the same thing to me.”
And the director of the meet seemed just as warm to Gregory.
“I shook the director’s hand and I told him, ‘I want to thank you, because as a transgender lifter, I was unsure of the reaction I was going to get here, and you and your staff have gone above and beyond to make me feel welcome. And I really appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to me.’ And I told him that to his face,” she said.
Gregory says that her hormone treatments have greatly affected her performance when lifting.
Before transitioning, she could lift 408 pounds in the squat, bench press 298 pounds, and deadlift 507 — now she’s down to 314, 233, and 424 respectively.
She had been taking hormones and hormone blockers for 11 months prior to the championships. And because she was competing uncontested that day, her wins didn’t prevent someone else from taking home a trophy.
However, hormones don’t tell the whole story in powerlifting, at least according to USA Powerlifting.
The USAPL, which oversees national powerlifting competitions and is not the group Gregory competed under, doesn’t allow transgender women to compete, saying that “Men naturally have larger bone structure, higher bone density, stronger connective tissue, and higher muscle density than women. These traits, even with reduced levels of testosterone do not go away.”
However, Gregory’s love of the sport hasn’t been dimmed.
Even though she can’t compete, she has stayed involved as a referee, which hasn’t been easy, but she keeps doing it “in hopes that by being visible and speaking out will help lift the ban,” she wrote on Instagram .
h/t Outsports
