Now the Paralympics are letting men race against women

Valentina Petrillo will soon become the first openly transgender athlete to compete in the Paralympic Games. The 50-year-old biological male will be representing Italy in the 200m and 400m races next month under the T12 classification for visually impaired sportswomen.

Like the Olympics, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has no uniform policy on transgender athletes. Individual sporting bodies must decide for themselves whether a trans athlete can compete or not. Last year, World Athletics banned biological men from running in women’s races, but World Para Athletics has no such rule. Instead, it allows athletes to compete as whichever gender they are legally recognised as.

Of course, a gender-recognition certificate or an ‘F’ on a passport are just pieces of paper. They have no actual impact on a person’s biological make-up. Even though Petrillo has been medically transitioning since 2019, no amount of hormone treatment can erase the many benefits he gained from going through male puberty. It is exactly for this reason that so many sporting bodies have recently decided to scrap testing for hormone levels and have instead placed a blanket ban on trans athletes competing as their identified gender.

This doesn’t seem to bother Petrillo. Speaking to the BBC, he said he believed that his selection for the Paralympics is an ‘important symbol for inclusion’. But for the women he’ll be competing against, it signifies just how little value is placed on their sport. Athlete and lawyer Mariuccia Quilleri, who has represented a number of female athletes opposed to Petrillo’s participation, told the BBC that so-called inclusion is being prioritised over fair competition. Sadly, ‘there is not much more we can do’, she complained.

This isn’t the first time Petrillo has been the subject of fierce controversy. Last year, the then 49-year-old won bronze in both the T12 200m and 400m women’s races at the World Para Athletics Championships. A former Canadian head Olympic coach called it ‘shocking’. ‘How many 49-year-olds would win medals at world level?’, asked British marathon runner Mara Yamauchi. To put Petrillo’s win into perspective, the other podium winners were aged 26 and 32.

In 2021, Petrillo was almost selected for the Tokyo Paralympics. Over 30 female athletes signed a petition in protest, demanding he not be allowed to compete in women’s races. This backlash was of no concern to Petrillo. ‘I don’t feel like I’m stealing anything from anyone’, he told the BBC at the time. In the end, he did not qualify.

Petrillo’s selection for the Paralympics this year leaves a particularly bad taste in the mouth, given that the Paris Olympics was recently embroiled in its own gender controversy. Earlier this month, boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting won gold medals in women’s events, despite both having previously failed gender tests. Though neither Khelif nor Yu-ting are transgender, testing revealed that they have male XY chromosomes and unusually high testosterone levels – both of which give them a huge biological advantage over their female competitors. They are believed to have disorders of sexual development (DSD).

First in the Olympics and now in the Paralympics, the message is clear: gender ideology takes priority over fairness for women. Female athletes are essentially being told that the immense amount of training they have done for the most important event of their lives is less important than trans or DSD males feeling ‘included’ in elite women’s sport.

That a biological man is about to compete against female Paralympians is an outrage. While Petrillo is being hailed as another progressive ‘first’, it is women who will suffer the consequences.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.