"I have to choose between health and being able to race," she says. "When you look at it, the men can take a therapeutic use exemption and still compete with women, but the women can't." The Rimer Twins went through a tribunal with Canada and the IOC before they were allowed to continue competing as female cyclists.
My guest today is Inga Thompson, one of the most decorated cyclists in American history.
You might ask, besides being aware I’m something of a bike geek, why am I having a cyclist on the show? Well, we’re not here to talk about bikes or training diets.
We are here to talk about what happened to Inga when she spoke out in defense of women’s rights. Not against bible-thumping religious fundamentalists who think women belong in the kitchen and bedroom making dinner and babies, but against her fellow liberals.
Let me be clear: this is a sensitive and complex issue. Transgender individuals often experience body dysmorphia. Common treatments for dysmorphia include hormone therapy and gender affirmation surgery, which typically entails surgically creating a neovagina, breast implants, facial feminization, and sometimes hair transplants or alteration of the vocal cords.
These physical changes often help alleviate the symptoms, but they do not fundamentally change the physical advantages the transgender—born biologically male—athlete would have over biological women when competing in women’s sports.
This poses the challenge of conflicting rights, which is the subject of this conversation...
What should we do when transgender athletes, with all the physical advantages of being born male, compete against and defeat biological females?