SAN FRANCISCO – Finding a way for transgender athletes to remain welcome and involved in sports amid a national backlash was at the forefront of a summit this week in San Francisco as the city continued to shine a spotlight on Pride month.
Thursday’s SF Pride Human Rights Summit included panel discussions and speeches by community leaders — San Francisco mayor London Breed among them — and unfolded on a day in which nonbinary middle-distance runner Nikki Hiltz competed for a spot on the United States Olympic team.
“Us trans people, we’re all just people trying to survive and make it through this world together,” political activist Honey Mahogany said, later adding, “There are ways in which I think the trans community is providing an opportunity for us to collectively advance and grow as a society.”
A panel that included Mahogany, runner Cal Calamia, former pro golfer Cheryl Lala-Chávez and San Francisco Chronicle sports editor Christina Kahrl addressed the talking point most frequently cited when transgender athletes compete: athletes identified as male at birth transitioning to female, and then, critics presume, excelling in their sport.
“At any level where trans people have been allowed to compete, they haven’t dominated their sport in California,” said Kahrl, a transgender woman. “This has never happened. It’s a scare tactic against inclusion, about the perception that trans athletes have an advantage.”
The International Olympic Committee funded a study published this spring that analyzed trans athletes who transitioned from male to female, and it showed that by taking estrogen and being on hormone replacement therapy, athletes’ lung and heart capacity shrunk, Mahogany said.
Kahrl said that only one transgender athlete has won an Olympic medal in the past 20 years – a nonbinary Canadian women’s soccer player assigned female at birth – and described concerns over transgender athletes dominating as “an overstated bit of scaremongering.”
Calamia, who ran collegiately at St. Louis University and was the first nonbinary winner of the San Francisco Marathon in 2022, said that trans athletes face internal challenges, too.
“When we talk about trans athletes, we talk about that biological component of having some sort of biological advantage, and we know that’s not true,” Calamia said. “But I also want to talk about the mental, social and emotional toll and disadvantages that trans athletes have.
“I could never, if I wanted to, just be an athlete. I have to beg for my place on the starting line, and sometimes that begging lasts years before I can go there.”
Lala-Chavez grew up around golf, playing collegiately at Cal and later turning pro. But Lala-Chavez stopped playing after she came out as transgender in 2008.
“I completely left sport and I left golf, and I still have a very complicated relationship with golf,” Lala-Chavez said. “It is a rich, white sport and a very conservative sport. It was a sport that I never felt comfortable in as a person of color.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Calamia (who used he/they pronouns) said that he learned to love his sport again after coming out …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
