Valentina Petrillo, born Fabrizio Petrillo, will compete in the female T12 classification (visual impairments) at the Paralympic Games in Paris.
Petrillo, who is 50 years old, will run in the 200m and 400m events.
Petrillo is the first transgender athlete in the Paralympic Games.
World Para Athletics’ rules allow Petrillo to compete against females:
Under World Para Athletics’ rules, a person who is legally recognised as a woman is eligible to compete in the category their impairment qualifies them for.The rules go on to say that “World Para Athletics will deal with any cases involving transgender athletes in accordance with the International Olympic Committee’s transgender guidelines (as amended by the IOC from time to time) and any applicable World Para Athletics regulations.”
We saw two males win the gold in two female boxing divisions at the Olympics last week.
In 2023, Petrillo won two bronze medals at the Para Athletics World Championships, competing against females.
Petrillo has nine medals in female events. After the World Championships, Canadian Paralympic coach Peter Eriksson lashed out:
“It’s shocking to see that women’s opportunities to a medal were taken by a cheating 49-year-old male,” Eriksson told Reduxx. “The International Paralympic Committee is diminishing the rights of fairness in women’s sport by allowing transgender athletes at their events.”Eriksson added, “It’s a cop-out not to make a stance in support of women in sport. It feels kind of like they are trying to push the blame onto the IOC,” Eriksson says. “They adapted World Athletics rules and should also adopt the World Athletics regulation on transgender and DSD participation.”After failed attempts to win at men’s events, Petrillo began his hormone therapy treatment in 2019. He was previously married to a woman with whom he shares a son.
Petrillo even admitted that hormone treatments affected his racing times. He said, “Better to be a slow, happy woman than a fast, unhappy man.”
But it doesn’t change the fact that Petrillo went through male puberty:
Sports scientist Professor Ross Tucker said: “Male advantage is created through development and so it is essentially laid down over years and years of exposure to testosterone. The solution that sport has tried to come up with is to say well if the source of that advantage is testosterone then let’s lower it and then the athlete is free to compete.”But that doesn’t work because there is an asymmetry there because some of the changes that testosterone causes, like the increased muscle mass, increased strength, the shape and size of the skeleton, those changes don’t go away. There are some, like haemoglobin levels, certain elements of the cardiovascular system that may go away.”But the strength advantages, all the evidence that exists suggests that even when you remove testosterone in an adult those advantages continue to exist in that person. So therefore sport has to realise that it can’t take away that male advantage, reduce it slightly yes, but certainly it doesn’t get removed. And the only conclusion you can then draw is that the person still has male advantage even when their testosterone is lower.”
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