Unsettling News from the World of Collegiate Track & Field

I have already riffed on Bruce (“call me ‘Caitlyn’”) Jenner, the former Olympian who struggled with gender-identity issues for four decades before deciding that he was a she. I have compassion for Jenner. He apparently thought he had to take such a drastic step in order to be true to himself. This pertains not only to Jenner but to all boys and girls, men and women who hold the conviction that they were somehow born the wrong sex. Although happily—indeed gratefully—a male hetero, I realize that gender-bending has gone on in most cultures for a long time. This is not a new phenomenon, but what is new is that sexual diversity is more fully expressed and accepted. Furthermore, today there are chemical and surgical methods that enable people to make the big leap of becoming transgender.

The topic at hand involves Jenner’s sport: track & field, although far below the Olympic level.  Our focus is a young man named Craig Telfer, although since 2018 he has gone by “CeCe” and now identifies as female. He was born in Jamaica, moved with his mother to Toronto and then settled in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Telfer proved to be a competent runner, doing everything from the 55-meter hurdles to the 400 meters, even sampling the long jump and pole vault. For two years, he ran on the men’s team for Franklin Pierce University, a member of the Northeast 10 Conference. Like most college jocks, he did OK but not great. Telfer’s best time in the 400-meter hurdles was 57.34, good enough to be ranked 200 among NCAA Division II freshmen. His showing as a sophomore got worse—number 390. In neither of those years did he come close to making nationals.

Things changed in 2018 when he informed his coach, teammates and others of his fluid sexuality and that he was becoming a transgender woman. The NCAA’s Transgender Handbook, first written in 2011, states only that a man must undergo a year of testosterone-suppression treatment to be eligible for competition with women. No mention is made of a minimum testosterone level or the removal of male sexual organs and replacement with their female counterparts. Remember also that Telfer lived for 20 years as a biological male, had narrow hips, long legs, broad shoulders, stronger bones, and more heart and lung capacity than all but a few women. Needless to say, he started cleaning up as soon as he got on the track as a transgender female. The competition, I have to say, was much weaker. He won the NE 10 title in the 60 meters, 200 meters and 60-meter hurdles, accounting for more than half of his team’s points. For reasons I am not certain of, Telfer represented FPU in none of those events at the national meet in Kingsville, Texas in May 2019. Rather, he ran in the 100-meter hurdles and 400-meter hurdles. In the former, he finished sixth and in the latter he won in a time of 57.53. Coming in second at 59:21 was Minna Sveard of Texas A&M−Commerce, followed by Sidney Trinidad of Central Washington, Hanneke Oosterwegel of Northern (South Dakota) State, Jordan Hammond of Northwest Missouri, Kissi-Ann Brown of Lincoln and Jessica Eby of Grand Valley State. I can find no reference to complaints issued by Sveard, Trinidad, Oosterwegel, Hammond, Brown or Eby, all of whom are genuine, bonafide females with two X chromosomes. Telfer, with his 12 months of testosterone-suppression therapy, still had an X and a Y—the bottom-line definition of a male; gender is not just a “social construct.” Nevertheless, I can only speculate as to how those young women felt since they had no chance once the starter’s gun went off. Although Telfer had been mediocre as a male athlete in New England, he won the race going away. I will add that he must have been taking estrogen because photos show him with a well-developed chest. In that regard alone, he resembled a girl. Unlike his competitors in Kingsville, he lacks ovaries, a womb and the ability to conceive and deliver a baby. Telfer, it is certain, will never menstruate.

I doubt that Sveard et al. uttered any kind of protest, although the optics of the scene—what appeared to be a male athlete destroying an otherwise female field—were quite bad. Had they complained, the PC apparatchiks would have been all over them. Look what happened when former tennis star Martina Navratilova made a carefully worded Tweet about the injustice of transgender women competing against real women. She suffered intense criticism and backtracked almost immediately. The charge hurled at Navratilova, an out lesbian for almost 40 years now, was that of being “transphobic.”

Again I quote from the NCAA’s Transgender Handbook: “According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage…is not supported by evidence.” Who, I ask, are these medical experts? And what “evidence” do they cite? I have some real-world evidence to the contrary in the form of one randomly chosen track & field event, the 200 meters. The men’s world record in the 200 is 19.19, whereas it is 21.34 for women. If the fastest man (Usain Bolt) and the fastest woman (the late Florence Griffith-Joyner) set their marks in the same race, she would have been almost 22 meters behind! Were that not damning enough, there are hundreds of male high school athletes every year in the USA who can match or beat Flo-Jo’s time in the 200. My point, quite simply, is that we have valid reasons for segregating men and women in all sports except maybe sailing and croquet. If the game involves speed and strength, it is palpably wrong to have the sexes compete together. To do so is unfair, and “unfair” is almost surely what the young women who lost to Telfer in Kingsville were ever so quietly saying among themselves.

If I may be forgiven for mixing my metaphors, Pandora’s box has been opened, we are on a slippery slope, and that’s a slam dunk. Craig Telfer in college track & field is just part of the story. Consider also Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, high schoolers in Connecticut. Average among the boys, they simply declared themselves female (nothing done to lessen their testosterone) and started winning easy victories in the 100 and 200 meters. Rhys “Rachel” McKinnon—6’5″ tall—won his age group in a recent world championship bicycle race for women. Callum “Hannah” Mouncey, despite having strength, stamina and a physique that dwarfs his female competitors, plays Aussie rules football. Any such list would be incomplete without Caster Semenya, but her (I use the preposition advisedly) case is quite different. This South African was born in 1991 with X and Y chromosomes, and undescended testes. She is a hermaphrodite or “intersex.” Those testes work quite well, producing abundant testosterone, which gives her an androgynous look, but so what? I do not blame her for wanting to compete. Semenya has done just that, winning gold in the 800 meters at the London Olympics and again in Rio. One might argue that, with her male-level testosterone and DNA makeup, she should have been running with the men. Semenya’s PR of 1:54.25 is the fourth best ever among women. Among men, it does not crack the top 7,000. As much as I respect Semenya, she made a wise move in choosing to “be” female. (Polish-born Stella Walsh, also hermaphroditic, won gold in the 100 meters in Los Angeles and silver in Berlin.)

Bioethicists and armchair philosophers assert rather loudly that this is most of all a civil rights issue and that Telfer need not apologize for being the 2019 NCAA Division II women’s champ in the 400-meter hurdles. Perhaps, but the civil rights of the natural-born girls he so handily outran took quite a beating. I read of a survey in which people were asked whether they approve of this if-you-can’t-play-with-the-boys-go-join-the-girls business. Four percent were in favor, 4% were undecided, and 92% were against.