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news
2023 Tour of the Gila women's podium Austin Killips (image credit: Tour of the Gila)"Trump singled me out for ruining women's sport": Transgender cyclist accuses president of "fixating hate" on trans athletes instead of working to "elevate, fund or support women athletes"
Transgender cyclist Austin Killips has responded to Donald Trump and accused the president of using fear around the idea of trans athletes "invading women's sports" to "fixate hate and attention" on them, while "doing nothing at all to elevate, fund or support women athletes".
The comments come in an opinion piece published by the Guardian, Killips calling the article her "response" to Trump having "singled me out" as "someone ruining women's sport".
Killips' victory at the UCI 2.2 Tour of the Gila in 2023, as well as wins in cyclocross and ultra-endurance races, sparked much debate and scrutiny from politicians, the press and wider public. Her situation has been comparable to that of Emily Bridges in the UK, both trans cyclists subject to vast media attention and comments from politicians who have questioned their right to race in women's events.
In July 2023, two months on from Killips becoming the first trans cyclist to win a UCI women's stage race, the sport's governing body banned transgender female cyclists who have transitioned after puberty from competing in international women's races.
Killips has continued to compete in gravel events and other endurance races and was this month mentioned by Trump as the newly inaugurated president announced his Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports executive order. Trump said Killips is "a male cyclist posing as a woman" who "competed in the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race – a very big deal in cycling – and obliterated the women's course record by nearly five and a half hours".
Pointing out that she took the record from a male athlete, Alex Schultz, Killips went on to explain in the Guardian piece how Schultz himself had previously beaten female ultra-distance legend Lael Wilcox's record, the event's "co-ed leaderboard" what "spurred" her interest in the event in the first place.
"Not that it got me anywhere, financially," Killips wrote. "It failed to secure me anything meaningful like industry sponsorships – tangible support that would have made my pursuits in sport tenable. Instead, my wins only served to generate more artifacts for the right's culture wars, while I remained unable to garner even a sliver of the institutional recognition that friends and fellow competitors with similar palmares have found.
"Transgender people lost the inclusion battle in sport ages ago. International governing bodies for competitions in running, cycling, chess, swimming, darts and more have repeatedly caved to pressure and helped shift the Overton window to exclude trans people from public life more broadly. The world's least gracious winners insist on kicking sand in our eyes.
"Trump's executive order is a perfect scam: he and his acolytes get to talk endlessly about the fake spectre of trans athletes 'invading' women's sports, while never putting any of their attention, immense political cache and funding access towards things that would meaningfully elevate the state of women’s sports. Instead, they get to fixate their hate and attention on every transsexual woman who dares show up to a rec T-ball league with her friends. Meanwhile, the women who simply want to compete and labour as athletes are left in the cold."
Killips says conditions for female cyclists looking for a team or a race "are the worst they have been in the last decade".
She continued: "Consider this: when you watch a professional race, it's common for an announcer to regale spectators with the resumes of the women on the start line. Many of them are record-shattering athletes and also hold full-time jobs as doctors, researchers or investment bankers. These remarks always come in good faith, but as a means of contrasting us against the men – who usually have enough money and support thrown behind them to make a living as athletes – they speak to the sad state of affairs in women's sport.
"And soon, things for women's sports will get even worse. Because it bears repeating, as clearly as possible: their project contains no measures that help female athletes at the professional level as labourers, and certainly nothing that even gestures towards new investment opportunities for girls pursuing their dream. It's a free market that devalues women's labour at every turn.
"In fact, the only action items referencing funding simply establishes a precedent for rescinding money from organisations investing in women and girls who have given their lives and bodies to sport. In this new reality, all women lose. In fact, everyone loses – except for the people cashing checks and amassing political power.
"They found a scapegoat, and all they have done is enrich themselves with five-figure speaking fee tours, while taking the oxygen out of the room. The only lane they've made is one that encourages women to quit competing for a life of news appearances and college campus speaking tours. They are, for lack of a better word, cowards who don’t want to do the actual work of empowering and supporting athletes.
"So my argument is quite simple. Maybe you take umbrage with trans people in sports, and in turn me (whatever, you won that battle). But if you purport to care about women's sports, about girls getting a fair chance at competing, you need to ask yourself why, at the height of a historic moment of sweeping and unchecked austerity measures, the loudest and wealthiest people in the room have built a movement that culminated in this: an executive order that establishes a precedent to strip funding away from women in sport."
Prior to the UCI's ban on transgender female cyclists who have transitioned after puberty from competing in international women's races, Killips raced numerous high-profile events, including finishing ninth in the United States' national championships road race in 2023 and competing in several rounds of the UCI Cyclo-cross World Cup in Europe.
Following her win at the Tour of the Gila, the UCI said it would make an "eventual decision" on its transgender policy and "take into account all elements" of heated debate. That decision banning transgender female cyclists who have transitioned after puberty from women's races came in July.
A couple of months earlier, British Cycling updated its transgender policy and introduced a new "Open" category to run alongside the women's category and which transgender women would be required to compete in.
> British Cycling's transgender and non-binary participation policy: a cyclist's experience
Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges claimed the announcement amounted to trans women being "banned" and called British Cycling a "failed organisation" which "takes money from petrochemical companies and engages in culture wars".
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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25 comments
Stop beating a dead horse, people. This story isn't really about trans competitors but about the elected felon and his autocratic regime, targeting minorities.
Isn't the simple solution to let transgender women ride and let naturally born women dope to level the playing field, and also let transgender men dope to level the even more unfair situation in the male peloton where transgenders don't stand a hope in hell of competing?
Why is there never any discussion of how unfairly transgender men are treated in sport? Is there any sport in which they've been permitted to find success?
What I find ironic is that the Enhanced games are funded by Trump Jr.
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Are you saying you are in favour of 'othering' people you don't like? Because that is one of Trump's tactics to spread irrational hatred of people.
Protecting biological woman's rights isn't irrational or hateful .
It's not about protecting rights, it's about othering groups of the population. His EO states that there are only 2 sexes which is scientifically incorrect.
If you are unable to see the extremism and hatred being stirred up by the current regime, I despair.
In the interests of scientific correctness, could you name one of the other sexes please?
XX
XY
XXX
XXY
X0
people born intersex
The prefered term now is Differences in Sexual Development (DSD) rather than intersex, but putting that to one side none of the examples you've listed result in a sex that isn't male or female..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dd8Ow8bA-Q
So back to my question, could you name one of the other sexes rather than list some chromosome combinations.
How are you defining sex then ?
The way science does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
BTW Don't think for a moment that I believe Trump and the rest of his hangers on are anything other than a complete cesspit of humanity, but on this point they are scientifically correct - they're are just two sexes. Any other conjecture is just the scientfic equivalent of flat earth beliefs.
But the fact that there are just two sexes, mostly shouldn't place limitations on how people want to view themselves, or express themselves to others.
But (despite using this in argument) I don't think that is really what most people are arguing about. It is (at least in part) an "argument from nature" but people are not really that interested in the nature part - more a particular human view of the same.
I think the "sciencey" bit is not that interesting to people - or rather I think it's trumped by our "intuitive biological thinking" - which seems to be "essentialist" (informed by culture of course - perhaps it's mostly OK in your culture to have 3 categories rather than 2, for most purposes?).
As others have pointed out sport - at least at higher levels - seems to be all about extremes, tiny minorities but also arbitrary rules anway (speaking as someone who sometimes rides a recumbent)...
Yup I agree (and I'm not arguing with the points people are raising in that greater argument), people tend to conflate sex with sexual traits, gender roles, , and gender expression and then it get's messy.. And conversations about gender or gender expression are complex, and require nuance which can be difficult online - and for that reason I tend to stay clear of them.
I just get triggered when people assert things that are just scientifcally incorrect
Yeah ... although if you're too triggered by the latter then much of the internet will not a safe space for you!
If I recall, HP posted an interesting diagram that covered some of the science on this.
I believe the scientific terms for sexes hinge on what gametes are produced by the sexually reproducing organism (assuming heterogamy - the case for humans, although I believe there are a (very) few documented cases of fertile human hermaphrodites. It gets more complicated in other areas of life). Anyway - humans here I think - so presumably male, female, sterile(?) if incapable of producing gametes and we can't pick some other definition?) and (very) rare hermaphrodite?
(Not that this likely helps - people have their own ideas about how they want to think of the world. In at least one sense it doesn't matter how well or even if those align with how science slices and dices biology...).
Sexes in this sense might be a bit boring when it comes to sport because AFAIK while they are generally correlated with e.g. performance that's not a perfect link (of course, then rules come into it). And also not perfectly correlated with what scientists term "what bits you've got".
The particular sport may make a difference: for some time one of the top rock climbers in the world was female. Of course that may also reflect upon the development of the sport (probably "popularity").
Yeah, not your battle - or maybe even "about time this wokery is abolished"?
But ... aside from Trump so apparently it's random from day to day, one consistent thing is a fondness for bringing (right-thinking) people together by kicking the 'others' - as Hirsute notes.
Who's to say he won't decide that any women cycling is an affront? Or that anyone cycling is anti-progress / doesn't present his business pals with another opportunity to make billions?
"But US so what do I care?" ... Indeed - but currently it seems they're quite happy leaning on anyone (including their "friends") to change stuff they don't approve of. Plus his tech-bro (currently) pals operate the world's biggest
magaphonesorry, megaphone.FWIW it seems that the US is now (a bit like Russia) being run by "angry grandpa".
I'm not really sure exactly what I think about the fairness of transgender folk in sport but I do know that hating them is not an option and where I'm out of my comfort zone that's my problem to deal with.
There is also a real danger to women with the rise of christian nationalism as part of project 2025 and the patriarchal society - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/missouri-b...
You might be a risk so we have to monitor you.
well said a few old rich white males thinking they have some kind of right over womans bodies.
I am almost certain that it's not fair for transgender women who went through male puberty to compete in female sports...but I'm very certain that it's a very minor issue in the major scheme of things and that it's being used as a shitty stick with which to beat all transgender people. There needs to be further examination of the issues by experts, negotiation and compromise as appropriate, certainly all this screaming "look at that tall woman with big hands" is doing nothing but promote hate and encourage discrimination.
Your analogy is utterly preposterous .
Which analogy? I see a couple of metaphors there ('megaphone' - doesn't seem to be much preposterous about that; 'angry grandpa' - I don't think you we're meant to take that particularly seriously) but no analogies.
You are going to have to explain what analogy you specifically refer to and why it is 'utterly preposterous'.
I believe he's already started on your second sentence with his determination to force New York to tear out its cycle lanes. As for the first, he'll probably get round to it, he's only been in office a month...