First Transgender Woman In Paralympics Gets Pushback From Previous Competitors

BOLOGNA, Italy — Valentina Petrillo fell in love with athletics as a 7-year-old while watching Italian sprinter Pietro Mennea win gold in the 200 meters at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

“I said I wanted to be like him,” said Petrillo, a transgender woman who was raised as a boy. “I wanted to put on the blue (Italy) shirt, I wanted to go to the Olympics. But — and there was a but — I wanted to do it as a woman because I didn’t feel like a man, I didn’t feel like myself.”

Four decades later, at 50, Petrillo is about to finally realize her dream, but not at the Olympics. In two weeks, she is set to become the first transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics when she runs the 200 and 400 meters in the T12 classification for visually impaired athletes in Paris.

World Athletics last year banned transgender women from competing in the female category at international events if they transitioned after puberty. But its para counterpart, World Para Athletics, has not followed suit.

Petrillo, who was diagnosed as a teenager with Stargardt disease, a degenerative eye condition, considers herself lucky despite the challenges she’s faced. She’s lived most of her life as a man and only came out as transgender to her wife — with whom she has a son — in 2017 before beginning hormone therapy two years later.

“Yes, I have problems with my vision, I’m partially sighted, I’m trans – and let’s say that’s not the best in our Italy, being trans – but I am a happy person,” she told The Associated Press in an interview at a track she trains on in a suburb of Bologna, where she lives.

“I began transitioning in 2019 and in 2020 I realized my dream, which was to race in the female category, to do the sport that I had always loved doing,” she said