Kristen Worley - Woman Enough: How a Boy Became a Woman and Changed the World of Sport

Do not show weakness, I kept telling myself. Do not let them see you break down.

As a competitive cyclist, I had discipline. I knew a lot about riding through pain. But what these four menall white, heterosexual and over fiftywere doing to me in this non-descript Ottawa boardroom, in the name of Canadas National Sport Organizations, was wrong.

Ever since I was a kid, when I would run as an escape from a life I didnt fit into, I had wanted to compete as a high-performance athlete. Sport is supposed to be straightforward, clear-cut. You train, you do your best, and you either win or you dont. Sport was my safe space.

I wanted to cycle for Canada in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I was ready. Id spent the last few years training six to eight hours a day, seven days a week. Id raced twice a week. Id ridden through rain, sleet and snow, skidding on wet leaves and swerving away from countless cars. Id made a million circles on the banked tracks of velodromes, climbing the steep angled corners and dropping down to straights at dizzying speeds. Id gone to sleep each night with my pulse throbbing in my exhausted thighs, and Id woken each morning almost too stiff to move, to do it all over again. Canadas national coach believed I would qualify fair and square for the B-team in pursuit track racing. All I needed was my licence. Which was why I was here, in this office, in front of these men.

Im a woman, a fully transitioned XY female. But in 2003, in advance of the Athens Olympics in 2004, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), together with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), had put out a two-page policy statement, the Stockholm Consensus on Sex Reassignment in Sport, to govern the process by which transitioned athletes are authenticatedverified as the gender they say they areand permitted to compete. It was now April 2005. I was the first athlete to be tested under this new policy, anywhere in the world.

Of the four men in the room, two were sport administrators, one was a lawyer, and the fourth was an emergency-room doctornot a gender or endocrine specialist. The doctor had no special knowledge of hormone science. This shocked me. I had assumed that the IOC would have done its research before moving ahead with its new policy. But an hour into the encounter, I was sure that I knew more about the science of my body than these four men and the entire IOC put together.

The assumed authority of sport had empowered them to do whatever they wanted to me. It was like handing a layperson a scalpel and saying, Here, now youre a heart surgeon. Dont worry about the law; we answer to no one. It was absurd, and yet my sport and my livelihoodmy lifedepended on this panels verifying that I was who I know I am. Authenticating me as a woman.

Id already endured a humiliating physical examination with an endocrinologist in Toronto, where I live. He asked me intimate questions about my vagina. He did a complete gynecological exam. He requested and received an affidavit from the surgeon who performed my transition surgery, and a copy of my birth certificate verifying my gender as female. He asked me about my sexualityeven though who I like to sleep with is irrelevant to my gender descriptionand included that in his multi-page report. He shared my full medical recordsmy most private informationwith this panel, who eventually shared them with the IOC and the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the international cycling organization I belong to; they also passed my records on to Sport Canada and to Canadas anti-doping body, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), and literally anyone else who asked to read them.

Im uncomfortable talking about sex. Even though I went through a full medical transition in 2004, I was a square kid, and Ive lived a private, conservative life. So I requested a copy of the UCI medical report, and a list of everyone who had reviewed my private file. My requests were denied. You just have to trust us, Kristen, was all the UCI said.

I was trying to play by their rules. Ive always been a well-behaved person. Often too well-behaved. I am respectful. I treat others as I want to be treated. And I was the one whod willingly driven the five hours from Toronto to Ottawa to be here, excited that, after this ordeal was over, Id be able to compete in sport as who I really am.

I also knew that this was about something much bigger than just me. I wanted to make sport better and safer for the athletes coming up after me. I grew up in athletics. Im passionate about the good things in the sport world, the way its able to shine a spotlight on issues of ability and diversity. To empower people. So I answered their questions, even when, over and over, they asked me why I wanted to be in sport. I answered honestly: Ive been a high-performance athlete my whole life. Its who I am. Its fun. Its my community, my tribe. My opponents are also my friends. Its about competingfor me, and for my countrybut even more, its about camaraderie.