Paralympics
Valentina Petrillo will be the first transgender athlete at a Paralympic Games
The 50-year-old Italian, who underwent a sex change in 2019, was a bronze medalist in the 200m and 400m race at last year’s World Championships in Paris
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After the controversy at the Paris Olympics in the boxing discipline due to the presence of two intergender boxers – Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting – who also won the gold medal in their respective categories, the 2024 Paralympic Games will also go down in history for having the first transgender athlete in its history.
It will be Italy’s Valentina Petrillo, who at last year’s women’s World Championships in Paris won bronze medals in the 200m and 400m races at the age of 50.
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The difference between this case and that of the Olympic Games with the female boxers is that in the case of the female boxers they have always legally been women, and what they suffer from is a genetic alteration that causes them to have combinations of XY chromosomes, typical of men.
In Petrillo’s case, the athlete feels she is a woman, which is why she voluntarily changed her sex five years ago.
Before changing sex, Petrillo had already won 11 national titles in the men’s category.
“I still find it hard to believe and I keep my feet on the ground because I narrowly missed my chance to participate in Tokyo. I will only start thinking about the Paris Games when I get to France,” the athlete admitted.
Division of opinions
The inclusion of the athlete with Stargardt syndrome in the Paralympic Games in Paris has brought controversy, as usually happens when issues of this kind come to the fore.
On the one hand, there are those who believe that she has a musculoskeletal advantage, having gone through puberty as a man, while the other side claims that she has the right to participate like everyone else, since not enough research has been done to prove that these advantages really exist.
IOC President Andrew Parsons welcomed Petrillo to the Paris Paralympic Games, which will be held from August 28 to September 8.
He also encouraged the world to unite in the same direction, after seeing bodies such as athletics, cycling and swimming tighten their rules regarding these cases.
For the time being, we already know that the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games will go down in history before they even begin.