The 2024 Paris Paralympic Games will include the sporting event’s first out transgender athlete, Valentina Petrillo.
Petrillo — a 50-year-old visually impaired sprinter from Italy — will be competing in the women’s T12 class 200- and 400-meter events for athletes with visual impairments. Petrillo has experienced slow degeneration of her central vision since her diagnosis with the rare genetic disorder Stargardt Disease at the age of 14.
In an interview with BBC Sport, Petrillo said that her milestone as the first out transgender Paralympian “is an important symbol of inclusion.” She also said that her transgender and non-binary identities “should not be discriminated against in the same way that race, religion or political ideology should not be discriminated against.”
Before transitioning, Petrillo won 11 national titles in men’s T12 races from 2015 to 2018. She began transitioning socially in 2018 and began gender-affirming hormone therapy in January 2019. In September 2020, she took part in her first women’s competition at the Italian Para Athletics Championship. Her journey as a transgender Paralympic athlete has been detailed in the documentary “5 Nanomoles – the Olympic Dream of a Trans Woman”.
Although the President of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Andrew Parsons believes that “the sport movement has to — guided by science — come up with better answers” regarding inclusion of transgender athletes, the current rules allow for transgender athletes like Petrillo to participate alongside their cisgender peers. The inclusion of transgender athletes has been a hot topic, especially amid the 2024 Olympic Games. While some people argue that transgender women’s physical traits put them at an unfair advantage, a 2024 study has found that trans women athletes actually experience more disadvantages than their cisgender counterparts.
Valentina Petrillo asserts, “It is sport that has to find a solution and excluding transgender athletes is clearly not that solution”. The 2024 Paris Paralympic Games will take place from August 28 to September 8, following the conclusion of the Olympic Games on August 11th. Photo courtesy of social media
