American transgender runner Nikki Hiltz finished third in an Olympic preliminary heat for the 1,500-meter run Tuesday, thereby advancing to Thursday’s semifinals.
The Washington Post reported Monday that particularly since identifying as nonbinary and transgender earlier this year, Hiltz has “become a beacon for the LGBTQ+ community and entrenched themself at the apex of American middle-distance running.”
The runner won the 1,500-meter U.S. trials in June to qualify for the Olympics.
What makes Hiltz’s story different from the controversy surrounding other transgender athletes is the sex assigned to her at birth: female.
And the American in fact competes as a female, which likely none of her competitors have a problem with, because she does not have the physical advantages a male would have.
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And obviously no male runner would have a problem with Hiltz competing as a man, if she chose to do so.
That’s something you really never see, certainly at the Olympic level, because females in most any sport have a significant disadvantage to male athletes.
For example, Hiltz’s qualifying time in the 1,500-meter on Tuesday was 4:00:42.
By contrast men’s qualifying times were approximately 3:33:00, or about a half a lap faster than Hiltz’s.
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Nikki Hiltz is officially an Olympian and advancing to their first 1500m #ParisOlympics semifinal! pic.twitter.com/kq9NTyqsyd
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024
The runner chimed in on the controversy surrounding Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who are both finalist in Olympic women’s boxing despite failing a chromosome tests last year, which disqualified them from competing in the women’s world championship tournament.
If fighters fail chromosome tests for female boxing, that would presumably mean they have XY chromosomes — as men would.
“The past week’s been hard, and there’s been a lot of hate and transphobia and just a lot of ignorance,” Hiltz said, according to the New York Post.
Multiple outlets reported that Khelif suffers from a rare medical condition known as “Differences of Sex Development.”
The Cleveland Clinic defined DSD as “conditions where a person’s reproductive organs and genitals are ‘mismatched’ at birth. Examples include male chromosomes (XY) and genitalia that appears female (vulva) or female chromosomes (XX) and genitalia that appears male (penis). Some people with DSDs have characteristics of both sexes.”
If Khelif has this condition that could explain why female was the gender assigned at birth, based on genitalia.
Regardless, Hiltz believes, “Trans women are women, and they deserve to compete wherever they’re comfortable.”
That’s where the runner is wrong. The whole point of women’s sports is for female athletes to have an arena to compete against each other with the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of the contest.
Hiltz can identify however she wants and compete against women or men.
This issue is allowing men to invade women’s sports and rob them of the chance to achieve their goals and dreams.
