I'm a Team USA World Masters track athlete, mom and coach calling for the protection of women's sports

Cynthia and Margaret Monteleone argue fairness is needed

I'm a mom, a coach and a Team USA World Masters track athlete who is fighting for something greater than another gold medal: I’m standing for the protection of women’s sports.  

If male-bodied athletes continue competing on female teams, it will be the end of women’s sports. This is no exaggeration; this is reality, and it’s happening right now. 

TEAM USA ATHLETE SAYS SHE WAS TOLD TO KEEP HER 'MOUTH SHUT' ABOUT COMPETING AGAINST TRANS ATHLETE

At the 2018 World Masters Athletics Championships in Málaga, Spain, I competed in the 200-meter race against a male-bodied athlete, whom I beat by onlya few tenths of a second. The next year, the same athlete beat my teammate in the hurdles for a place on the podium at the 2019 World Championship indoor meet in Poland. My teammate had trained harder than anyone I know. 

Cynthia Monteleone (Courtesy Cynthia Monteleone)

It wasn’t just on the world stage that I experienced the demoralizing trend of male-bodied athletes displacing females from their own competitions; it was also on my home island of Maui, Hawaii. 

A year and a half after my experience in Spain, my daughter lost to a biological male identifying as female in her first-ever high school track race. I had watched proudly as my strong and determined girl did all the right things – made personal, difficult sacrifices to train her body to be as fast and fit as possible for her first race. 

Yet all her hard work seemed to drift away along with the male-bodied athlete, who had just transferred from the boys’ volleyball team to the girl’s team the season before. The athlete breezed right by her to win first place, leaving her to finish second.  

How can you win as a female