Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old man born as Fabrizio Petrillo, is advancing to the 400m T12 semifinals in the 2024 Paralympics following a second-place victory in a heat at the Stade de France today. The Italian sprinter finished the heat with a time of 58.35 seconds, pushing China’s Shen Yaqin, 33, out of the competition.
Petrillo, who only began identifying as a woman in 2019 after winning almost a dozen sprint titles in the men’s category, is the Paralympics’ first trans-identified athlete, reports the Daily Mail. He suffers from Stargardt disease, which causes degeneration of the retina in the eye and gradually causes blindness. Petrillo qualifies to compete in both events meant for athletes with disabilities and athletes without disabilities.
The International Paralympic Committee cleared him to compete in the women’s category, despite his s*x. The IPC took no responsibility for the decision, instead claiming that such determinations are made according to the committees governing each individual sport. Some sports may keep events s*x-segregated, while others will allow men to compete against women and deprive female athletes of their spots in major competitions.
Petrillo is considered a woman under Italian law and was therefore allowed to compete in the women’s T12 200m and 400m. His legal first name is Valentina, although he first called himself Vanessa upon determining he was a female. He reportedly began taking estrogen in 2019.
Five years of estrogen treatment is not sufficient to eliminate the biological advantage of men over women in sports such as sprinting. Petrillo was 45 years old when he began taking estrogen. He already had the longer limbs and higher muscular force of an adult man.
Petrillo won eleven Italian men’s titles before deciding to compete against women instead.
In 2021, more than thirty female Master-level athletes signed a petition opposing men being allowed into women’s sports. Mariuccia Quilleri, a lawyer who represented female athletes who objected to Petrillo’s forced inclusion in their events, has said that some of the athletes unfairly beaten by Petrillo in races told her that they felt “discriminated against”.
Petrillo, meanwhile, claims he is the one being discriminated against whenever he is criticized for taking slots away from real women – especially disabled women.
He accused his critics of being jealous and compared not being allowed to compete in women’s sports to being murdered or harassed into suicide. Last year he compared calls to disallow him from women’s sports to Nazis banning Jews from partaking in sports. He also compared himself to an “appestati,” or quarantined plague sufferer, after being barred from the women’s locker room and instead being given his own private locker room.
He has said that it’s “better to be a slow happy woman than a fast unhappy man”, despite the fact that he has ostensibly broken several Italian women’s running records, making him anything but slow in addition to being anything but a woman.
Petrillo won first place in the 100-, 200- and 400-meter sprints at the 2020 Italian Paralympic Athletics Championships in Jesolo. The Italian government at that time, however, barred him from the 2021 Paralympics due to the International Olympic Committee’s rules that male athletes had to keep their testosterone below ten nanomoles per liter for at least twelve months to compete in women’s divisions. Petrillo apparently did not meet these qualifications, despite the estrogen therapy.
The International Olympic Committee has since dropped these standards, using the same determination for qualification that the IPC does: Leaving it up to individual sport governing bodies, even when their only requirement for a man to say he’s a woman is to be marked female on a legal identification document.
There is no evidence that testosterone levels of less than ten nanomoles per liter significantly impair men’s physical abilities to the point of being on par with women, no matter how long they’ve had their testosterone suppressed. Ten nanomoles per liter is less than half of normal male testosterone levels. Trans-identifying athletes taking testosterone suppression therapy still regularly outperform female athletes in sports that rely on strength, speed, and reach.
Petrillo, speaking to the BBC in 2021, described himself pre-transition as “s*xist” and “a tough guy who’d speak dismissively of women”. He also admitted to stealing and wearing clothing from his mother and, later, his wife.
Petrillo will be racing for a medal on Tuesday. The woman that Italy could have sent instead of him will not be.
