For Valentina Petrillo, the 51-year-old transgender sprinter, the entrance to the Paralympic village was like a portal to another world. Removed from the scrutiny over her participation in Paris, inside she felt like just another athlete living out their dream.
“It was the perfect life. It was beautiful. I was welcomed by everybody,” the Italian says via a translator as she prepares to leave the village for the final time. “Outside, we know it’s not going to be the same.”
Petrillo, who competed as a man up until she was 45, became the first openly transgender Paralympian last week and reached the semi-finals of the T12 200m and 400m for visually impaired athletes. She knew that piece of history would prompt backlash but did not expect the level of outcry that overshadowed the athletics, with her right to race in the female category fiercely criticised, even more so given the steep age gap to her competitors.
“It was a surprise because I’m not used to this. I don’t know how to handle it. Before I was focused on my performance so I didn’t know [the full extent of] what was happening around me,” says Petrillo, who adds that she was already subject to daily harassment at home before this intense spotlight.
From Petrillo’s perspective, the criticism is rooted in prejudice and transphobia. She has adhered to the rules set by World Para Athletics, which permits transgender athletes so long as they are legally recognised as a woman and have provided evidence their total testosterone level has been below 10 nanomoles per litre of blood for at least 12 months prior to their first female competition, and remains so from thereon.
“Since 2015, when the IOC opened the Olympics to transgender people, there has only been one person who competed, Laurel Hubbard, [a weightlifter from New Zealand]. And there has only been one [openly transgender] person that has participated at the Paralympics, me. So all of this fear that trans people will destroy the world [of women’s sport] actually does not exist,” Petrillo says. “People said [lots of] men would go to compete as women just so they could win, but that has not happened at all. It is just transphobia.”
The counterpoint, of course, is that, having gone through male puberty, Petrillo has an inherent advantage over her rivals, regardless of whether she has undergone hormone therapy, and a female-born athlete has lost their own Paralympic dream as a result. And the fact that Spain’s Nagore Folgado Garcia, a World Championship bronze medallist 31 years Petrillo’s junior, missed out on the 200m semi-finals as the fastest loser was amplified by the likes of JK Rowling, who branded Petrillo an “out and proud cheat”. Petrillo responded to that criticism at trackside by saying she has “never read Harry Potter”.
There is certainly no disputing that Petrillo’s performances as a male competitor would not have met the Paralympic standard, but she explains that she has wrestled with her gender identity for her entire life, long before she took up running again. “JK Rowling is only concerned about the fact that I use the female toilet, but she doesn’t know anything about me,” she says.
Petrillo was born into a modest family in central Naples in 1973 when Camorra gangs were near the height of their powers. Their home was near the top of a dark street where drug dealers used to loiter in the shadows, so she would sprint back up the hill on her way back from school. “That was the start of the training that brought me here,” she says.
Named Fabrizio, Petrillo says she was a stereotypically macho, streetwise teenager who played football and got into fist fights when standing up for her older brother, but that persona also acted as a protective disguise. “I knew something was wrong on my first day of communion when I entered the church and I saw the other girls wearing their white dresses and I wanted to be with them,” she says.
“At the age of nine, I tried on my mum’s clothes for the first time, I used to put nail polish on, but I had an older cousin that was transgender and my uncle kicked her out of the house. I was afraid that would happen to me too, so I kept everything hidden inside. In those days in Naples, I always said it was better to be a Camorra than to be a woman.”
When Petrillo was 14, she was diagnosed with Stargardt disease — a rare inherited eye condition with no known cure that has left permanent dark areas in the centre of her vision, and which seemingly ended her running prospects. Doctors in Naples predicted that her sight would deteriorate completely. “I used to hear my parents crying. It was very difficult,” she says.
But Petrillo defied that prediction. Although she struggles to distinguish people, she is just about able to read text by pressing a magnifying glass up against a screen and looking through the periphery of her vision. At 20, she left home for Bologna and studied computer science at the Institute for the Blind and has worked as a computer programmer ever since.
Petrillo only returned to competitive running at 41. By tilting her head, she can make out the lines of the track a few metres in front of her feet and marks a parallel reference point before the start of each race to recognise where the finish line is. She won 11 national titles in the male T12 category within the space of three years but, in 2017, not long after her mother died, Petrillo told her ex-wife, Elena, with whom she shares a son, Lorenzo, that she had continued to wear women’s clothing in secret and could no longer suppress what she felt was her true identity.
“I had always said it was a secret that I would keep to the grave. It meant destroying everything I had created. It was very painful,” Petrillo says. “We saw a sex psychologist together. After four months, they said I had gender dysphoria, [which the NHS describes as a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity].
“Being homosexual was removed [from the International Classification of Diseases] by the World Health Organisation in 1990 and we celebrate this day, but being transgender is considered a mental disorder. It’s not nice.”
In January 2019, with her ex-wife’s support, Petrillo began undergoing hormone therapy. “The beginning is devastating,” she says. “I gained 10 kilograms in the first month. My metabolism completely changed. In the first year, my chest grew and, mentally, everything was different. I started to have a much greater sensitivity. The smallest thing would make me feel like crying.”
After six months of the treatment, Petrillo had lost more than ten seconds in the 400m and about 2.5 seconds in the 200m — the two events in which she reached the semi-finals in Paris — but she considered that a necessary sacrifice and “better to be a slow, happy woman than a fast, unhappy man” became her personal motto.
Petrillo first competed as a woman in September 2020 in both para and non-disabled competitions. The following year, more than 30 competitors in the masters category for women aged 35 and above signed a petition demanding that Petrillo was banned. “Her physical superiority is so evident as to make competition unfair,” Fausta Quilleri, a lawyer from Brescia and fellow runner, wrote.
In 2022 some athletes turned around on the podium in protest when pictures were being taken. Petrillo said she did not realise at the time due to her vision; a friend told her afterwards. At a masters event in Ancona, Petrillo was told she was not allowed to use the women’s changing rooms. “At the end of the competition, I said to the girls: ‘You do realise that I cannot even see?’ ”
Petrillo had been due to compete at the World Masters Indoor Athletic Championships last year before she was warned there was “an aggressive atmosphere” against her. The organisers said they would have to notify the police because of the potential danger and Petrillo was advised to travel with a bodyguard. She subsequently withdrew from the event. “All these negatives were in the Olympic world. In the Paralympic world, I’ve never had problems,” she says.
There were certainly not protests reminiscent of the furore surrounding the participation of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting — the gold medal-winning boxers alleged to have failed gender tests — and Petrillo says she was overwhelmed by the support she received inside the Stade de France, but some of her rivals did publicly question her place. “I find this not fair,” Ukraine’s Oksana Boturchu said. “I am not against transgenders in general but in this situation I do not understand or support it.”
It is a sentiment shared widely but, for Petrillo, the personal and sporting contexts are inseparable. Being a woman and running are defining features of her identity and she ardently believes one should not preclude the other. “I hope this can be the start of a transformation for transgender people,” she says.
For others, that landmark is a threat to the very future of women’s sport. Rather than allowing resentment to build and leaving athletes to defend their rights, it is surely for the governing bodies to have the courage to take a clearer stance.
