Saturday October 28. Katia and Mya meet in the ring. The amateur boxers are both participating in their first provincial championship. They’ve been training hard for this for weeks. They feel ready. Katia Bissonnette left from Saguenay and Mya Walmsley, from Montreal. They will face each other in Victoriaville.
But barely an hour before the fight, everything goes wrong.
“Around 11:15 a.m., I warm up to get into the ring,” says Katia. And there, my coach tells me that my opponent is someone who was born a man…”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MYA WALMSLEY
Trans boxer Mya Walmsley
Shock. Dismay. Katia’s trainer, Denis Gravel, has just received a text message from a colleague to warn him: Mya is a trans person. Until then, no one had seen fit to notify him. Neither the organizers of the championship, nor the Quebec Olympic Boxing Federation, nor Boxing Canada. Everyone, apparently, considered that this information was none of their business.
“I talk about it with my athlete,” says Denis Gravel. Are we going there or not? We think. We lack information. We have an hour before the fight. We don’t know anything about testosterone levels, we don’t know whether or not this person took puberty blockers before adolescence… We’re in the dark. »
The coach fears for the safety of his athlete. “In boxing, we hit each other on the face, we are not in a pool of water or on a race track! We are in a ring and we want to win. »
Katia Bissonnette is fearful, too. “If we are not on equal terms, I could have after-effects, end up in hospital, with a concussion or in a coma…” Faced with the unknown, the Saguenay psychologist chooses to withdraw. “We have so many questions, it’s impossible to do otherwise. »
Mya Walmsley warms up when she is told that her opponent will not enter the ring. Knowing that Katia Bissonnette traveled from Saguenay, she immediately worried. Did her opponent have a car accident?
A Facebook post tells her that she is the problem.
Shock. Dismay. Very quickly, the media took up this issue, which was as burning as it was divisive. Social media, of course, is going wild. And it’s Mya’s turn to fear for her safety…
“I felt like a political object, not like a real person who likes to box and was happy to participate in a fight,” says Mya Walmsley, 27, a philosophy student at Concordia University.
Of Australian origin, she had boxed a few times before her transition, but it is only in the last year and a half that she has taken her training more seriously.
Let’s be clear: Mya Walmsley did not decide to change sex one fine morning in order to collect victories in the ring. It’s never that simple.
“Obviously, I didn’t transition to become a boxer. I do this for the pleasure of participating in a sport. I like to be fit and healthy. And I’m a little competitive, so I like getting into fights. But I transitioned for reasons much more complex than that. No one transitions to compete in sports. It changes your life in such a fundamental way that it’s not a valid reason to do it…”
I have no problem believing it. There’s no doubt that Mya Walmsley didn’t become a trans woman to cheat at boxing. It would be grotesque – and not just a little transphobic – to suggest this.
That said, the concerns expressed by Katia Bissonnette and her trainer were perfectly legitimate. Fearing for the physical safety of an athlete is not transphobic. Demanding that sports organizations be more transparent in this regard, neither.
For the moment, we are swimming in fog. The Quebec Olympic Boxing Federation relies on Boxing Canada, which has no clear guidelines to present. In Mya’s case, his only recommendation was to… keep it dead. Above all, not to say anything, not even to the opponents of the trans athlete, to prevent the latter from being a victim of discrimination.
It’s very virtuous, but clearly it doesn’t work. Sports organizations are dreaming if they think they can resolve this issue by sweeping it under the rug. “If an accident happens, who will be responsible? », asks Denis Gravel. “It seems like they are washing their hands of it or afraid of being prosecuted for transphobia. The safety of my boxer, we don’t care…”
Boxing Canada does have a policy, posted on its website, which requires trans athletes registered in female categories to have low testosterone levels. But the sports federation does not apply this policy; a committee is still looking into the matter.
Mya Walmsley confirms that she did not have to measure her testosterone levels before registering for the championship. “It would lead to a dead end to require this kind of tests”, in his opinion “arbitrary and invasive”. It’s better to trust the athletes themselves, as well as their coaches, to choose the appropriate gender categories, she believes.
This is not the avenue chosen by major sports organizations like the International Athletics Federation, which recently banned trans people who have undergone male puberty from women’s athletics competitions. Male puberty, according to the Federation, provides skeletal and muscular advantages that do not disappear by lowering testosterone levels.
Critics, however, consider these new rules far too restrictive. The phenomenon is relatively new and there is probably insufficient research to determine the best approach to adopt.
For the moment, we are groping. But one day we will have to find a balance between inclusion, justice and the safety of all athletes.
Mya Walmsley believes that “there is no right to know who is trans and who is not.” Katia Bissonnette believes, on the contrary, that organizers must be transparent to allow athletes to make informed decisions.
The Saguenay boxer with orange hair thinks above all that she should never have had to decide this issue which goes beyond her, and which goes far beyond the world of Quebec boxing.
Reluctantly, Saturday, it became a bit of his fight.