Nikki Hiltz doesn’t just represent the USA on the racetrack.
“This is bigger than just me,” said the 29-year-old from California NBC after qualifying for the Olympics on June 30 after running 1,500 meters in 3 minutes, 55.33 seconds, a personal best and a competition record in the women’s event. “It’s the last day of Pride Month and I wanted to hold this for my community. All LGBTQ folks, you brought me home the last hundred. I could feel the love and support.”
Hiltz, who identifies as transgender and non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, already holds the American women’s outdoor mile record. They are now set to make more history next month as one of the few gender non-conforming athletes to compete in the Olympics.
In 2021, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard participated in the Tokyo Games, becoming at age 43 one of the first openly trans Olympic athletes in the world. Facing controversy over his alleged biological advantages over female-born competitors despite suppressing his testosterone levels below a certain threshold, Hubbard didn’t get a medal.
In the same Games, mononymous football player Quinn became the first transidentification person to win an Olympic medal, taking home gold with the Canadian women’s team. (Quinn won a bronze medal in 2016 but only came out as nonbinary in 2020.) They will compete for another medal in Paris this summer.
BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe also made history the same year, becoming the first openly trans athlete to join the Team USA roster, after qualifying as an alternate, although she ultimately did not compete in Tokyo.
Skateboarder Alana Smith, who identifies as non-binary, competed in Tokyo for Team USA, at one point holding her skateboard with her preferred “they/them” pronouns scrawled across it. Although they didn’t win a medal, they said they achieved their goal at the Olympics, which was “to be happy and be a visual representation for humans like me.”
In 2022, American figure skater Timothy LeDuc became the first openly non-binary Olympian to compete at the Winter Games in Beijing, where he qualified 8th in the pairs category alongside her partner Ashley Cain-Gribble. “I know that for me, non-binary people, this is only possible because amazing queer people came before me and laid the foundation for me,” LeDuc said at the time. “And now I want to do this so that others will come later too.”
See more information: Your guide to the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics: when and how to watch – and what to expect
Sport has long grappled with issues of sex and gender identity, as many critics of inclusion have argued about potential injustices. Most individual and team competitive events are also organized around binary sex and gender categories.
In 2004, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) opened its Games for the first time to transgender individuals under certain conditions, including hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery. The need for surgery was removed in 2016 to reflect more modern attitudes, but male-to-female transgender athletes were still required to achieve certain testosterone levels for a year before they could compete. In 2021, the IOC updated your policies again allow each sport’s governing body to determine its own rules for the participation of trans and non-binary athletes.
Since then, global government bodies for athletics, boxing, Cricket, cyclingIt is swimmingamong others, they tightened their rules on trans athletes, especially trans women who were assigned male at birth.
But as more people open up to the notion of gender as a spectrum, especially with younger generations increasingly identifying as non-binary, athletes like Hiltz, who was assigned female at birth and has always competed in women’s events , are showing their opponents that it is not so easy to politicize the issue.
After a social media user accused Hiltz of being “a mediocre man who steals a woman’s spot on the Olympic team,” Hiltz responded with a laughing emoji and said to look up what nonbinary means.
“I knew an Olympic birth would bring a huge amount of love and support online, but I also knew the huge platform would also bring some hate and ignorance,” Hiltz later added on Instagram. “Throughout this journey to the Paris Olympics, I will continue to use my platform to uplift trans and queer people and perhaps educate a few people along the way as well. If you consider yourself an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, I hope you will join me in doing the same.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
