Italian sprinter Valentina Petrillo has been selected to represent her country at the Paralympic Games in Paris , becoming the first openly transgender athlete to partake in the international sports competition.
Petrillo is set to compete as a T12 woman - a classification given to track athletes with visual impairments - and will race in the 200m and 400m events. Speaking to BBC Sport , the 50-year-old described her upcoming presence at the Games as an “important symbol of inclusion.”
Addressing her selection to the Paralympics, which begin on August 28 and end on September 8, Petrillo asserted: “I have been waiting for this day for three years and in these past three years I have done everything possible to earn it.
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“I deserve this selection and I want to thank the Italian Paralympic Federation and the Italian Paralympic Committee for having always believed in me, above all as a person as well as an athlete.
“The historic value of being the first transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics is an important symbol of inclusion.”
At the age of nine, Petrillo says she already knew inside that she was a woman. Five years later, the Naples native was diagnosed with stargardt disease, a degenerative eye condition.
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While competing as a male in the T12 classification from 2015 to 2018, Petrillo amassed 11 national titles. With the support of her wife, she began living as a woman in 2018, later starting hormone therapy in January of the following year.
In 2021, Petrillo told BBC that the treatment was having significant impacts on her body and performance on the track. "My metabolism has changed," she began.
"I'm not the energetic person I was. In the first months of transition I put on 10kg. I can't eat the way I did before, I became anaemic, my haemoglobin is low, I'm always cold, I don't have the same physical strength, my sleep isn't what it was, I have mood swings.
"As a sportsperson, to accept that you won't go as fast as before is difficult,” Petrillo added. “I had to accept this compromise, because it is a compromise, for my happiness."
Since undergoing her transition, Petrillo has medaled at the World Para Athletics Championships and National Para Championships, most recently securing two bronze medals at the former competition.
In anticipation of the wave of backlash likely to come from her presence at the Paralympic Games, Petrillo told BBC Sports: "This is not a lifestyle choice for me, this is who I am. And the way I am, like all transgender people who do not feel they belong to their biological gender, should not be discriminated against in the same way that race, religion or political ideology should not be discriminated against.
"And sport that imposes rules based on a binary way of thinking does not factor this in. It is sport that has to find a solution and excluding transgender athletes is clearly not that solution.
"Ultimately, in the seven years in which transgender athletes have been able to compete in the female category, the number of instances in which they have stood out for their sporting results have been very few and far between."
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