We Spoke With This Former Olympian About Transgender Athletes. Here’s What She Said

• Former Olympic athlete Rebecca Dussault warned against allowing biologically male athletes who identify as transgender to compete in women’s sports.
• “Every women’s record in sport will fall,” she warned in an interview with the DCNF.
• Male athletes have been piling up victories in girls’ and women’s sports.
• Dussault represented the U.S. at the Olympics and also won two world championships.

“Every record in women’s sport will fall” if male athletes who identify as transgender women are allowed to compete in female sports, former Olympic athlete Rebecca Dussault said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Forcing female athletes to compete against biological males will have a devastating effect on girls’ and women’s sports, which will, in turn, have a devastating effect on girls and women, Dussault told the DCNF over the phone.

Her warning isn’t a hypothetical: Male athletes who identify as transgender have been piling up victories when allowed to compete in female events. Democrats in Congress and on the campaign have rallied behind the Equality Act, which would require schools to allow male athletes into girls’ sports if the male athletes identify as transgender.

“Once a male body has gone through puberty, they have received the benefits. So the skeletal form, lung capacity, muscle density, the greater length of levers in their body, their muscle-to-weight ratio, their capacity to deal with dehydration much better, narrower hips, I mean you name it — they are physiologically designed differently than women,” she said.

In addition to competing in the Olympics, Dussault won multiple world championships and runs a fitness training business with global reach from her home in Iowa.

“We invest so much money into keeping sports fair, and this blows the cap off of it. Every women’s record in sports will fall,” said Dussault.

“I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt there are 1,500 men who on their bad day can beat Serena Williams in tennis,” she said. “There are 2,000 men who could outrun the fastest female sprinters of all time. So if one of them decides to compete as a trans woman, there you go.”

A paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in June found that male athletes who identify as transgender women have an “intolerable” advantage over their female competitors, even after suppressing testosterone levels.

The professors who wrote the paper support allowing transgender athletes to compete against female athletes, but argue that the only way to ensure fairness is to eliminate binary gender-based categories in sports altogether and find other ways of categorizing athletes.

“We cannot take the time to hyper-categorize people, it absolutely wouldn’t work to get into the nitty-gritty of categorizing people based on lung capacity or arm length or anything other than XX or XY [chromosomes], and maybe there can be a third category but it cannot encroach upon the dignified competition of woman vs. woman,” Dussault told the DCNF.

“It’s a sad day for sport if we’re going to just put up with this,” she added.

She said she wants to see more women speak up about protecting the integrity of female athletics.

“Where are the women who will stand up for women? There are so many women who will stand up for women’s rights in every other possible thing, but when it comes to sports, we’re just going to be spineless? Where are these great champions who aren’t speaking out on this?”

And it’s not just her fellow women that Dussault wants to see speak up.

“Where are the men standing up for this? Where are the men defending women’s sport?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but the men are fine and safe, they’re on high ground, but we’re about to go in on the undertow, as women in sport. And so, I call out the male champions there too: where is your voice? Where is your spine?”