Transgender wins 2nd straight Texas girls state wrestling championship
In most sports, taking synthetic testosterone steroid treatments will get you a lengthy suspension and pariah status.
In Texas girls’ wrestling, it gets you two state championships.
Eighteen-year-old Mack Beggs, who was born a girl but has taken hormones to transition to a male, claims to have never wanted to wrestle against girls any more than she wanted to be one of them.
Indeed, Beggs outright asked the Texas high school athletic commission to let her wrestle as a boy.
But rules are rules, and the same rule that prevents someone born as a man from wrestling as a girl works both ways.
Of course, this also raises more questions than it answers in terms of all that testosterone, since under any other circumstances, from Major League Baseball to the Olympics, injecting an androgen into one’s system is a good way to get banned.
Beggs, however, still wanted to compete, and ended up with a 32-0 record this year, as well as a championship.
Beggs’ mother, Angela McNew, addressed the issue when interviewed by The Associated Press.
“He has so much respect for all the girls he wrestles,” she said. “People think Mack has been beating up on girls. … The girls he wrestles with, they are tough. It has more to do with skill and discipline than strength.”
That may be so, but watching the video lays bare just what an advantage brute force can be:
WATCH: in a dramatic finish, transgender wrestler Mack Beggs rolls out of a possible pinfall to avoid defeat and win state. Met with boos from the crowd. @wfaa pic.twitter.com/72xRpzsQGN
— Matt Howerton (@HowertonNews) February 24, 2018
The crowd, of course, was having none of it; a chorus of boos for an unfair match drowned out any profile-in-courage cheers.
Beggs was unavailable for interviews in the run-up to the championship tournament, as her mother sensibly decided to keep her at a safe distance from the at-times toxic world of social media cyber-bullying that inevitably comes when the media gets hold of a story that proves divisive.
Indeed, the reaction seemed less vitriolic than it had been in 2017 when Beggs won the state title and faced far stiffer opposition from people connected to the sport.
“I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my teammates,” Beggs said last year. “That’s honestly what the spotlight should have been on is my teammates. The hard work that I put in in the practice room with them, beside me — we trained hard every, single day. Every, single day and that’s where the spotlight should have been on. Not me. All of these guys. Because I would not be here without them.”
The bigger question becomes will do regarding competitive wrestling in college.
After all, the NCAA has its own set of rules, but they essentially stipulate that people like Beggs are regarded as men rather than as women because of the testosterone therapy (similarly, the rules are stricter on male-to-female transgender treatment, requiring a full year of testosterone suppression before a male who identifies as a woman may compete against biological females.)
It will be interesting to see if Beggs stands up that standard when the time comes.
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