Canada - Cyclist Kristen Worley: ‘I'm a woman on the move

the move...' [2007-09-08 Globe and Mail]

‘I'm a woman on the move'
ANNE MCILROY

From Saturday's GlobeandMail

September 08, 2007

LONDON, Ont. — Kristen Worley grabs a large pink gym bag out of her

car and walks into the women's change room at the Forest City Velodrome.

She emerges in skin-tight racing gear provided by a potential new

sponsor and carefully tucks her ponytail into an aerodynamic helmet

for her final workout on her home course before the women's national

track cycling championships, being held this weekend in Dieppe, N.B.

A good showing will give her a shot at qualifying for next year's

Olympic Games in Beijing.

At 39, Ms. Worley is a serious contender; she has a commanding

presence among the other cyclists as she travels the London, Ont.,

track's steep curves at 50 kilometres an hour. And yet the muscles in

her thighs and arms look beefy; they don't have the definition you

might expect in someone who grinds through five or six hours a day on

a bike.

The cycling skills are a holdover from what she calls her “previous

life,” but the extra fat is the result of leaving that life behind.

In 1996, as a man named Chris, she started taking hormones to begin

the process of becoming a woman. Five years later, surgery completed

the transition.

“If I were to take my clothes off, you wouldn't know,” Ms. Worley

insists. “I'm no different than any woman who has had a hysterectomy.”

It has been 55 years since an ex-GI named George Jorgenson realized

his dreams and shocked the world by travelling to Denmark for surgery

and returning to the Bronx as Christine Jorgensen. Hard numbers are

still difficult to find, but a research paper presented this week at

a conference in Chicago suggests that as many as one person in 500

feels estranged from his or her body. These people are so distanced

from their assigned sex that they are desperate to change it.

As a result, parents are more accepting of children who feel this

way, and so are schools. Last year, a boy was admitted to a South

Florida kindergarten class as a girl. A year earlier, the boy who had

been elected to head a Toronto high school's student council came

back after the summer holidays as a girl, and officials made sure

students and teachers alike were sensitive to the situation.

The trend also has spread to the pantheon of physical perfection:

athletics. A growing number of transitioned athletes now compete at

an elite level. Professional mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq won the

Canadian women's downhill championship last year and Danish golfer

Mianne Bagger has earned a berth on the Ladies European Tour.

Like Ms. Worley, both were once men, and there are those who contend

that, when it comes to world-class athletics, they simply aren't the

same as other women. They challenge the notion that it's fair to have

competitors who were born and raised as males pull up to the starting

line with women.

At the same time, a growing number of sports experts now counter that

argument; in fact, many contend that because of what they've had to

do to their bodies, transitioned women are really at a physical

disadvantage.

But Ms. Worley insists that the real issue is one of equality for

people like her ­ both in sport and in broader society. She dreams of

carrying the Canadian flag into the Olympics' opening ceremonies, of

sending a powerful message that people who change gender aren't

mentally ill or sexual deviants, that they're normal and can lead

healthy, successful lives.

She, for example, is an elite water skier as well as a competitive

cyclist, has a successful career as a design engineer and is in a

loving relationship with the woman she married when she was a man.

They live in Toronto and hope to start a family.

“I'm a woman on the move,” she says as she pulls off the track for a

pit stop to make adjustments on her new bike. Sweat drips off her

face, carrying flecks of mascara with it.

But is Beijing really in her future?

Sports have been part of Kristen Worley's life for as long as she can

remember, an escape from the overpowering anxiety she felt even as a

four-year-old, when her parents told her to toughen up or dressed her

in blue and grey, not the bright colours she craved.

Born in 1967, she was adopted as a baby into a sport-minded, middle- class family in Mississauga. Little Chris had a sister four years his

senior and when he got older he would skip family sailing expeditions

so he could stay home and dress up in her clothes, play with her

dolls, try her makeup, or relax in her sleigh bed.

Looking back, Ms. Worley says it's too simplistic to describe that

she felt like she was trapped in the wrong body. It was more like

there was a profound disconnect: She saw herself as a girl, yet to

everybody else, she was a boy.

“Your brain is telling you one thing and your body is telling society

something else.”

Adolescence was difficult. The anxiety got worse and the troubling

thoughts were becoming harder to suppress. It took a toll. Chris

became anorexic and depressed; he started drinking, hanging out with

older kids and smoking pot.

Every month or so, he would break down and start to shake and cry,

but he couldn't tell his mother what the trouble was. He didn't know.

He would see the odd reference in magazines or on television to men

who became women. “Oh, my God,” Ms. Worley remembers thinking. “That

is too far out.”

He feared that he might be gay. “I don't have a homophobic bone in my

body. But I knew in my heart that this was something different.”

Unable to express such feelings properly, “I suppressed everything.”

Enter sports. Already a competitive water skier, Chris took up cross- country running and became friends with a group of top athletes in

high school. That led to mountain biking and road racing, which he

loved in part because it gave him an excuse to shave his legs. But he

was serious about cycling and dreamed of making it to the Olympics.

“Sports saved my life,” Ms. Worley says. It provided an outlet,

something positive to focus on, a way that Chris could so exhaust

himself that he could fall asleep rather than lay awake feeling anxious.

But then, during a road race in London, a crash took 20 riders down,

Chris among them, and he broke his pelvis. He was 18 and thought he

would never ride again.

LOST AND FOUND

The months that followed were painful, both physically and

emotionally. Sports had been his life and, without the training

regime and the races, he felt lost and left out. Then he reconnected

with Alison, an old acquaintance, and recalls that when they started

to talk in a bar near Peterborough's Trent University, it was as if

everyone else at the table had faded into the background.

When they were married in 1993, Chris still believed that he could

conquer what he was feeling. “You think that you can hold it off,

that if you do masculine things, it will go away,” recalls Ms.

Worley, who now believes that Alison had a sense of what might be

coming. “I don't think it was a huge surprise to her.”

After leaving Trent, Chris had studied graphic design and

illustration at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and then begun

to work in animation. While in New York for a business meeting, he

had an acute anxiety attack.

“I don't know what happened, but it felt like the bottom floor

dropped out of my life,” Ms. Worley remembers. “All the years of

suppression overcame me physically and that on-off switch was staying

on. … All those cross-gender thoughts weren't going away.”

Chris made it to the airport and sat there sweating, shaking and

thinking: “Oh my god, I'm in trouble.”

With the assistance of his sister-in-law, he sought medical help, but

was horrified by doctors who made him feel like a deviant. He was

told that he would have to divorce Alison and should prepare to be

rejected by the people he loved.

“I tried to hang myself,” Ms. Worley says. “I tried to drown myself ­

twice.”

Eventually, Chris found a physician he was comfortable with and began

the transition to womanhood, choosing the name Kristen to make things

easier for family and friends.

The couple have stayed together, but Ms. Worley says the change

hasn't been easy for Alison. “We've been through a lot of

challenges. ... It is really about the relationship. A lot of people

don't seem to understand that. I am very lucky.”

No longer in touch with her adoptive family, she now considers her in- laws her mother and father ­ Worley is their name. She hesitates to

discuss her transition but is thrilled with the results and laughs

when told no one would suspect she was once a male.

On the other hand, she is wary of rejection and wonders how each

person she meets will react to her.

Before that last workout in London (the velodrome is the closest

indoor track to Toronto), she met at a nearby Tim Hortons with Paul

Gonsalves, a potential sponsor and distributor of Blue Competition

bikes. He didn't seem to be aware of her past and she didn't bring it

up, but afterward she worried that their deal ­ a new bike at cost ­

would fall through if Mr. Gonsalves weren't comfortable with who she

really is.

Afterward, Mr. Gonsalves said he knew all along, but didn't want to

make Ms. Worley uncomfortable. Some sponsors might think twice, he

said, but all he wants to do is “help an athlete accomplish her goals

and not allow equipment to be a limiting factor.”

During a break later that evening, Ms. Worley tells another cyclist

about her past. A former captain of the national junior women's

hockey team, Heather Logan is also competing at the cycling

championships this weekend.

At first, she was skeptical, she says ­ not certain that Ms. Worley

should be included. Now, “I would want her hormone levels to be

checked, but I guess it is fair.”

JUMPING WITH GIRLS

The only man ever to admit to entering the Olympics as a woman is

Hermann (Dora) Ratjen, a German who bound his genitals for the 1936

Berlin Games and placed fourth in the women's high jump. Two decades

later, he said the Nazis made him do it.

No transitioned athlete has ever taken part ­ openly, at least. But

in 2004, the International Olympic Committee put in place rules that

would allow it. Those rules require a confidential evaluation no

earlier than two years after an athlete has undergone surgery to

remove either ovaries or testicles. Surgical alterations of genitals

also must have been completed by that point. (Women who become men

are at an added disadvantage because but their reconstruction can

cost three times as much, and the results are imperfect.)

Ms. Worley has had to submit her medical records and blood work to

four separate panels: the two organizations that oversee cycling and

water skiing in Canada and the two that govern international

competitions in both sports. (Water skiing is not an Olympic sport,

but its federation is pushing to have it included.)

As well, she had to undergo questioning, something she found very

difficult. Now lobbying for a more sensitive approach, she describes

a conference call she had with officials of Water Ski and Wakeboard

Canada as “gross.”

“They were all men, and I'm sure they were thinking, ‘Why would

someone do this to themselves? Why would they cut their penis off?' ”

Joseph Quigg, the national team's physician, was in on that call and

has since become a strong supporter of Ms. Worley. He prepared for

the interview by searching the scientific literature but could find

very little about male athletes who had become women and whether they

might enjoy a competitive edge.

Before long, he came to the opposite view: that Ms. Worley had a

physical drawback because other women produce small amounts of

natural testosterone in their ovaries and adrenal glands.

It's a conclusion that Sport Canada, the governing body for

athletics, now shares. “There is a growing body of evidence to show

that transitioned females actually compete at a disadvantage to all

other female competitors,” according to a government background

document. “Transitioned women do not produce, nor have the means to

produce, testosterone ­ a fundamental hormone for both men and women.

“Testosterone enables the body to build muscle; allows muscle

recovery during and after physical activity; supports heart and lung

development and recovery; supports, regulates and burns body fat;

regulates weight and the immune system; and provides overall drive

and energy.”

Last year, organizations such as the Canadian Olympic Committee,

Sport Canada and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport struck a

committee to address the ignorance surrounding transitioned athletes.

And Ms. Worley says she has lobbied hard to change the official view,

telling the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine and government

bureaucrats how she lost muscle strength and had trouble controlling

her weight. “I became an apple,” she says.

Crashing fatigue has been another pitfall. She'll be in the front

pack in a road race, then suddenly have no energy and fade to the back.

But not everyone feels that all the evidence is in.

Can someone who grew up with lots of testosterone really be at a

disadvantage compared with “women who have never had increased

levels?” asks Gabriela Tymowski, a sports ethicist at the University

of New Brunswick. “Right now, we don't know. We have competing rights

­ Kristen's right to compete at the highest levels of sport and the

rights of other women who have trained … with the female physiology

from day one.”

Dr. Tymowski says she put the question to students taking her course

on ethics in sports and almost all of them felt that someone who used

to be a man would have the upper hand. But three years ago,

officialdom came to the opposite conclusion.

In 2004, both the cycling and the water-skiing associations restored

Ms. Worley's accreditation, this time as a woman. They recommended

that the international bodies governing their sports do the same, and

those bodies agreed.

The rest is up to her. “I just have to cycle my butt off.”

OLYMPIC LONGSHOT The practice doesn't finish until 9 p.m., and even

then Ms. Worley seems reluctant to get off the bike she is test- driving, the one she hopes will carry her to a berth on the national

team in the 3,000-metre pursuit ­ an event in which two competitors

start at opposite sides of the track and try to overtake each other.

But making the qualifying time ­ 3:51:07 ­ is just the start. Under

IOC rules, Canada can't send someone to Beijing unless it has a rider

in the world's top nine, says Kris Westwood of the Canadian Cycling

Association. So, as well as making the national team, Ms. Worley will

have to do well at international competitions, so “chances for us

qualifying for the Olympics are pretty slim.”

But Ms. Worley says she has a shot. “Remember Lori-Anne Muenzer?” she

asks, referring to the 38-year-old Edmonton legal secretary who went

from nowhere to gold in Athens.

So she has been training hard (up to six hours a day on the bike,

plus weights) ­ but hasn't interrupted her bid to change how people

think.

And change is slowly coming about. Doctors have begun to take a

different approach to treating the condition formally known as gender

identify disorder, or gender dysphoria.

A number of clinics, including one in Toronto, now give transgender

adolescents drugs that delay puberty and stop the development of

secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts. Hormone therapy

can begin at as young as 16, with sex-reassignment surgery at 18.

Ms. Worley wishes she'd had surgery as a teen ­ and that more doctors

were like Herbert Schreier of the Children's Hospital and Research

Center in Oakland, Calif. “We don't use the term ‘gender identity

disorder,'” Dr. Schreier said in an interview. “We call it ‘gender

variance.' The disorder comes in the minds of others.”

She also is fighting to allow transitioned women to take small

amounts of testosterone, which would improve their health but is

currently against Olympic anti-doping rules

And she has taken up the cause of Santhi Soundarajan, the Indian

runner stripped of her silver medal in the 800 metres at the Asian

Games last year after failing a gender test.

Ms. Soundarajan may have androgen insensitivity syndrome, the term

for people who are born with male sex chromosomes ­ XY instead of XX

­ but develop as females because their bodies don't respond to male

hormones.

In a letter to IOC president Jacques Rogge, Ms. Worley argues that

Ms. Soundarajan should never have been subjected to gender testing.

Outside athletics, she works with young people and, last summer, when

she invited some of them for a day of water skiing, one boy said he

had always felt like a broken toy.

That, she says, is the kind of stigma she hopes to erase by speaking

out and becoming a role model ­ by pushing as hard as she can on the

track.

“When we think about each other, about men and women, male and

female, we are all in the grey,” she says. “It is not black and white

for any us.”

-

Anne McIlroy is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.

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