Transgender cyclist to face Olympic champ in first race as woman

Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges is set to face star athletes including five-time Olympic champion Laura Kenny when she makes her competitive debut as a woman in the UK on Saturday – and her mother is said to have claimed that a police operation has been put in place so that the British Cycling academy racer can compete.

The 21-year-old began hormone therapy last year as part of gender dysphoria treatment and now meets the testosterone level requirements of the national governing body for the sport.

Trans athletes must have testosterone below five nanomoles per litre for a year to compete against other women. The UK National Health Service says that men typically have between 10 and 30 nanomoles per litre, while the numbers for women range between 0.7 and 2.8.

Bridges is provisionally on the starting list for the National Omnium Championships in the midlands city of Derby, where she is expected to take on the most successful British female Olympic cyclist of all time in Kenny.

The prospect set a national junior men's record over 25 miles before joining the academy in 2019 and coming out as transgender in October 2020, telling Cycling Weekly this month that she "couldn't be my true self" as a man.

The news of her involvement in the race, which will include members of Team GB's Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games team, has inevitably led to controversy, coming in the wake of US athlete Lia Thomas becoming the first openly trans swimmer to win at the national college championship in her country.

Bridges finished 43rd out of 45 riders in the elite men's criterium at the Loughborough Cycling Festival in May 2021, and 12km behind the winner at the Welsh National Championship road race in September.

She featured in the bronze medal-winnning University of Nottingham men’s team in the team pursuit at the British Universities’ Championships in Glasgow last month.

The University of Nottingham Sport Twitter account subsequently deleted a post celebrating the result, according to The Telegraph and screenshots shared on Twitter.

“Of course, sport must be for all and Emily has raced in the men’s team for years," 1980 Olympic swimming silver medalist Sharron Davies, who regularly campaigns against trans involvement in women’s sport, told the outlet.

“She competed with the men’s team very successfully this past year while reducing testosterone, so it shows an open and fully inclusive category can work very well without ruining the rights of female athletes to their own category of fair sport.

“This is wrong and people must start calling it out or lose sport for future generations of young girls.”

Mara Yamauchi, the sixth-placed finisher at the 2008 Olympic marathon, agreed and reportedly wants the public to boycott Bridges' sponsors and British Cycling's commercial sponsors.

She also warned that taxpayers' money should not fund national governing bodies that permit trans participation in women’s sport.

“We have categories in sport in order to ensure fair competition and those categories are by sex, by age, by type of disability and by weight,” she said.

“If we didn’t have those categories then the only people who would achieve anything in sport would be the heaviest adult males.”

Davies also claimed that "a few of the girls" had telephoned her in a "very distressed" state because they felt inclusion was not being paired with fairness.

British Cycling said it would continue to follow world governing body UCI's guidelines based around testosterone levels.

“After starting hormone therapy, I didn’t want to race in the male category any more than I had to," said Bridges.

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"It sucks, racing as a man when you’re not one. It was quickly apparent that that was the wrong category for me.”

Writing on a private Twitter account, Bridges' mother, Sandy, is said to have suggested that her daughter may have police protection at the championships at the Derby Arena and added a hashtag of "safe to be me 2022".

“This is the reality of being trans today,” she wrote, according to road.cc. “That my daughter has to be on a police operation plan to compete in a bike race in the UK. How in any way can that be [safe]?"

The Telegraph said that a spokesman for Kenny did not respond to requests for comment.