Curiosity
Transgender sues Crossfit for refusing to let her compete
Exercises work up a sweat during a military-style fitness class.
Photo courtesy 16×9
CrossFit sued by transgender athlete for competition discrimination
Chloe Johnson said CrossFit wouldn’t let her enter its strength competition as a woman. She was born a male, but had a sex change operation in 2006. California legally classifies her as a woman. However, CrossFit said it was unfair to other contestants to allow her to compete as a female. Johnson said she was discriminated against. She also sued for unfair competition and intentional infliction of emotional pain.
Johnson, who is 5-feet, 4-inches tall and weighs 150 pounds, said the company was trampling her civil rights. CrossFit officials said they had no problem with transgender athletes, but wanted a level paying field.
CrossFit’s general counsel, Dale Saran, would not comment on the lawsuit, which seeks $2.5 million in damages. Saran directed The Associated Press to a CrossFit online discussion board, where he posted that Jonsson had never supplied medical documents to back up her assertion that she was a woman. He also dismissed McCoy’s suggestion that transgender athletes are engaged in a struggle as valid as the one black baseball players waged to be accepted in the major leagues.
“The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women,” Saran wrote in a letter to McCoy that’s linked to the discussion board. “That Chloie may have felt herself emotionally, and very conscientiously, to be a woman in her heart, and that she ultimately underwent the legal and other surgical procedures to carry that out, cannot change that reality.”