Because she’s training in a sport that has now banned her from international competition, there’s no real career path. She says she feels isolated and believes she would have had more support from the sport if she had been a Division I athlete, or cisgender, or both.
“I wake up every day thinking, What’s next?” Telfer says. “Because if they can ban transgender female athletes from elite sports on International Transgender Day of Visibility, then they can do anything.”
Chelsea Wolfe, BMX
BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe was about two weeks away from the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Championships in Scotland, an international event that would allow her to requalify for Team USA, which she had been a member of since 2020 and represented as an alternate at the Tokyo Olympics. She woke up on the morning of July 14, 2023, to a text from a close friend that simply said, “They did it.” Wolfe hoped her worst fears hadn’t come true, but they did: The UCI, cycling’s international governing body, a ban had been passed about transgender women competing in the women’s division.
“I wish I could say I was surprised they went ahead with the ban, but I was surprised by the inhumane way they did it,” Wolfe says. To put this announcement into perspective, according to Cycling magazine, the UCI typically doesn’t enact major rule changes regarding things like equipment and bikes that can be used in the middle of a season, or even in the middle of a game cycle, so that brands, manufacturers, athletes, and teams can have a chance to adapt to the new rules. SELF has reached out to the UCI for comment on this and has not yet received a response.
“For them to make this rule change, implement it [almost immediately]“Two weeks before the world championships?” Wolfe continues, “I felt like my heart had been ripped out of my throat. It was like my whole world had ended without warning.”
Wolfe, a 31-year-old from San Diego, has been cycling for nearly her entire life. It’s been her family’s sport, and in 2016, when the IOC announced that BMX would be part of the Olympics, she decided to give it a try. At the time, it seemed like a distant goal, and Wolfe admits it was a bit of a Hail Mary for her. But she began competing at the elite level in 2018 and qualified for her first World Cup in 2019.
A professional BMX rider’s life revolves around the sport. When the UCI passed its new policy, Wolfe was in the thick of the season. Events are usually about a month apart, so Wolfe would come home from a competition, recover for a few days, and then slowly build up to a full training schedule about two weeks before the next event, pushing herself as hard as she could to learn new tricks and be ready for her next competition. “I think I had a double training session the day before,” she said. [to the announcement]where I was working on new tricks at the skate park and then I did a more cardio-heavy ride that night,” she says. “I had just had a good day, I vividly remember the sunset being so beautiful on my training ride the night before, and I was so grateful for life. And then I woke up the next morning to this.”