Angel Flores, a 22-year-old powerlifter, had been training for the 2022 Violet Crown Classic in Austin, Texas, for weeks when a sudden phone call changed everything. Her local gym informed her that the United States Powerlifting Association (USPA) had changed its policies on inclusion of trans athletes, and she would no longer be able to compete in the upcoming meet, which was scheduled to be held in just over three weeks.
Flores says she felt “defeated” and “at a loss” after learning she would no longer be able to compete. Although USPA Texas offered to compromise by allowing Flores to participate in the Jan. 29 event as a “guest,” her scores would essentially be symbolic. If she broke any records, the achievement would only count toward her personal goals.
The day of the meet, Flores was forced to sit on the sidelines while she watched her colleagues earn what she had worked so hard for.
“It was a challenge to see my friends and my peers go up and accept their medals, take their pictures and celebrate,” she tells Xtra. “Any athlete who has had any sort of competition taken away from them, either through COVID-19, injury or anything else, they understand how it feels to have that pulled away at the last second.”
The new USPA guidelines unveiled on Jan. 1 are just the latest instance of U.S. sporting associations limiting the ability of trans athletes to compete. Under its new rules, trans powerlifters are only eligible to compete in “non-tested” USPA events, referring to a category in which competitors are not required to undergo drug testing. While competing federation USA Powerlifting requires all lifters to prove they are not using steroids or other performance-enhancement drugs, USPA does not.
USPA’s updated rulebook goes a step further by banning competitors currently taking “any hormone, regardless of medical necessity or choice” from partaking in tested meets. These regulations don’t just apply to trans athletes but also include women using birth control pills or hormonal IUDs and patients prescribed hormone treatments to manage their diabetes, among others.
The guidelines were met with condemnation by LGBTQ2S+ groups after both the NCAA and USA Swimming rolled back inclusion guidelines amid right-wing backlash to trans participation. Nine U.S. states have passed laws in the past 12 months barring some or all trans athletes from competing in alignment with their gender.
“In the wake of attacks on trans athletes in statehouses across the country and in the media, we have seen a number of sport governing bodies change their policies to make it harder for trans people to play,” writes Laurel Powell, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), in an email. “Preventing trans athletes from playing sports is inexcusable. These organizations are simply cowing to pressure from extremists who have made trans athletes the target of their vitriol.”
But what critics say has surprised them most about the USPA’s new guidelines is what they claim is the unusually quiet way they were rolled out.
Flores, for instance, says she was only notified of the rule change when a representative of USPA called her home gym directly to inform them she would no longer be permitted to compete in tested play. Prior to that conversation, she had assumed “nothing had changed and the policy was still that the USPA did not make a distinction between trans lifters and cisgender lifters,” Flores adds.
JayCee Cooper, an ambassador for the LGBTQ2S+ advocacy group Athlete Ally, says Flores wasn’t the first trans powerlifter to be pulled out of tested competition as a result of the guidelines. A second competitor was barred from a meet last November, weeks before the amended rulebook was released on USPA’s website.
Cooper says the way USPA’s policy updates were rolled out is “completely unfair to affected athletes” and that the guidelines themselves are “completely against all standards” of inclusion.
“They have a responsibility as an organization to be transparent about policies as big as this and also provide clarification and justification on the policies that they’re adopting, neither of which they did when adopting this policy,” Cooper tells Xtra.
The phenomenon is a familiar one for Cooper, who is currently suing USA Powerlifting over its 2019 ban on trans athletes. She says that organizations like the Canadian Powerlifting Federation have “accepted trans athletes for a number of years without issue” but that “powerlifting as a general community has really struggled to understand the body of evidence that’s out there to support the inclusion of trans athletes.
“I feel like sometimes powerlifting organizations feel like they need to reinvent the wheel when there’s so much information that’s already out there to support inclusion in sports,” she says.
Both the USPA and USA Powerlifting deny that their policies discriminate against trans athletes. On its website, USA Powerlifting notes that trans men are still allowed to compete and adds that it is “a sports organization with rules and policies” that “apply to everyone to provide a level playing field.
“While the term discrimination is used to catch the attention of the public, it is most often misused,” its trans participation policy reads. “We have restriction [sic] such as age eligibility, who can compete as [sic] at our national events and so on. No, you are not discriminated against because you are a 40-year-old college student that is not allowed to compete at Collegiate Nationals. No, we are not discriminating against your 7-year-old daughter by not letting her compete.”
USPA, meanwhile, denied that there was anything abnormal in the way that its new policies were unveiled, calling the accusation “simply false.
“The USPA Executive Committee drafts and votes on rule changes the year before they are implemented and published in our rule book,” USPA’s president, Steve Denison, tells Xtra in an emailed statement. “Changes are then posted to our website on Jan. 1 of each year. The publication of the rule book is how all athletes, referees, meet directors, and other USPA officials, are notified of rule changes for the current year.”
The USPA rule changes will not affect all trans powerlifters. The more than 20 independent powerlifting organizations operating in the U.S. each set their own guidelines for inclusion, according to Cooper, and the USPA’s new policies will not affect athletes competing in other leagues.
Meanwhile, the U.S. national governing body, Powerlifting America, allows trans athletes to compete in line with inclusion policies from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES). A trans inclusion manual published by CCES in 2017 asserts that “policies governing the participation of trans athletes should nurture fair play, honesty and respect and preserve the integrity of sport.
“Trans athletes should have equal opportunity to participate in sport and strive for excellence,” the guidelines state.
While Flores isn’t sure what the future holds for her powerlifting career, she hopes to continue fighting for space in the sport she loves. As a trans woman, having the ability to be celebrated for who you are and what you can accomplish is rare, and she has found that among the powerlifters at her gym. That supportive community encourages each other, she says, to bring their best selves to the mat, day in and day out.
“Finding a support system that keeps you going and drives you, it makes you feel like you can conquer the world,” she says. “I feel that with this community at my back, I can truly go and do anything and be whoever I want, and I know that every single person next to me feels the exact same way.”
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