Cis Mom Harassed by Transphobes After Winning Half-Marathon
The Great West Race that Anna Harold won bans trans women from competing.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
A half-marathon win by a mother-of-four in Exeter, UK is demonstrating in stark terms how much the anti-trans hate campaign has done for women in athletics. Anna Harrold’s victory at the Great West Race was met by slurs, harassment, and false claims that she was a trans woman, according to reporting in the Independent. Harold later told the Independent that no one should be subjected to such monstrous treatment.
screenshot from the Independent
The targeting of Harold came despite the fact that she is cisgender, and despite the fact that the race she won bans trans women from competing as women. The Great West Race is affiliated with UK Athletics, which acted to ban trans women from all women’s categories of competition over a year ago.
Despite anti-trans campaigners portraying themselves as caring about women’s sports and fairness, this harassment of a random woman over her appearance betrays what the true goal of all efforts to ban trans athletes was nothing but a desire to bully, harass, and intimidate people regardless of the truth of any given situation.
The trans community predicted well in advance that cis women would inevitably wind up being targeted by the growing anti-trans hysteria, and that, because trans women are relatively uncommon, the majority of the harassment would ultimately be targeting cisgender women. That has sadly turned out to be the case as members of the public who’ve been whipped into a transmisogynistic frenzy look to vent their rage on any women who doesn’t adequately perform femininity. The harassment of Harold after her half-marathon is just the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Some of these have been relatively mild, such as fleeting encounters in public restrooms where cis women have been challenged or treated disrespectfully by people who believed that they were trans. A few, however, have been violent, including an incident where a woman was maced, dragged, and kicked after a shop attendant got the mistaken idea she was transgender, and one where a woman was murdered by a man who falsely believed her to be transgender. Both of the victims of violent attacks were Black women, who are believed to be particularly vulnerable to transmisogyny, included misdirected transmisogyny.
Incidents like these, where cis women wind up as targets for hatred and harassment intended for trans women, provide an opportunity to shine a spotlight on just how ugly and pointless the anti-trans panic is, even as harassment and violence towards trans women is often ignored and downplayed. However, it also speaks to the irony of a hate campaign that targets a group of women who are small in number, risk averse, and difficult to distinguish from other women. Cis women don’t just wind up as frequent targets of anti-trans hate by accident, they wind up as targets of anti-trans hate because the loathing and violent anger engendered by the anti-trans movement has to vent itself on somebody, and there aren’t enough visible trans women to slake the bloodlust.
This is the fatal flaw of a campaign that frequently bills itself as standing up for women’s rights but, in reality, can’t fail to make life more difficult and more dangerous for all women. That over-policing of women’s femininity was always destined to lead here is just a sad result of an unchecked spasm of far-right hatred that enables the worst people and gives them license to harass, intimidate, and attack any woman they decide isn’t woman enough. The same forces that led UK Athletics to ban trans women from the Great West Race led to the harassment of the Great West Race’s female champion. By giving in to transphobic hate groups, UK Athletics is as much to blame as anyone for the harassment of one of their cis women winners.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and an incoming member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.