Boston Marathon Runners Can Compete as Gender ‘They Specify

Boston Marathon Runners Can Compete as Gender ‘They Specify Themselves to Be’

The Boston Athletic Association, the group behind the Boston Marathon, has confirmed that it allows runners to compete as the gender with which they self-identify—a controversial allowance that has raised questions about whether it gives male runners who identify as female an unfair advantage. “We take people at their word. We register people as they specify themselves to be,” Tom Grilk, chief of the Boston Athletic Association, told the Boston Herald. “Members of the LGBT community have had a lot to deal with over the years, and we’d rather not add to that burden.”

NPR also reports that while the Association has no explicit policy about the matter, runners have been asked for several years to compete with the same gender with which they qualified. “We don’t require that runners outline their gender identity history with us, so we can’t say for certain how many trans runners are in our race. We do know that we have had several transgender runners in the past,” the Association outlined
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