When world champion powerlifter Matt Kroczaleski was outed as a transgender woman, Janae Marie, the fitness industry was stunned. “Kroc” wasn’t just the strongest in his weight class, but maintained a reputation for being THE alpha of the sport, enduring notoriously extreme training routines and weight cuts that would kill the average man. Shortly after the news broke, I shot Janae an email, something to the effect of, “Would you want to lay it all out for me? I’ll take as long as I need to get it right.” A few days later I was on a plane to Michigan to visit her. From early one morning until very late at night, we sat around her kitchen table as I absorbed her life story. I consider it nothing short of a privilege that she trusted me with it. This piece was named to the Notable list in the 2016 anthology of Best American Sports Writing, and I was happy that my first time making it into that book was for telling the world about of one of the most beautiful humans I’ve had the pleasure to know. Curiously—and this can give you some sense of how far and how fast this discussion has moved even since then—there’s no discussion in this piece about the wider issue of trans women in women’s sport. It was not a major culture war flashpoint in late 2015 when this was written, and since Janae told me she had no plans to compete as a woman (she already owned all the world records for her weight class as a man) there was no sense in deviating from the main narrative. But Janae is as brilliant and wise as she is physically strong, and I’ve been meaning to catch up with her to pick her brain on the topic. Perhaps a followup is in order…
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