As I wrote here previously, I was relieved to see the end of the Olympic Games on Sunday. This was largely because of the scars left on the competition by males being allowed to box against females in an unfair and potentially dangerous fashion. But it turns out that we're not out of the woods yet. With the official Olympic Games behind us, we now have the Paralympic Games coming close on their heels. These games allow athletes with various physical impairments to compete for their own shot at Olympic glory. But at least one group of athletes won't be given the same opportunity as the others. The organizers of the games are going to allow a visually impaired male transgender sprinter from Italy to compete against the women. As the New York Post put it last night, this has to stop.

Valentina Petrillo is visually impaired, but anyone can see this fact clearly.

The Italian sprinter — who, later this month, will become the first openly trans athlete to compete in the Paralympic Games — is a strapping biological man and should not be racing against women on a world stage.

And yet: Different games, same old story. Man identifies as woman and the doors of female spaces magically swing open for them. Truth be damned.

Unlike the boxers in this year's Olympic Games, this is not a question of a "person with a Y chromosome" who is still somehow recognized as a female because of other genetic anomalies. Valentina Petrillo is a 50-year-old male sprinter from Italy who lived as a man well into his 40s before finally beginning his "transition" in 2019. He is fully developed as a male and is, as the Post describes him, a "strapping biological man."

But he wasn't "strapping" enough to dominate the men's competitions among the visually impaired. In fact, even after transitioning, he went to the Para Athletics World Championship games where he won 11 medals, which would typically be impressive. But he only managed to take the bronze medal in the women’s 200 and 400-meter sprinting events. In other words, there were still two other actual women who beat him out. How do you think he would have fared against the men? Not very well, or so I would imagine.

This keeps happening over and over again and the results are almost uniformly outraging. Actual women who train their entire lives to be champions are robbed of opportunities by selfish men who are too mediocre to compete against their own gender. And now it's happening to disabled women, further adding insult to injury. These disabled athletes have had to overcome all manner of challenges in their lives to reach the point where they have finally earned the chance to grab for the gold. And then they arrive for their big moment and this is how they are treated?

The villains in this particular story are the members of the International Paralympic Committee. They allow each sport’s governing body to set its own rules. (This is similar to what the Olympics and other international governing sports bodies do.) Some of them observe traditional gender definitions while others allow trans competitors if they meet certain standards regarding their "transition" period. World Para Athletics, the international federation for track and field sports, says that "an individual legally recognized as a woman can compete in the women’s category." Of course, the definition of "legally recognized" varies from place to place and case to case, so this mess will not be cleaned up quickly and easily. All I can say for sure is that will be boycotting the sprinting events during the Paralympic Games, if not the entire spectacle. I've long since grown sick of this.