In a long-awaited policy change, transgender athletes will be accepted as competitors in the CrossFit Games starting in 2019. CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman made the announcement Friday night at an LGBTQ+ event timed to the launch of this weekend’s 2018 Reebok CrossFit Games at the Alliant Energy Center arena in Madison, Wisconsin.

“In the 2019 CrossFit competitive season, starting with the Open, transgender athletes are welcome to participate in the division with which they identify," said Glassman. "This is the right thing to do. CrossFit believes in the potential, capacity, and dignity of every athlete. We are proud of our LGBT community, including our transgender athletes, and we want you here with us.”

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Glassman spoke Friday at “Big Gay Happy Hour,” an event sponsored by LGBTQ+ CrossFit group OUTWOD. The group’s name refers to “WOD,” or Workout of the Day, CrossFit code for the series of exercises that a CrossFit coach gives athletes.

Alyssa Royse, a CrossFit affiliate gym owner and board member at the Out Foundation — the nonprofit that oversees OUTWOD — says she’s worked closely with CrossFit leaders to bring the new policy to life.

“I think it's important to realize that CrossFit is the largest fitness brand in the world, and where we go, others — we hope — will follow,” Royse says.

Out Foundation executive director Will Lanier calls the policy change “magical.”

"Now the sport that we have known and loved has taken the biggest step towards full inclusion,” says Lanier, noting that over 5,000 LGBTQ+ athletes have participated in OUTWOD events. “While our work may never be done, we are one giant step closer.”

The announcement is life-changing for transgender fans of the fitness regimen that’s taken on a cult-like status across the world, with 13,000 affiliate gyms in more than 120 countries worldwide.

Bennett Kaspar has trained at his CrossFit gym in Los Angeles for the past six years, and is “incredibly excited” by the news.

“To hear that it has become a reality, it’s a nice weight off the shoulders,” says Kaspar. “It feels like there’s one less thing on the to-do list in terms of advocating for trans people. Like, check — we got that one done.”

Kaspar wanted to enter the games as a competitor in the past, but would have been forced to compete in the women’s category due to CrossFit’s previous policy, mandating that athletes compete according to their sex assigned at birth.

“Can you imagine if I had shown up to compete as the gender I was assigned at birth? That would be ridiculous,” says Kaspar. He adds that he has participated in the workouts that his gym runs for athletes that do enter the games, but he's never paid to register because “I didn’t want to give my money to a company with a non-inclusive policy.” In a 2016 Medium post about CrossFit’s “Trans Problem,” Kaspar wrote that he was “taking the $20 I would have spent to register for the Open, and...donating it to Lambda Legal.”

In 2019, Kaspar says, he will register for the open — the first of a series of elimination rounds leading up to each summer's games — for the first time: “Now I’ll play for the leaderboard like everybody else.”

The policy change comes on the heels of years of controversy over the company’s inclusivity regarding LGBTQ+ — especially transgender — CrossFitters.

Early this June, CrossFit fired former Chief Knowledge Officer Russell Berger after he said in a series of tweets that he believed LGBTQ+ Pride festivals are a “sin,” sparking national news coverage and outrage within the community of devoted athletes. Berger slammed the “intolerance of the LGBTQ ideology” while applauding an Indiana gym that had refused to host an OUTWOD-sponsored workout due to opposition from the gym’s conservative Christian owners.

To quell the controversy, Glassman was quick to fire Berger and to tweet that he is “crazy proud of the gay community in CrossFit.” But while Glassman dismissed Berger as a “zealot” in a June 7 Buzzfeed interview, members of the fitness community capitalized on the moment to highlight CrossFit’s exclusion of transgender athletes.

LGBTQ+ athletes and advocates have vocally opposed the transgender policy at the CrossFit Games since 2014, when CrossFitter Chloie Jonsson filed a $2.5 million discrimination lawsuit after being unwillingly outed as trans by a gym member — and was subsequently informed that she would have to compete in the men’s division, despite having medically transitioned a decade earlier.

In response to the lawsuit, CrossFit doubled down on its policy that transgender athletes must compete in the games in the division of their sex assigned at birth rather than their post-transition gender. CrossFit attorney Dale Saran sent a scathing letter to Jonsson’s attorney Waukeen McCoy, referring to her as male and “trans-gendered,” and said she and her attorney lacked “understanding...of fundamental biology.”

"Our decision has nothing to do with 'ignorance' or being bigots — it has to do with a very real understanding of the human genome, of fundamental biology, that you are either intentionally ignoring or missed in high school," Saran wrote.

On Friday morning, ahead of Glassman’s official announcement, Jonsson was informed through the community that the policy would finally change. She says she cried tears of happiness and relief when she heard, and was “one hundred percent ecstatic.”

“It just feels now that what I did had a purpose,” says Jonsson. “That there’s some resolution, even though it’s many years later. It feels like a little bit of closure.”

Jonsson can’t speak about her lawsuit due to a settlement, but she does recall how painful it was to be “scrutinized from every angle,” and subject to transphobic comments, as a result of the attention around the case.

“The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women,” wrote Saran in the 2014 letter responding to Jonsson’s lawsuit. “That Chloie may have felt herself emotionally, and very conscientiously, to be a woman in her heart, and that she ultimately underwent the legal and other surgical procedures to carry that out, cannot change that reality.”

Saran currently serves on the CrossFit Board of Directors, and is the General Manager of CrossFit China, according to his LinkedIn page.

“I always loved CrossFit so much for how inclusive it felt,” Jonsson says. “So when this all happened four years ago, it felt so divided. And now I’m hoping that it can all go back together again. I want it to feel like everyone is included, and everyone has the same opportunity.”

The lawsuit, and the company’s dismissive response to Jonsson, resulted in a flurry of online petitions on sites like Change.org and MoveOn. Royse wrote a blog post defending Jonsson, and says corporate leaders reached out to her, expressing an interest in learning more.

“Every interaction I've had with them since has focused on a passionate commitment to empowered health for all people,” says Royse. “When I've spoken with Greg about this, he's crystal clear that CrossFit is for everybody. It's only logical, and super exciting that the CrossFit Games can be for everyone too.”

After Jonsson’s lawsuit made national headlines, many in the community called on the CrossFit Games to adopt a trans-inclusive policy allowing athletes to compete according to gender identity — similar to the policy adopted by the International Olympic Committee in November 2015.

Chris Mosier, a trans triathlete who became the first trans member of a U.S. National Team in 2015, is considered the impetus behind the policy change at the Olympics, which allows trans athletes to compete without requiring that they undergo gender reassignment surgery specifically. Instead, the world’s most prestigious sporting event — the Olympic Games — now requires that trans athletes undergo routine hormone testing to ensure their hormone levels are on par with cisgender athletes.

“As I have outlined on www.transathlete.com, many athletic governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, have created guidelines for allowing trans athletes to compete as their lived gender,” Mosier said in an email on Thursday, before the CrossFit policy change was announced. “It is ridiculous to think transgender athletes like myself could compete at the highest level of sports but are not allowed to compete in CrossFit.”

Although CrossFit’s official policy — until Friday, that is — mandated that trans athletes compete according to sex assigned at birth, some CrossFitters managed to slip past the rules.

Dillon King owns Flambeaux CrossFit in Metarie, Louisiana, an intentionally LGBTQ+ inclusive gym where the motto is “Be fit, be proud.” The transgender man says even though he’d registered for the open in 2014 as female — just prior to beginning his gender transition — he registered as male the next year. At the time, he says, he spoke to someone at CrossFit corporate who was understanding, and who made the gender change in his records once he supplied documentation of his transition. Still, King was surprised: “Maybe it was just the person working that day.”

“I’ll be honest, I’m far from being a games contender and I know that,” says King. He thinks that even though he was allowed to register as male for the open, he likely would not have passed the drug testing required for the regionals and the final games under the old rules.

“The synthetic testosterone I’m on would have been flagged, because it’s also used as a performance enhancer by cisgender men,” King says. “Even though my hormone levels are the same as an average male, this exact kind is one of the things they look for — even though I take such a small relative amount.”

Regardless of whether he’d ever place in the finals, King was excited to hear the news Friday: “I’m still shocked. Thinking about it gives you chills, just thinking about how far we’ve come.”

As for Jonsson, she doesn’t plan to register for the 2019 open. She’s recovering from some injuries, and says she doesn’t “have that competitiveness in me anymore.”

“I’m just way more excited for the rest of the trans community that has a chance to participate now,” says Jonsson. “The athletes just keep getting better and better, and stronger and faster. But at least there’s going to be a fair and open playing field now.”

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