Make It Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner

CeCé Telfer summarizes her struggles in her eight-page prologue as the first transgender woman “to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) National Championships in the 400-meter hurdles” an achievement that qualifies her for the Olympic Trials in June 2019, although her actual participation in the Olympic Games is blocked by a combination of incompetence and prejudice.

Since that memorable time she has “been named personally in anti-trans legislation . . . honoured by top LGBTQ organizations . . . painted as a hero, a villain, as a symbol, as a representative for an issue that has taken center stage in the cultural wars. . . .”

It is a bit surprising that that neither Telfer, nor her many colleagues and coaches appear to have heard of the analogous triumphs and trials of the South African athlete, Caster Semenya, who won the 800 meters at the 2009 Athletics World Championships in spectacular time and immediately fell foul of the gender police at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) who pronounced Semenya a woman “but maybe not 100%.”

The IAAF and the International Olympics Committee (IOC) have long been preoccupied with the correct gender categorization of women athletes, conceding in 2015 that levels of testosterone are unreliable indicator of performance, though monitoring of testosterone levels still continues.

Semenya has won two Olympic Gold Medals though this has not affected the basic thinking of the Olympic and other athletic bodies concerned. She was present at the Paris Olympics this year as a coach. The 2024 Olympics saw controversy again around two transwomen athletes who won gold medals. (Caster Semenya’s mother famously said, “They can’t complain about her gender after she won.”)

Telfer’s early and main focus from her childhood in Jamaica was to live as the girl she has always known herself to be, first of all in relation to her mother, and then with school and college mates, teammates, and fellow athletes.

Her mother has her own demons to answer to calling her from Jamica, to Canada, to Texas, to New York and elsewhere searching for herself, changing jobs, houses, and often violent partners, and squatting with relations and friends—all of which creates massive disruption for Telfer in terms of friendships, schooling, and self-determination.

With regard to Telfer’s sexuality and gender identity, her mother is however clear and single-minded “If you ever turn out to be a faggot . . . I’m going to kill you . . . because I brought you into this world and can take you right back out.” She considers Telfer’s self- doubts about her identity to be not only anti-social but blasphemous.

Telfer’s mother never accepts her, and the relationship is eventually ended.

Her running prowess is however Telfer’s salvation, even if she is obliged to run on the boys’ team. And changing cities and schools and colleges so often, also provides opportunity to pilot her female identity, though it remains hidden at home. When she enters Franklin Pierce University she sheds her boy’s name, or “deadname” which we never hear, and becomes “CeCé” for the duration.

We learn very little about CeCé’s health regime, except for the insight that she has been asking her friends for any spare birth control pills because of the estrogen they contain. She starts her HRT regime almost incidentally when her condition is recognized by a staff member at a Planned Parenthood clinic where she has accompanied a friend.

This book adopts the familiar style of contemporary confessional memoirs of many short chapters which are easy to read, and easy to confuse!

Finally in Chapter 28 in her last year at Franklin Pierce University, CeCé summons the courage to ask to run with the girls and is immediately accepted by her beloved Coach Zem who says “the truth is we’ve always seen you as a female, CeCé. From day one. So, I’ve been waiting for this day. And would love to have you on the female track team.”

Telfer’s story ends on an upbeat note, despite the fact that her chance to participate in the Olympic Trials is destroyed by the combined incompetencies of the doctor submitting the required documentation of her treatment, and the confused bureaucracy and prejudices of the various bodies involved, USA Track and Field (USATF)and World Athletics to name but two.

As she wisely says, “When you are blazing a new trail, sometimes you get burned.”

Though as noted earlier, she is not blazing an entirely new trail and could perhaps have benefited from the examples of those who preceded her both in understanding her situation, and in her career.

Make It Count works well as an account of personal strivings, but could have been much more powerful had Telfer’s struggles been more clearly situated in their larger scientific and historical context.