Female powerlifter speaks out following trans athlete’s record-crushing lift: ‘It’s outrageous’

Following the record-breaking lift of a transgender athlete at the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s 2023 Western Canadian Championship on Sunday, one competitive female powerlifter said she is “disheartened” by the failure to protect women in sports.

Anne Andres, a 40-year-old biological male, competed in the squat, bench, and deadlift for a total score of 1,317 pounds.

“That’s lifting 460 pounds more than the second-place winner who was born a woman,” Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers on Friday.

(Video: Fox News)

“I keep using the word ‘disheartening’ over and over again,” powerlifter April Hutchinson told Earhardt. “It’s outrageous. It’s a big slap in the face to women that the federation, after all of this time and all these letters, even legal letters, have not stepped up and protected women in sports.”

Andres’ performance means he can now brag that he set a new Canadian women’s national record, as well as an unofficial women’s world record.

“Those records will never, ever be broken by a biological female,” Hutchinson said. “That deadlift, for example… that is something that top athletes who have been training for 10 years and more have not yet achieved. They’ve been busting their butt off trying to get that. And he literally just strolled in and did it. No problem.”

Many people don’t even realize Andres is a man, according to Hutchinson.

“Where he lives in Manitoba or BC area, the western area, there are some supporters. But at the same time, a lot of people, for example, at the competition on Sunday had no idea Anne was a man,” she said.

“The one woman on the side of the podium on Sunday had no idea the man was a man,” she continued. “Some people just kind of clap along. They don’t know what’s going on. Some people don’t even know what the word ‘transgender’ means. That’s why I called him a man. Because if you start throwing around words, people get confused. So you kind of have to call a spade a spade.”

The female athlete pointed to the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s (CPU) “Trans Inclusion” policy, which allows athletes “to participate in the gender with which they identify and not be subject to requirements for disclosure of personal information beyond those required of cisgender athletes.”

“Nor should there be any requirement for hormonal therapy or surgery,” the CPU stated.

According to Hutchinson, that means her boyfriend could wake up and decide to compete against her.

“So the Canadian powerlifting union, it’s the only powerlifting federation that has a trans inclusion policy. So there is no policy at all to protect women,” she said. “My boyfriend, who’s a big 6-foot-4 firefighter, could walk into a competition tomorrow, say he feels like a woman that day, go compete, crush records and the next day go back to being a man.”

If things don’t change, Hutchinson predicted, “Men are going to keep doing it to make a mockery of the federation.”

 

Melissa Fine

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