‘Fastest Girl in Connecticut’ Sues State to Keep Males From Competing in Female Sports

A high school track star in Connecticut is suing her state for allowing biological males to compete against her, which she says caused her to unfairly lose.

Self-dubbed the “fastest girl in Connecticut,” Chelsea Mitchell, who’s now 20, told the New York Post she and three other girls are suing the Connecticut Association of Schools and the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference in efforts to overturn policies allowing transgenders to compete against biological females.

“At the end of the day, this is just about fairness,” Mitchell said, adding, “This is about biology.”

“I wanted to give voice to my story and help other girls out there so that they wouldn’t have to experience this,” she said.

The Post explains Mitchell “lost more than 20 races over the course of her high school career” in no small part due to competing against transgenders.

Mitchell says after breaking two school records she felt she was on the right track to becoming a great runner, that is until she competed against boys pretending to be girls.

The Post has more details:

Chelsea realized her potential as a runner when she broke two school records in her first meet as a freshman at Canton High School in 2016.

“Since then I just kept going with it and got better and better,” she recalled. “Track is really just about hitting those long-term goals that you’ve set for yourself.”

For her, those goals were winning a state championship and going to college for track.

But in her first statewide competition, she was forced to compete against a transgender athlete — something she said she “had never really heard of” until it happened to her.

In that race, the trans competitor bumped her out of qualifying for the next round of competition.

“It was just obvious to everyone there that they had a huge advantage. Everyone could see it,” Mitchell said.

After that, Mitchell said she recalled races being dominated by two trans runners who invariably won races and pushed other girls out of qualifying positions.

By her sophomore year, she says, there were two transgender athletes regularly blowing biologically female track stars out of the water.

Mitchell raced against them in all four years of high school and in every major race she competed in.

“Just two athletes took so many opportunities away from biological females,” Mitchell told The Post. “Even though there were only two of them, they took 15 state championships away from other girls — and there were 85 girls that were directly impacted from them being in the races.”

Mitchell recalled it was hard to cope with the unfair losses, saying, “Having to lose four of them, time after time, and trying to pick yourself up and go back to the starting line again and again was really hard because you knew each time that there was no hope to win.”

As a junior she anonymously submitted a Title IX complaint to the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference fearing that revealing her identity could ruin her chances at getting into college.

However, by 2020 she along with fellow female athletes Selina Soule, 19, and Alanna Smith, 19, eventually sued the state to rescind the policy and “protect women’s sports.”

Mitchell’s case, which will be re-heard by New York City’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals after a previous court ruled against it, seeks among other things to “restore their record and the credit that they rightfully worked hard to earn,” according to her attorney Matt Sharp.

Looking back, Mitchell says it’s incredible high school female athletes are still fighting the same battle, but that it’s getting easier because more girls are starting to speak out.

“We were the first girls to speak out about this issue, but now there are so many more girls speaking out about their own experiences and standing up with us… The more of us there are, the easier it gets,” she said.