Massachusetts teen Grace Chapman* is a high school cross-country and track runner from a large family of athletes. Over the last four years, she has trained alongside her older sister Hope as they honed their signature events—the 100-meter sprint for Grace, and the 800-meter race for Hope.
At the Division IV State Champion Meet during the spring 2025 track season, however, Grace noticed an unusual competitor on the starting line—someone, she told IW Features, who was clearly male.
“I had seen him at other meets but hadn’t looked at him closely, so I hadn’t really been able to tell,” she said. “He does have long hair, but the closer you look, it’s really obvious that he’s not a biological woman.”
According to Grace, qualifying for the Division IV State Championship is no small feat for the women competing. Yet the male runner, who allegedly is Grace’s age and attends a nearby high school, was able to qualify for the prestigious event after less than one year of participating in cross-country and track.
“He started running just this year, and he got eighth in the 100-meter dash,” she said. “Even though he didn’t win, the fact that he was there at all and took a spot on the podium is a big deal.”
The top eight athletes at the State Championship have a high likelihood of advancing to a “Meet of Champions,” Grace explained, which means that the female runner in ninth place was potentially cheated out of a spot that day.
Since she did not place in the top eight this year, Grace assumed she had seen the last of the male runner for the season—until her sister Hope was forced to run against him at a meet a few weeks later.
“I was standing on the line for a hurdles event, which I’m not good at,” Hope said. “He started talking to me, but I didn’t have anything to say because my first thought was, ‘What are you doing here?’”
After getting over her initial shock, Hope said she was shocked again by his results. The male athlete placed in the top 30 out of 168 girls — after revealing to Hope that he “had never done hurdles before.”
“It’s bizarre, because he has terrible running form, which is usually a big deal in sprinting,” Grace added. “If you don’t have good form, you’re not going to have a good race. But since he’s male, he’ll do well anyways.”
Between the male athlete’s lack of skill, which girls like Grace and Hope have worked so hard to cultivate, and the over-the-top makeup and hairstyles that he reportedly wears to events, the sisters heartbreakingly said that it felt like they “were being made fun of.”
After the meet, Hope said, she discussed the situation privately with her teammates but felt “awkward” speaking with other teams due to the oppressive political climate in Massachusetts.
“Everybody knows that it’s happening, but nobody wants to say anything about it because people are in support of it,” she said. “Everybody’s kind of scared.”
According to Hope, the brave actions of young female athletes across the country who refuse to stand on podiums with males would not go over well in their school district.
“A girl who did that would probably get brutally bullied,” Hope said.
“And disqualified,” Grace added. “This is a brand new experience for a lot of us girls, to have something like that taken away.”
At their high school, they said, the vast majority of students are “fine” with transgender-identifying males competing in girls’ sports.
“Our Pride flag is bigger than our American flag,” Grace said. “I’m pretty sure we do more learning about being in support of these people than we do actual learning in the classroom sometimes.”
Despite their frustrating situation, Grace and Hope stay grounded by leaning into their family’s values.
“We were always told, ‘We love these people, but we don’t support this [transgender] lifestyle, ’” Grace said. “It’s crazy that this is actually happening to us.”
*The names of storytellers have been changed to protect their identities.
