Woman Enough
Read by
Justine Eyre
Release:
03/26/2019
Runtime:
5h 59m
Quantity:
Kristen Worley’s story not only sheds light on women’s issues in international and Olympic sport systems, but illustrates the struggle and complexity of her experience becoming her authentic self. I not only feel better educated after reading Woman Enough, I feel a greater respect and empathy towards all individuals who have gone through a gender transition.
Silken Laumann, author of Unsinkable
A powerful and inspiring story of self-realization and legal victory that upends our basic assumptions about sexual identity.
In 1966, a male baby, Chris, was adopted by an upper-middle-class Toronto couple. From early childhood, Chris felt ill-at-ease as a boy and like an outsider in his conservative family. An obsession with sports--running, waterskiing and especially cycling--helped him survive what he would eventually understand to be a profound disconnect between his anatomical sexual identity and his gender identity. In his twenties, with the support of newfound friends and family and the medical community, Chris became Kristen.
Chris had been a world-class cyclist, and now Kristen wanted to compete for her country and herself in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She became the first athlete in the world to submit to the International Olympic Committee's gender verification process, the Stockholm Consensus. An all-male jury determined she fit their biological criteria--but the IOC ultimately objected to her use of testosterone supplements. They, and other sports bodies, regard them as performance enhancing, when in fact all transitioned female athletes need the hormone to stay healthy and to compete. So Kristen filed a complaint against the sports bodies standing in her way with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. And she won.
Woman Enough is the account of a human rights battle with global repercussions for the world of sport; it's a challenge to rethink fixed ideas about gender; and it's the extraordinary story of a boy who was rejected for who he wasn't, and who fought back until she found out who she is.
In 1966, a male baby, Chris, was adopted by an upper-middle-class Toronto couple. From early childhood, Chris felt ill-at-ease as a boy and like an outsider in his conservative family. An obsession with sports--running, waterskiing and especially cycling--helped him survive what he would eventually understand to be a profound disconnect between his anatomical sexual identity and his gender identity. In his twenties, with the support of newfound friends and family and the medical community, Chris became Kristen.
Chris had been a world-class cyclist, and now Kristen wanted to compete for her country and herself in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She became the first athlete in the world to submit to the International Olympic Committee's gender verification process, the Stockholm Consensus. An all-male jury determined she fit their biological criteria--but the IOC ultimately objected to her use of testosterone supplements. They, and other sports bodies, regard them as performance enhancing, when in fact all transitioned female athletes need the hormone to stay healthy and to compete. So Kristen filed a complaint against the sports bodies standing in her way with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. And she won.
Woman Enough is the account of a human rights battle with global repercussions for the world of sport; it's a challenge to rethink fixed ideas about gender; and it's the extraordinary story of a boy who was rejected for who he wasn't, and who fought back until she found out who she is.
Release:
2019-03-26
Runtime:
5h 59m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780735277670
Praise