What women's sports lost when Nikki Hiltz won

Nikki Hiltz ran a smart and smoking 1500 meter race at the Olympic Track & Field Trials, setting a huge PB of 3:55, becoming the Women’s National Champion at that distance, and sealing her spot on the U.S. Olympic team. It was without doubt one of the most thrilling, momentous achievements I’ve ever witnessed.

Hiltz’s Instagram has since been an orgy of love and joy. Hiltz wrote: “Yesterday afternoon in Eugene Oregon a childhood dream of mine came true. I’m not sure when this will fully sink in… All I know is today I’m waking up just so grateful for my people, overwhelmed by all the love and support, and filled with joy that I get to race people I deeply love and respect around a track for a living.” Hiltz thanks her “competitors.” She gives a shout to Faith Kipyegon, as the greatest miler of all time. Citiusmag wrote: “…[Nikki Hiltz] takes the win in the second fastest 1500m ever by an American.”

People. Competitors. Miler. American. National Champion. You know what descriptor was conspicuously absent, not only from Hiltz’s comments but from the torrent of media coverage? Women. Hiltz never once used the word woman to describe the class of humans she’s been racing against since middle school, the class of people who are responsible for her career, and, apparently thinking it would be transphobic or awkward to mention that, in fact, Hiltz is one of the women running in a women’s race, the media erases the inconvenient word woman from any event Hiltz is in. Hiltz expects the track community, broadcasters, media, and other women to respect her pronouns and her gender identity, but that’s a one-way street. She does not recognize their sex, their pronouns, the word woman, the reality that these women are also a community—of female athletes—and that they’ve worked hard to be recognized as such. By demanding everyone respect her otherness, her specialness, her pronouns, Hiltz erases the fact that these are women’s achievements.

When Nikki Hiltz won that epic race, it was an achievement for the trans community, the queer community, the gays, LGBT2QIA+. But all women suddenly lost any claim to women’s athletic achievements. The word woman disappeared. Elle St. Pierre? Just a sex-less fellow competitor in Hiltz’s trans nonbinary world.

For all the trans joy and love bombing from a person who has reached the absolute pinnacle of women’s sports with her female body, there’s a strong undercurrent of disrespect for women, schadenfreude, ungratefulness, dare I say, misogyny from the newly crowned Olympian.
 
In a sycophantic 2023 profile, Runner’s World wrote: “Where Hiltz once loved seeing other trans people on social media documenting their journeys with top surgery or hormone replacement therapy, those videos are now a point of sadness, knowing that it is not currently possible for them. ‘Going to the Olympics is such a dream of mine,’ Hiltz says. ‘But it’s also such a dream of mine to take testosterone or grow facial hair or have top surgery, and so I think sometimes I can really resent this sport.’

The besotted writer continued: “So many athletes struggle when they retire, not knowing who they are or what they are going to do with their time. But not Hiltz: ‘I know exactly what I’m gonna do. I can take testosterone.’”

Resent the sport? Are these the words of an icon of women’s sports who owes her Olympic berth, her entire career, to the fact that there was a girls’/women’s team? All this joy rings a little hollow if she’s only competing in the female category grudgingly, and can’t wait to reject all this woman shit (which btw, is quite important to the vast majority of female athletes who recognize their sex) so that she can lop off her breasts and take testosterone. And aside from resenting the sport for having the category that allowed her to succeed, Hiltz announces to her 89.1K followers, many of them young girls who are distressed about their bodies, that she can’t wait to mutilate her body, take dangerous hormones, and grow facial hair. Which, of course, is about as binary as you can get. It’s her “dream” to reject the reality of her sex, by which she’s found all this incredible love and joy and success, in favor of an uncertain future though one that will assuredly make her a lifelong patient performing a woman’s idea of manhood. If Hiltz wants to do that, fine, but touting these extreme ideas as the promised land to young girls is dangerous and misogynistic. I can’t think of another prominent female athlete who uses her platform to encourage young girls to hate their bodies, and their femaleness.

The Runner’s World writer further gushed: “… a self-identified king racing in the women’s division. There is joy in crossing the finish line as the first person doing it in a body like theirs.” Huh? Somehow this writer was convinced that Hiltz’s body was not female, something better, something male, a king. Apparently, if you want to be good at women’s sports, you have to be male-like. How very anti-woman and regressive. It may float Hiltz’s boat but it doesn’t do much for women.

After the Monaco Diamond League meet in 2023, Hiltz wrote on Instagram: “Plus how cool is it that in a country who seems to be fixated on hurting trans people, a very out, very proud trans non-binary athlete now holds their mile record.” Let’s try to imagine DII walk-on Dakotah Lindwurm, who surprised everyone but herself by making the Olympic marathon team, saying Take that haters. In every trip before the media, Hiltz never misses a chance to point out the ignorance and hate she thinks the world has for LGBTQ2IA+ people, and their victimhood. Grace is what women’s sports lost when Nikki Hiltz won.

And finally, at about the 44-minute mark in this Ali on the Run Show episode, Hiltz and her partner, Emma Gee, break down in tears over the crowd at Hayward Field booing trans-identified male Aayden Gallagher as he won the Oregon girls’ state championship at 200 meters and came second in the 400 meters. Hiltz said that she feels like a very “digestible trans person.” This is utterly disingenuous. She knows, every person with a pulse knows, why she has never gotten booed, and why Gallagher was booed, and to pretend otherwise is deeply insulting. Sprinkling this story of trauma liberally with the word “like,” Gee and Hiltz talked about how important it is to belong and feel safe, “like our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, like, any time those are messed with our bodies freak out. And naturally, it’s, like, really important that they do.” Again, with the internalized misogyny. My goodness, couldn’t a competent therapist have a field day with this. HILTZ AND GEE ARE WOMEN. YES, WOMEN NEED TO FEEL SAFE IN COMPETITION AND IN THE LOCKER ROOM. Neither of these women has ever had a male on their team, and don’t now, but are all teary eyed because everyone isn’t love bombing a boy taking girl’s opportunities. Not once in their tremulous rant did they even consider girls’ feelings—the unfairness, the discrimination, the knowledge that girls as a class were less important than this one boy. I don’t care how many cheesy grins Hiltz flashes, how many times she talks about her love and joy, those empty words can’t hide the ugly anti-woman misogyny she’s actually shilling by encouraging trans-identified men to compete in the female category. With a star like that women’s sports doesn’t need haters.

Now, I’d like to do a comparison of social media reaction to Hiltz and PWHL recruit Britta Curl. And I will say right now, I’d file this under Gigantic Unknowable Self-Hating Regression/Fails By Women Age 18 - 35.

As we’ve seen above, Hiltz erases the word woman from her own social media and refuses to describe her fellow female athletes as women. She openly talks about how she rejects being female and can’t wait to be rid of the female body that has brought her all this success. She uses her platform to promote the idea of body mutilation and dangerous male hormones, and she actively shills discrimination against girls and women in sports. Not doing a whole lot for women’s sports. Yet, with the exception of a few angry or confused trolls calling her a dude, responses on Hiltz’s Instagram are gushing, maybe excessively so: Not only do you belong, you elevate the sport, you held your head like a hero on a history book page, you are an inspiration, they are a phenomenal runner.

Britta Curl retweeted an ICONS post hailing the original meaning of Title IX—yay, women’s sports for women.

The backlash, as you can see from Nicole Haase’s post, was horrific. It was as if she’d said I hate women. Within a day, Curl posted a video apology for “hurt” (?) she’d caused to the LGBTQ community, literally groveling. It was not enough. The vitriol was unbelievable: How exactly are you going to be better, just stay off social media? Why not do charity / volunteer work this pride month for a local LGBTQ+ organization?, Non-specific and empty. Everyone is calling BS. You didn’t specifically apologize for anything. Might as well have said “I’m sorry you think that”, Made the dreadful mistake of looking at Britta Curls’ likes/replies. Reddit commenters suggested she shouldn’t be recruited, and that they would boycott games if she was. Bear in mind, all Curl did to garner this abuse was to like or comment on social media with a pro-women’s sports stance. That’s it. Nothing anti-trans. Nothing racist. (As an aside, let’s also think about the impact—and I mean that literally and figuratively—of having trans-identified men in professional women’s hockey. Hockey. 6’2”, 200 pounds of trans-identified male slamming a woman into the boards. I really can’t imagine anyone NOT suggesting that professional hockey should be sex segregated). As a postscript, Curl was signed by PWHL and the organization has not collapsed, but I’m still baffled by the social media reaction to a pro-woman statement.

I think every news outlet in the country has published a story about Hiltz, focused entirely on her pronouns, her trans nonbinaryness, her role as a pioneer and representative for the LGBTQ2IA+ community. Lost in the frenzy of genuflexion is her time in the 1500 meters—3:55. It’s a women’s American record. What’s her training like? Does she train with other women? What does that mean for other American women? How does that compare with other women she’ll be facing in Paris? When young girls see her running, is it inspirational to the vast majority who are not trans nonbinary? How does her win advance women’s sports? It’s hard to celebrate a female star who rejects being female.