“At the end of the day, this is just about fairness,” Chelsea Mitchell told The Post. “This is about biology.”
The 20-year-old is fighting for the integrity of women’s sports after she lost more than 20 races over the course of her high school career — thanks to a Connecticut policy that allows transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports.
Now, Mitchell, who has declared herself “the fastest girl in Connecticut,” is challenging her state’s policy in court.
Mitchell is teaming up with fellow Connecticut residents Selina Soule, 20, Ashley Nicoletti, 19, and Alanna Smith, 19, who ran high school track in the state at the same time she did.
The four are suing the Connecticut Association of Schools and the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, seeking to overturn a policy that allows transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
“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.
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.
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.”
She herself lost two all-New England awards and four girls’ state championships as a consequence.
“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,” she said.
In her junior year, she filed a Title IX complaint against the state’s policies but remained anonymous for fear that exposure might hurt her college recruitment prospects.
But by senior year, she had “reached a breaking point” and came out of the shadows to file her lawsuit with Selina Soule and Alanna Smith.
“It was like, if I don’t speak up for myself, who else is going to speak up for me? As much as I wanted the coaches and administrators to speak up, at the end of the day, they weren’t.”
Today, Mitchell is running track as a college senior (she declined to disclose where she goes to school for privacy reasons), but she said she’ll never know how the dings to her record impacted her recruitment and scholarship prospects.
“When colleges looked at me, they didn’t see a winner. They saw a second- or third-place,” she said. “I wasn’t a first-place finisher, and I think that’s what really hurt me.”
On June 6, her argument will be reheard before the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City after a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit ruled against it in December.
“We’re hopeful that the court will declare that this Connecticut policy violates Title IX,” said Mitchell’s lawyer Matt Sharp of Alliance Defending Freedom. “We’re asking for the court to recognize the damage done to Chelsea and the other athletes, and to restore their record and the credit that they rightfully worked hard to earn.”
In their filing with the Second Circuit, the athletes request that the court order that their athletic records be updated to reflect the titles and rankings they would have earned had trans athletes not been competing against them.
The filing argues that “courts routinely recognize student athletes’ ongoing interest in vindicating the records they’ve earned.”
Mitchell said her legal battle is more important now than ever as stories like hers pop up around the country.
Just last week, two transgender athletes were no-shows at a California high school women’s preliminary track and field state championship, citing concern over public backlash to their recent races.
As a result, the two biological female runners who otherwise would have qualified were not able to compete.
“I filed this lawsuit back in 2020, and so I think it’s sad that this is still happening,” Mitchell said.
But, as her legal battle stretches into its third year, she is holding out hope and watching a coalition build around her.
“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,” she said. “The more of us there are, the easier it gets.”
