Op-ed by Haika Mrema
Anne Andres, a 40-year-old biological male who identifies as a female, set a new women’s national record and unofficial world record at the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s 2023 Western Canadian Championship Sunday.
Andres’s squat, bench, and deadlift weight totaled 597.5 kilograms, which was 210 kilograms more than the runner-up SuJan Gill, who totaled 387.5 kilograms, according to SymPlmeet.
Following the event, Andres celebrated the “win” on Instagram and posted that he took “every masters record and two unofficial world masters records.” Andres also announced that he recently turned 40, putting him in the Masters 1 category.
“I don’t care about records. I care about being there with my friends,” he wrote.
In a resurfaced video, Andres mocks the women in his powerlifting category.
"Why is women's bench so bad?" he asked. "I mean, not compared to me. We all know I'm a tranny freak, so that doesn't count."
“And no, we’re not talking about Mackenzie Lee,” he continued. “She’s got little T-Rex arms, and she’s like 400 pounds of chest muscle apparently. I mean, standard bench in powerlifting competition for women. I literally don’t understand why it’s so bad.”
Riley Gaines, ex-swimmer and advocate for protecting women’s sports, responded to the resurfaced video, calling Andres’s record a “mediocre lift by a mediocre male powerlifter.”
“Being a woman or a female athlete doesn't mean we’re inferior or not capable of accomplishing incredible things, but it means we’re different to men,” she said. “And that’s exactly why the women’s sporting category was ever even created.”
“We deserve to be recognized and celebrated based off of those physical ceilings and our own uniqueness,” she added.
Andres’s act of stealing titles away from females in women’s sports is another example of how allowing men to compete in women’s sports completely diminishes the effort of females who have trained for years to compete.
Men and women have separate biological makeups, and no matter how many suppressants Andres takes, he will always have a physical advantage that women don’t.
I do not believe this was the idea feminists had when they were fighting to uplift and protect women’s spaces.