On May 4, 14-year-old Lina Haaga crossed the finish line of the 400-meter dash in the Prep League Finals — a track championship for a small private-school league in southern California — milliseconds ahead of her older sister. Her sister had won every prior race. “When I crossed the finish line just milliseconds before her, I was as surprised as everyone else,” Haaga wrote. “My teammates rushed to me, cheering wildly. My sister wrapped me in a hug. My parents celebrated from the stands. It was a moment of joy.”
Days later, conservative media outlets and online commenters had turned that moment into a national flashpoint. Headlines Haaga cited included “Transgender heiress, 14, steals victory from her own SISTER at California race” and “Another biological male wins high school track championship.” Commenters called her a “freak” and a “monster.”
“I realized the conversation was more malevolent than I anticipated,” Haaga wrote. “Not because of what they said about my performance, but because of what they said about my character. This was not a healthy debate about fairness in sports; it was about my worth as a person.”
Haaga, who wrote the piece for the Guardian’s Comment is free section, said she has known she is a girl “for as long as I can remember,” adding that the certainty is “as instinctive as knowing I am right-handed.” She transitioned at age four. By sixth grade, her identity was public. “I grew used to the double takes, the questions, the quiet skepticism,” she wrote. “Most of it did not bother me. Curiosity, even when clumsy, is human.”
But the response to the May 4 race, she said, was different. “Countless adults absently unlocked their phones and devastated a 14 year old,” she wrote. “It didn’t matter that my sister couldn’t have been prouder or that the scientific evidence on trans women’s advantages is mixed.”
Haaga called for a reset in the way the public conversation is conducted. “The line between debate and dehumanization has not just been crossed — it’s been erased,” she wrote. “Opinion is being presented as fact. Disagreement is becoming ridicule. What masquerades as dialogue is amounting to something closer to public shaming.”
She directed readers to sources including the Trevor Project, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, and peer-reviewed research in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. “No child, transgender or cisgender, should be forced to endure the cruelty of uninformed adults,” she wrote.