Valetina Petrillo has ramped up her war of words with JK Rowling by accusing the Harry Potter author of caring only about “the fact that I use the female toilet”.
The Paralympics’ first openly transgender athlete also mocked opponents of her using female-only changing rooms, revealing she had told them: “You do realise that I cannot even see?”
The participation of the visually-impaired Petrillo in the women’s T12 200m and 400m at this summer’s Games caused a major storm, climaxing in a bitter feud with Rowling.
Rowling, who has repeatedly spoken out about the participation of transgender women in female sport, used her X account last week to brand father-of-two Petrillo an “out and proud cheat”, prompting the latter to bite back by saying she had “never read Harry Potter”.
Petrillo has now launched a fresh attack on the author in an interview with The Times, saying: “JK Rowling is only concerned about the fact that I use the female toilet, but she doesn’t know anything about me.”
Rowling is far from the only opponent of Petrillo participating in women’s races and everything that comes with that.
The athlete’s demand to access female changing facilities at a race in her native Italy last year prompted complaints from women’s advocacy group RadFem Italia.
Upon being designated a separate changing room, the 51-year-old lashed out in a subsequent Facebook post, accusing detractors of being “on the same level as Hitler”.
Recalling the controversy in her latest interview, she said: “At the end of the competition, I said to the girls: ‘You do realise that I cannot even see?’”
Petrillo, who competed as a man until the age of 45, failed to reach the final of either event she entered at the Paralympics.
She ridiculed the idea that she and the likes of Laurel Hubbard, the New Zealand weightlifter the International Olympic Committee allowed to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, had transitioned “just so they could win”.
She said: “Since 2015, when the IOC opened the Olympics to transgender people, there has only been one person who competed, Laurel Hubbard. And there has only been one person that has participated at the Paralympics, me. So all of this fear that trans people will destroy the world [of women’s sport] actually does not exist.
“People said men would go to compete as women just so they could win, but that has not happened at all. It is just transphobia.”
She also laid bare her lifelong struggle with her gender identity in a macho culture in which she claimed it was more acceptable to join the Mafia than to be trans.
“I knew something was wrong on my first day of communion when I entered the church and I saw the other girls wearing their white dresses and I wanted to be with them,” she said.
“At the age of nine, I tried on my mum’s clothes for the first time. I used to put nail polish on, but I had an older cousin that was transgender and my uncle kicked her out of the house. I was afraid that would happen to me too, so I kept everything hidden inside. In those days in Naples, I always said it was better to be a Camorra than to be a woman.”
Recalling how she wrestled with whether to transition, Petrillo explained that she initially planned to take her “secret to the grave” but had found the effort required to cover it up too painful to cope with.
Petrillo also revealed the effects that hormone therapy had on her. Athletes who transition from male to female must undergo at least 12 months of testosterone-suppressing treatment, and maintain levels of less than 10 nanomoles of testosterone per litre of blood throughout that time period. The result, Petrillo said, is that she gained 10kg in weight in her first month of treatment, and that she lost 10 seconds on her 400m time and 2.5 seconds in the 200m, but added “it’s better to be a slow, happy woman than a fast, unhappy man”.
