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Margherita Guzzi Vincenti became the first known Team USA Olympic athlete to sue a US sports governing body over its policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, when she filed a class-action lawsuit against USA Fencing on Wednesday.
Vincenti’s lawsuit came the same month that a trans athlete, Dina Yukich, sued USA Fencing for being barred from a women’s competition.
The organization is facing legal battles on both fronts in what has been a transformative year for gender policies in American sports after President Donald Trump signed the “Keeping Men’s Out of Women’s Sports” executive order in February, prompting the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) to amend its own athlete safety policy to comply with the order in July.
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Alicja Klasik of Team Poland and Margherita Guzzi Vincenti of Team United States compete during the Women’s Epee Team Table of 8 match between Team Poland and Team United States on day four of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Grand Palais on July 30, 2024 in Nanterre, France. (Andrzej Iwanczuk/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
But Vincenti is bringing his lawsuit based on a situation that occurred in January at the North America Cup in Missouri. She claims that USA Fencing is knowingly allowed biological males to compete in women’s divisions while advertising events as women-only, including in competitions involving athletes under the age of 18, while withholding that information from the female competitors.
“We discovered that transgender people are present at our events, and this is not putting women on an equal footing,” she told Pakinomist Digital. “USA Fencing doesn’t disclose the exact amount of transgender people in our sports. So we’re really left in the dark. We don’t know when we step on the line who we’re going to fence. So it could be a fencer named Mary Wilson, and then we find out right at the moment when you step on the line and you’re about to start your match that Mary Wilson is not a woman.”
Vincenti said she didn’t compete against a trans fencer herself at the January event, but she did face one at a previous North America Cup.
“I just had to move on, but this is not about me, how I feel about the one fight or more fights that I could have fenced with transgender people. My vote is here to take a stand to protect the next generation,” she said.
In April, female wrestler Stephanie Turner went viral for kneeling to protest a trans opponent at an event in Maryland. She received a black card and disqualification as punishment. Vincenti says the same dilemma regularly faces other female fencers when matched against a trans athlete.
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“Do I withdraw from competition, refuse to fence and therefore face a black card, elimination from competition? So, as you can see, USA Fencing puts us women in an impossible position without winning,” Vincenti said. “It’s been an ongoing thing, so we’ve kind of known that this has been an ongoing pattern of having contests always open to transgender people. The problem is, we don’t really know how many or when they’re going to show up, and it only takes one game to make it unfair.”
The 35-year-old Olympian has fenced since he was 7 and represented the Italian junior national team from 2005-09 before becoming an American 15 years ago.
And throughout her decades of competition, she has competed against men several times. She has no problem competing in co-ed matches against male competitors, but for her, it’s a whole other game that she needs to be prepared for.
“As long as you don’t enter a competition not knowing you might be fencing with a male… that’s perfectly fine… but what I don’t think is correct is to be forced to do it while you don’t realize you’re doing it,” she said.
“When I’m competing against a female vs. a male, there’s a difference in strategy and there’s a difference in physics, of course. When a man is stronger, the fight has to be very [more] physical. Whereas when you fence a woman, the fight is more technical, more tactical, it’s about trying to trick your opponent. It’s a whole different game.”
Data shows that most Americans oppose trans athletes in women’s and girls’ sports, and that trend appears to be global as well.
At the USOPC media summit this week, USOPC board chairman Gene Sykes called Trump’s executive order barring transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports “consistent with the international trend.”
“And fortunately, the ordinance designed to protect women’s sports in the United States is very much in line with the trend internationally,” Sykes said. “The expectation is that this is where world sport, international sport will go.”
Still, Vincenti is familiar with the opposition to this stance, and she respects the other side. Still, she believes their argument is too rooted in “emotions.”
“People get very emotional about this topic. Although I think we should take a step back and really look at it more from a scientific perspective and really see what the core issue is here. We’re not trying to exclude transgender people… it’s something that people really embrace and I think a lot of times people forget to look at the bigger picture,” she said.
Vincenti even has her own message for trans athletes who want to compete with women.
“My message is, we have to work together. We don’t want to be a disrupted family. We’re all in this, men, women, transgender, there’s no labeling here, it’s just fairness, it’s our game, we want honesty and we want justice,” she said.
“If we all decide to put aside our political views, our feelings, and we all just work together, we can all find the right space to make everyone thrive.”
Margherita Guzzi Vincenti poses for a portrait during the Team USA Fencing media day at the New York Athletic Club on May 21, 2024 in New York City. (Al Bello/Getty Images)
USA Fencing has released a statement to Pakinomist Digital responding to the lawsuit.
“USA Fencing is aware of the class action complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri on October 29, and we strongly dispute its allegations. We will pursue this matter through the legal process and have no further comment at this time,” the statement read.
