Viral image misrepresents photo of transgender senior high school wrestler

A years-old image showing a guy pinning a lady opponent throughout a senior high school wrestling match has resurfaced on Facebook in recent several weeks, with commentary that produces a misleading impression of the items the photo depicts.

“They aren’t courageous transgender athletes,” the overlay text around the photo reads. “They’re just boys beating on women.”

The publish was shared to Facebook on May 23 and it was flagged included in Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (On our partnership with Facebook.)

The wrestler is Mack Beggs, who’s a transgender man. Beggs, who had been an 18-year-old student at Trinity Senior High School in Euless, Texas, at that time the photo was clicked, won the 2017 and 2018 Class 6A women condition wrestling titles, based on reporting at that time in the Dallas Morning News.

The written text around the image gives the look that Beggs competed against women to be able to gain an unfair advantage. That’s misleading.

The Texas organization that oversees scholastic athletics — the College Interscholastic League — stated at that time that Beggs wasn’t allowed to compete against other boys because his gender identity didn’t correspond using the sex documented on his birth record. He’d to compete in line with the sex he was assigned at birth, which meant wrestling against women.

The Morning News reported that Beggs was taking testosterone supplements to aid his transition. Exactly the same policy that prohibited Beggs from in competition with other boys also claims that athletes taking hormones for medical purposes don’t surrender their eligibility to compete.

Beggs was quoted in news tales as stating that he was prepared to compete against boys but tend to not achieve this due to the league policy.

“Boys wrestling is difficult. It’s really, very hard,” he told the Morning News in 2018 after his second consecutive condition title, “but I’ll get it done. Whether it means wrestling using the guys, I’ll get it done. It doesn’t invalidate the way i wrestle and just how my strategy is. Basically get beat, I recieve beat.”

A bill in Texas might have codified the College Interscholastic League policy into condition law and needed transgender student athletes to compete on teams in line with the sex these were assigned at birth. It unsuccessful to succeed in front of a legislative deadline in May.