Glen “Glenique” Frank, a biological male with gender dysphoria who ran in the London Marathon in the women’s category, said he’s willing to return the medal he inappropriately won in the wake of the backlash.
“If they want me to give my medal back, I’ll say, ‘OK, fine. No problem,’” he told the New York Post. “If they really think I’ve stolen the place [of a female runner], I don’t mind giving the medal back, because I’ll run again next year for charity.”
Did he realize the error of his ways? Is that why he’s suddenly willing to return the medal? Guess again. It turns out that he doesn’t actually regret what he did.
“But I don’t want to apologize, because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Frank explained. “They’re angry because they’re saying that one of 14,000 women behind me could have had my place. Really? I did [the race in] 4 hours 11 minutes. There’s lots of women that beat me.”
In recent months, Frank ran both the New York and Tokyo marathons as a man. Unlike Will “Lia” Thomas, who went from a mediocre athlete on the men’s swim team at UPenn to breaking records by switching to the women’s team, Frank is not an elite runner in either gender category. So switching from the men’s category to the women’s category didn’t significantly improve Frank’s competitive ranking, but it still generated backlash.
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“I get it … I’m not a woman, I don’t have a womb,” Frank continued. “But I didn’t compete as an elite, so I didn’t steal any money.”
I am not impressed by Frank’s gesture as it appears to be a response to negative attention. Although he has offered to return the medal, the fact remains that he competed in a women’s event despite being biologically male. Regardless of his gender identity, Frank had no business participating in a women’s competition, and his efforts to quell the backlash seem disingenuous to me.
Additionally, his behavior during the BBC interview, including shouting “girl power” and pretending to be a woman, comes across as the same narcissistic and attention-seeking type that we’ve seen from Dylan Mulvaney. The sad thing is that it worked. He’s a mediocre runner who’s gotten media attention solely for identifying as transgender—just like Mulvaney. Frank may have gotten attention and gained notoriety through his actions, but he’s learning the hard way that most people do not support or believe in transgender ideology.
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