‘Make It Count’ Is Our Summer SELF-Well Read Book Club Pick
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Each month, the SELF Well-Read Book Club highlights a timely, delightful, and crucial book on a subject that helps readers live better lives. So far, we’ve covered everything from the politics of running to the state of modern motherhood.
For most athletes on CeCé Telfer’s level, a national championship is just the beginning of a legendary career: a milestone in an Olympic trajectory, an invitation to dream bigger. But for Telfer, the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA title, this victory marked the beginning of a long, lonely battle. It’s also the catalyst point in her memoir—and our summer SELF Well-Read Book Club pick—Make It Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner.
Through her entire adolescence, Telfer understood herself as “a girl who’s forced to run with the boys.” Her story begins in Jamaica, situated within a culture, community, and family that she loves deeply—but who refuse to see her as a woman because of the body she was born into. She fell in love with track and field in fourth grade; from that point on, she writes, all she needed was “two legs, a pair of spikes, and the passion that’s burned in my heart since I was a child.” Telfer’s femininity was under constant attack growing up, but her athleticism became a shield against slurs, name calling, and threats of violence—from school bullies and family members alike.
Telfer didn’t run on a women’s team until her fifth year at Franklin Pierce University. Though she was already living as CeCé, using she/her pronouns, and on a hormone replacement therapy regimen, she ran on her school’s men’s track team but felt, as she writes, “trapped”: “I hate being stuck in a position where it feels like the deepest part of who I am is denied every time I do the thing I love. I need a way out.” But Telfer felt lost without her sport. She advocated for herself to her coach, and eventually learned that her existing hormone treatment already qualified her to compete with women in the NCAA. The ability to come to the track as her true self—a woman, running with other women—fueled Telfer’s dreams like never before and carried her to her historic championship title in 2019.
If you’ve been exposed to the cultural discourse around trans people in sports, you’re familiar with the tired argument that trans women have an unfair advantage. Telfer’s story doesn’t focus on discrediting that idea from a scientific POV (there’s plenty of existing evidence to do that, and besides, it’s not her job). Instead, it illuminates a different side of the conversation: the very real, often insurmountable disadvantages that trans athletes face. To name a few: Telfer writes that she experienced “loss of strength, endurance, and longer post-workout recovery times” from the HRT necessary for her hormone levels to meet competition standards. Constant online harassment created a need for unique security measures: She arrived at the NCAA Indoor National Championship days later than the other athletes, missing celebratory events and leaving her with little time to prepare or adjust to the Kansas climate. And even after her NCAA title, she writes that not one of the 500 elite coaches she contacted was willing to take her on as a client. While adversity stacks up against her, Telfer’s simple, driving motivation remains the same throughout her memoir: I just want to run.
Once you step into CeCé Tefler’s spikes, it’s impossible not to invest in her journey and share in her thrilling victories and crushing disappointments along the way. Whether or not you’re familiar with her story, everyone can take something valuable away from hearing “the human behind the headlines” tell it in her own words. But don’t just take our word for it: Check out an excerpt from Make It Count here, and be sure to grab your copy below.
‘Make It Count’ by CeCé Telfer
$30.00, Bookshop
Related:
Stop Excluding Trans Girls in the Name of ‘Protecting Women’s Sports’
How to Make Your Local Youth Sports Leagues More Welcoming to Trans Kids
This Queer Running Group Wants to Make the Sport More Inclusive
Originally Appeared on SELF
