Veronica Ivy

Veronica Ivy (born 1982), formerly Rachel McKinnon, is a Canadian competitive cyclist and transgender rights activist. She earned a bachelors of arts degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria and completed her PhD from University of Waterloo in Philosophy in 2012, with a thesis entitled "Reasonable Assertions: On Norms of Assertion and Why You Don't Need to Know What You're Talking About".

Ivy has said she first began thinking she might be transgender when she was thirteen, but took sixteen more years to "come to terms with it". She started transitioning near the time she was finishing her doctorate, and came out "two days after I defended my dissertation." She wrote to her students to tell them that she was transgender on 2 May 2012.

Ivy was an associate professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

Ivy's primary research focus is the philosophy of language. The majority of her published work is about the norms of the speech act of assertion, Vice, and Newsweek.

Athletic career

Prior to moving to the College of Charleston, Ivy played badminton. Lacking a strong badminton scene at Charleston, Ivy developed an interest in sport cycling. and the next day won the UCI Masters World Track Cycling Championship in the Women's Sprint 35–44 age bracket, becoming the first transgender world champion in track cycling.

Some in the sports world expressed their belief that her birth sex gave her an unfair advantage. American cyclist Jennifer Wagner, who finished third (bronze), said Ivy's birth sex gave her physiological advantages. The second-place (silver-medal) winner, Dutch athlete Caroline van Herrikhuyzen, supported Ivy. Ivy argued that there was no evidence that being born male gave an advantage in the race and that she had lost to Wagner in the past. British columnist Katie Hopkins wrote that the decision to allow Ivy to compete was evidence that "the world is gripped by a febrile madness". Tennis player Martina Navratilova said that allowing people born male to compete in women's sports was "insane" and "cheating". Ivy criticized Navrátilová's comments as transphobic.

Ivy cited one of the fundamental rules of the International Olympic Committee that the practice of sport is a human right. Some commentators felt that Ivy had an advantage because of her size and muscle mass. Ivy objected to this criticism: she must keep her testosterone level low as a prerequisite for her participation in sports competitions.

In response, she received a number of death threats, and was targeted on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. In December 2019, she wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about this experience. Ivy changed her name from Rachel McKinnon with an announcement on Twitter on December 4, 2019

Controversy

In August 2019, in relation to the death of American billionaire David Koch, Ivy tweeted that "it's okay to be happy, even celebrate, when bad people die".