The strange case of two mares that weren’t what they seemed
Occasionally, a story lands on the front page or drifts into your news feed, and you get that strange feeling that you’ve been here before. Not the details — they’re always different — but the questions underneath them. It’s like hearing an old song played in a new key. You find yourself momentarily paused, shaking your head a little and thinking, I know this story. I’ve seen it before, just in a place nobody would have expected.
That was my reaction when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. On June 30, by a 6-3 vote, the Court held that, when Congress used the word “sex” in Title IX back in 1972, it meant biological sex. As a result, states may restrict participation in girls’ and women’s sports to biological females.
It is one of those decisions that people will debate for years. Reasonable people already are.
What struck me wasn’t the politics of it. It was the strange feeling of déjà vu.
Because, in a very different world with a much smaller audience, harness racing wrestled with the same question nearly two decades ago.
Back in late 2008, I was the director of racing operations at Harrah’s Chester (now Harrah’s Philadelphia) when two mares that had raced and won there — Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine — suddenly found themselves at the center of a mystery.
Pennsylvania had recently begun an aggressive steroid testing program. When laboratory results showed elevated testosterone levels in both mares, the conclusion seemed almost automatic. Mares aren’t supposed to produce significant testosterone. If they tested positive, surely someone had administered anabolic steroids.
Except the people closest to the horses refused to accept that explanation.
The respective trainers insisted neither horse had ever been given steroids. Their veterinarians said the same thing. They weren’t making excuses; they genuinely believed something else was happening. And there was one curious detail that made everyone pause: Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine were related. Arizona Helen’s dam, Bret’s Excellence, was also the maternal grandam of Martha Maxine. That was … interesting.
So instead of assuming the tests told the whole story, the horses were sent to the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center.
The answer that came back surprised just about everyone.
Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine were diagnosed with a disorder of sex development known then as pseudohermaphroditism. Externally, they appeared to be mares. Internally, however, they possessed testes rather than ovaries. Their bodies naturally produced testosterone.
The positive tests had been real all along. They just hadn’t meant what everyone first thought they meant.
And suddenly the question wasn’t whether anyone had cheated. It was something far more complicated. Scientifically, intact male horses have higher testosterone levels and can develop greater muscle mass and strength than mares. How do you classify athletes when biology doesn’t fit neatly into the categories we’ve always used?
“The issue really was at the cellular chromosomal level, so we needed experts who could tell us what the science actually said.”
– Janet Terhune
The question landed almost immediately on the desk of the USTA’s Registration Committee.
Now what?
Would Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine continue racing against fillies and mares, as they always had? Or would biology, now better understood than before, require them to compete as males?
The committee didn’t spend months agonizing over it. Once the science was in, the decision wasn’t especially complicated. Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine would be reclassified as males.
Janet Terhune, today the executive director of the Harness Racing Museum & Hall of Fame, was the USTA’s registrar at the time and coordinated the committee’s work.
“It moved very quickly,” Terhune recalls, 17 years later. “The issue really was at the cellular chromosomal level, so we needed experts who could tell us what the science actually said. There wasn’t going to be any declaration until we had those results.
“The committee discussed the issue, and the vote was 11-6 in favor of reclassifying Arizona Helen as a male with the note ‘Arizona Helen has been determined to be a genetic male and is unsuitable for breeding purposes’ on the registration papers. Martha Maxine was treated the same way.
“The science essentially spoke for itself.”
And then something remarkable happened. Or, rather, it didn’t.
There were no lawsuits from the connections of either horse challenging the USTA’s decision. There were no owners of fillies or mares who had finished behind Arizona Helen or Martha Maxine demanding that old race results be rewritten. No one asked for purses to be redistributed. No one tried to relitigate history.
Arizona Helen and Martha Maxine kept racing. The only difference was that, from that point on, they competed in open company. The sport continued — ahem — apace.
The comparison, of course, between this matter and West Virginia v. B.P.J. is not apples-to-apples. Horses aren’t people, and people aren’t horses. (If they were, TSA security lines would be a lot more interesting.)
Horses have no concept of gender identity. They do not choose how they identify, nor do they possess the emotional, psychological or social dimensions that make human cases so complex. The issue before the USTA was purely biological and administrative. Veterinary evidence established that the horses were genetic males with internal testes. Once those facts became known, the USTA’s responsibility was not to weigh competing concepts of identity, but to determine the proper racing classification under its rules. Sports have never promised equal outcomes, but they have always tried to provide equal opportunities within clearly defined categories. What defines a fair and level playing field?
What stays with me, though, isn’t the outcome as much as the moment itself.
Years before cable news turned every disagreement into prime-time programming, before social media convinced us every question needed an immediate answer, before the Supreme Court weighed in, a group of USTA directors found themselves around a conference table, wrestling with a question that sounded simple until it wasn’t: What makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl? I doubt any of them imagined they were brushing against a conversation that would someday stretch far beyond a harness track, all the way into the classrooms, courtrooms and living rooms of America.
And that’s the thing. Harness racing will surprise you. Every now and then, this little sport tucked away at county fairs and half-mile tracks doesn’t just reflect the world.
It gets there first.
The views contained in this column are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the USTA.
This column appears in the September 2026 issue of Hoof Beats, the official magazine of the USTA. To learn more, or to become a subscriber to harness racing’s premier monthly publication, click here.