IOC fairness in women’s sports policy makes sports less fair for women

The new International Olympic Committee (IOC) policy targeting trans women at the Olympics will force high-level trans athletes out of competition. That is its simple stated intention. 

It also marks a massive rollback for fairness, equality and access in women’s sports overall. Thousands of female athletes around the world are going to have their access to high-level sport limited because of a witch hunt solve a problem that doesn’t exist. 

On Thursday, the IOC announced its long-awaited policy on trans women in Olympic sport. Not only are trans women now banned entirely from competing in women’s categories at the Olympics and other IOC events, but all female athletes are required to undergo genetic testing in order to be cleared to compete. The sweeping policy change comes after IOC president Kirsty Coventry promised a review to “protect the female category” when she took office last year. The policy will come into effect for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. 

Coventry claims the new policy, is about “fairness” for women athletes. “At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry said in a statement Thursday. “So, it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”

But make no mistake: the people who will be hurt most by this are the thousands of high-level athletes with dreams of competing professionally. At its core, anti-trans sports policy and legislation like this isn’t about protecting women’s rights, it’s about rolling them back. 

Five years ago, the IOC introduced a sweeping trans inclusion framework that was largely heralded by trans athletes and allies as a step in the right direction for moving away from testosterone-based testing for eligibility. That policy ultimately placed the responsibility of policing eligibility on individual sport associations, while concluding that sporting bodies should not “assume” that trans women have an inherent advantage over cis women or have to reduce their testosterone levels to compete.

Under the new policy unveiled Thursday, the IOC said the determination as to who is a woman in the eyes of the Olympics would be made on the basis of a one-time SRY gene screening. The SRY gene screening, usually administered via saliva, blood or cheek swab, and currently used by international track and field, boxing and swimming federations to regulate participation, tests for the presence of the sex determining region Y gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome. 

Andrew Sinclair, the researcher who discovered the SRY gene in 1990, has criticized the test’s use for policing sports eligibility. He was part of a team of researchers who encouraged the IRC to drop SRY testing back in 2000, and spoke out when it was reintroduced by World Athletics—the governing body for track and field—last year.

“World Athletics asserts the SRY gene is a reliable proxy for determining biological sex. But biological sex is much more complex, with chromosomal, gonadal (testis/ovary), hormonal and secondary sex characteristics all playing a role,” Sinclair wrote in The Conversation last summer. 

Sinclair also outlined a host of potential problems with SRY testing for sports eligibility, including lack of testing facilities in poor countries, the potential for cross-contamination from men who handle the samples and the social impacts that a positive test can have on female athletes. 

“The SRY gene should not be used to exclude women athletes from competition,” he concluded.

From South African sprinter Caster Semenya to the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, sex policing at the Olympics has a long and sordid history, with disproportionate negative impacts on racialized women, intersex athletes and women with disorders of sex development (DSD). These tests are often not only invasive, but their public results can lead the anti-trans mob to descend upon women who may not have even realized that they had some variation of intersex or DSD traits. We saw that clearly Chinese boxer Lin Yu-ting, who was only just cleared to return to competition following a failed gender test.  

Under the new IOC policy, it is unclear if the onus will be on individual athletes, countries or federations to solicit and pay for the now-mandatory SRY tests. Male athletes do not have to undergo any sort of equivalent test. 

So, yes, this is literally a new barrier that women will have to face to compete in sports and that men will not have to deal with. That alone shows how this policy isn’t really about protecting women in sports at all. This policy will subject women athletes to extra financial costs to participate in high-level sport compared to men. They will have their bodies placed under a microscope. And any woman who doesn’t visibly conform to arbitrary markers of womanhood will face intense social and medical scrutiny—all in the name of “fairness in women’s sports.” 

That doesn’t negate the impact this will have on trans women. Trans people and allies often tout how few trans women are competing at the professional level as evidence as to why these laws and policies are so ill-intentioned and misplaced. And it is remarkable that a legion of bad actors have sparked a moral panic around a perceived problem of “fairness” that literally doesn’t exist. 

The stats are clear: there are around 700,000 trans women in the United States, yet the U.S. Olympic team has never had a trans woman competitor. No major women’s professional sports league has featured a trans woman player. And even Lia Thomas, the collegiate swimmer who has advanced the careers of a slew of right-wing anti-trans pontificators, won just one championship before concluding her career. She remains the only trans woman to ever win a NCAA Division I national championship. There’s also only been one openly trans woman to compete at the Olympics in the past few decades, New Zealand weightlifer Laurel Hubbard in 2021, who placed last in her event.

If we’re thinking empirically, all of this evidence suggests that trans women actually have an inherent disadvantage compared to their cis peers in competitive sports. But it’s not that trans women are inherently worse athletes than cis women. It’s that institutional barriers like this IOC policy prevent them from getting into sports in the first place. Becoming an Olympic athlete takes years of preparation and training—it makes sense that trans women don’t reach those heights when the door is slammed in their faces as soon as they express interest in sports. 

Anti-trans policies are often not even about policing trans people. They are about policing who counts as a woman. 

And with a policy as sweeping as the IOC’s, “fairness in women’s sports” is actively making sports less fair for women. Because of this policy, it is now harder for women and girls—both cis and trans—to follow their Olympic dreams compared to their male counterparts. 

Anyone who calls themselves a feminist should name this for what it is: a massive blow to true fairness in women’s sports. Coventry and the like won’t, because this never was about fairness for women at all.