Transgender women athletes banned from Olympics under new IOC eligibility policy
Geneva: Transgender female athletes are now excluded from women’s competition at the Olympics after the IOC adopted a new eligibility policy in line with US President Donald Trump’s executive order on sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
“Eligibility for any women’s category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological women,” the International Olympic Committee said Thursday, which will be determined by a mandatory genetic test once in an athlete’s career. he said.
It’s unclear how many trans women have competed at the Olympic level. Although weightlifter Laurel Hubbard competed at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal, no women who transitioned from male birth participated in the 2024 Paris Summer Games.
The IOC said the eligibility policy, which will apply from the LA Olympics in July 2028, “protects fairness, security and integrity in the women’s category.”
Stating that access to sports is a human right in the Olympic Charter, the IOC said: “This is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programme.”
After the board meeting, International Olympic Committee publishes 10-page policy document This also limits medical conditions known as differences in gender development, or DSD, in female athletes such as two-time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya.
The IOC and its president, Kirsty Coventry, wanted a clear policy rather than continuing to make recommendations to sports governing bodies, which had previously drawn up their own rules.
“Even the smallest differences at the Olympic Games can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming, said in a statement. “So it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”
As the first woman to lead the Olympic body in its 132-year history, she prepared a review on “protecting the women’s category” as one of her first major decisions last June.
Women’s eligibility was a strong theme in the seven-candidate IOC selection, which followed excitement over women’s boxing in Paris last year, with Coventry’s main rivals promising a stronger policy to lead on the issue.
Ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, three top-level sports (athletics, swimming and cycling) excluded male adolescent transgender women. Semenya, who was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has high natural testosterone levels, won the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in her years-long legal battle that did not violate athletics rules.
The IOC document details research that found being born male provides physical advantages that a working group experts believe are protected.
“Males experience three major testosterone peaks: in utero, during mini-adolescence in infancy, and from puberty through adulthood,” the document states.
He added that this gives men “individual gender-based performance advantages in strength, power and/or endurance-based sports and activities.”
The IOC said its expert group agreed that the current gene test is “the most accurate and least invasive method currently available.” It screened for the “SRY gene, a piece of DNA usually found on the Y chromosome that initiates male sex development in the womb and indicates the presence of testicles/testicles.”
Still, mandatory gender screening currently carried out by the governing bodies of athletics, skiing and boxing is likely to be criticized by human rights experts and activist groups.
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, one of two female boxing gold medalists at the center of the gender debate in Paris, has passed a gene test and can return to competition, the World Boxing governing body said last week.
In the US, President Trump signed the executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February last year and promised to deny visas to some athletes trying to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics. The order also threatened to “rescind all funding” for organizations that allow transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.
Within months, the U.S. Olympic body updated its guidance for national sports bodies, citing an obligation to follow the White House’s rules.
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