The International Olympic Committee appears poised to ban all trans women from the Olympics after a scientific review concluded male athletes retain advantages over women.
The IOC’s guidance to Olympic sports has until now been that transgender women can compete with reduced testosterone levels but leaves it up to individual sports to decide. That is now set to change under its new president, Kirsty Coventry, who has promised to protect the female category.
The committee’s medical and scientific director, Dr Jane Thornton, last week presented to IOC members at a meeting in Lausanne the initial findings of a science-based review into the issues of transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) competing in female sport.
Sources said the presentation by Thornton, a Canadian former Olympic rower, stated that scientific evidence showed there were physical advantages to being born male that remained with athletes, including those who had taken treatment to reduce testosterone levels.
“It was a very scientific, factual and unemotional presentation which quite clearly laid out the evidence,” one source said. Another IOC insider said there had been hugely positive feedback from IOC members about the presentation.
If you’re wondering why this report refers to trans athletes and also to DSD athletes (differences of sexual development) the answer is Imane Khelif. Khelif is not trans in the sense that Khelif never claimed to be a man who transitioned to female. Instead Khelif (allegedly) has male genes but was raised as a girl because of a DSD.
Examples of trans women competing at the Olympics are very uncommon but one recent example was Laurel Hubbard, a weightlifter from New Zealand who appeared at the Tokyo Games in 2020 but did not win a medal.
The stricter new IOC policy could also include athletes with differences of sex development, known as DSD. The most high-profile example is Caster Semenya, who won 800m gold at London 2012 and Rio 2016.
Two boxers – Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting – won controversial gold medals at the Paris Olympics last year despite allegedly failing to meet gender eligibility criteria at the Boxing World Championships. Their sex has never been officially confirmed.
That may not seem like a big difference but it was enough that Snopes published an article titled “Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif Is Not a Trans Athlete.“
Anti-trans activists and social media pundits immediately painted this fight as an example of the alleged unfairness and danger of allowing trans women to fight against those assigned female at birth.
The author J.K. Rowling, for example, described the match on X as “a young female boxer” having “everything she’s worked and trained for snatched away because [the International Olympic Committee] allowed a male to get in the ring with her.”
You might notice that the JK Rowling tweet never described Khelif as trans. Snopes is effectively putting words in her mouth. There was a fine distinction here between trans and DSD and Snopes used it to try to create confusion about Khelif.
In any case, a genetic test of Khelif was leaked to the media over the summer shortly after World Boxing announced mandatory genetic testing of all athletes (a cheek swab).
Now, with Algeria’s Imane Khelif said to be on the verge of returning to competition, World Boxing has announced that Khelif, winner of a gold medal at the Paris Games, must take a chromosome test to prove eligibility – in its words, undergo “mandatory sex testing.”
Unless someone manipulates the evidence, the result is going to be crystal clear, déjà vu all over again, because in chromosome tests given amid the International Boxing Association’s 2022 and 2023 world championships, the boxer’s DNA showed XY markers with “male” karyotypes. The IOC knew this. And still it permitted Khelif, and Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei, whose tests turned up the same markers, to compete in Paris. Lin also won gold.
Khelif has not returned to boxing since the Paris Olympics. Khelif missed another competition in September while refusing to take the mandatory test.
Officially, the IOC hasn’t made the decision yet but it seems to be coming in the near future.
The International Olympic Committee says it is still weighing universal rules for transgender athletes at the Games, as a growing number of sports bodies move to tighten eligibility criteria in a shift in sentiment that the IOC appears increasingly willing to get on board with.
The IOC, under new president Kirsty Coventry, did a U-turn in June, deciding to take the lead in setting eligibility criteria for Olympic participation of transgender athletes, having previously handed responsibility to the individual sports federations leading to a confusing patchwork of different approaches.
The US Olympic Committee issued a statement in July which some news outlets reported as ban on trans athletes because it signaled compliance with President Trump’s executive order on trans athletes. But the forthcoming decision by the IOC would be much broader. Here’s a CBS News report on the US Olympic Committee’s decision from July.
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