The International Olympic Committee announced Thursday that any athletes who do not pass a specific chromosome test will be banned from competition. This means that trans women will no longer be able to compete in the single largest showcase for women's sports in the world, and neither will any women who test positive for having the SRY gene. The implementation of this policy could lead to similar bans elsewhere in sports, as athletic organizations often take their cues from the global sports powerhouse. The new rules will kick in for the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The 10-page policy doesn't provide much detail on how and why the IOC, under the leadership Kirsty Coventry, the first female president in IOC history, reached its decision. The policy recaps a lot of closed-door bureaucracy with little explanation. Olympic leadership "conducted a broad-based review" of women's sports. That leadership decided it needed a "working group." The working group talked to a bunch of unnamed "specialists." And the working group reported back to the IOC, which came up with the ban. The New York Times did name one person involved in the decision-making: Dr. Jane Thornton, a former Olympic rower and the medical and scientific director for the IOC, but the same article said the analysis presented by Thornton "has not been made public."
So while the new policy makes many assertions—men have advantages over women in sports, all contact sports are more dangerous for women than men—there are few explanations given. No scientific papers are cited. No research is detailed. No citations or attribution can be found. There isn't even a hyperlink. Everything is stated as fact. This includes a statement that "genetic screening for sex does not create significant problems in practice," despite the entire history of gender testing creating problems in practice.
The new policy also ignores that its proposed solution—testing for the SRY gene—has been done before. It was abandoned by the IOC in 2004 because it didn't work. The policy does not explain why IOC leadership now considers SRY testing more reliable.
Also unaddressed in the IOC's announcement is how this policy represents a solution in search of a problem. As reported by the Associated Press: "It is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level. No woman who transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games, though weightlifter Laurel Hubbard did at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal."
The new policy in full is below, or you can read it by clicking here.
