Olympics to Ban Men From Women’s sports

The IOC’s current policy is that individual sports should decide their own rules, leaving a mixture of approaches. Athletics and swimming ban transgender athletes while sports such as football permit transgender competitors as long as they have taken measures to reduce their testosterone levels.

Difference between transgender and DSD athletes

Laurel Hubbard, a weightlifter from New Zealand, became the first openly transgender to compete at the Olympics in 2021 but failed to record a successful lift in the women’s +87kg category.

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 800 metres 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.

According to World Athletics data, there have been 135 DSD finalists in elite female athletics competition this century.

In a presentation at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo this year, Dr Stephane Bermon, the head of health and science, estimated that 151.9 times more DSD athletes had made finals than the DSD incidence in the general population. World Athletics introduced mandatory sex testing ahead of this year’s World Championships, a move Bermon said was necessary because of an “over-representation” of DSD athletes among finalists.

Coventry was also part of the executive board that handled the controversy in Paris when Yu-Ting and Khelif won gold medals.

The IOC implemented “certificates of femininity” at the 1968 Mexico Games, but these chromosome-based tests were later deemed unscientific and unethical, leading to their removal before the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

In February, President Trump signed an executive order that prevents transgender athletes from competing in female categories. He said the order would include the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.