D The backpedaling is complete. It had been studied for nine months. On Thursday Kirsty Coventry, the president of the International Olympic Committee, was able to present it for the first time. From now on, as she announced, women must once again undergo a gender test. These tests had been mandatory in the 1960s, before the IOC deemed them outdated and abolished them in the late 1990s.
Initially, medical professionals still looked, but going forward, a one-time saliva test would determine who is really a woman. People with intersex traits and a Y chromosome should already be barred from competing at the next Summer Olympic Games in 2028, to the same extent as transgender female athletes.
No one should be surprised by the decision. Even the name of the working group that Kirsty Coventry set up a few months after her election last June foreshadowed the outcome: “Working Group on the Protection of the Female Category.” That sport is threatened by transgender women and intersex people, whose share in elite sport lies in the per‑thousand range, had already been a bold premise.
Presenting the exclusion of female athletes as the result of scientific findings gathered by the working group betrays a certain audacity. The exclusion is rather the result of a culture war that has reached sport and flared especially intensely at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Topic in the US election campaign
About the two boxers Imane Khelif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan, a great deal of hatred was directed at them at that time. They were called men, accused of beating women. The basis for this were dubious and nontransparent gender tests conducted by a corrupt and suspended world boxing federation, led by a friend of Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump fueled the debate for his campaign and taunted the eventual gold medalist Khelif. The IOC’s decision is, as the US president and culture-warrior Trump emphasized on Thursday, the result of his February decree, which threatened to strip funding from schools and universities should they allow transgender female athletes to participate in women’s competitions. Trump had also stated that, for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, no transgender athletes would be allowed to enter.
No matter how definitive culture warriors may seem, scientists do not view the matter in the same way. This is shown by the case of the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting. Additional medical documents submitted led the World Boxing Association to reconsider Lin Yu-ting’s case and register her as female despite the initial negative test. Intersex conditions and their implications for sport are a complex field that cannot be grasped by binary thinking.
What should be generally imaginable is how humiliating and detrimental such procedures can be for those affected. What price would be paid for the claimed greater fairness if winners in elite sport already benefit from particularly advantageous bodies compared with their competitors?
