Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
nytimes.com217 points by RestlessMind 9 hours ago
217 points by RestlessMind 9 hours ago
https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/breaking-news/article/tran...
My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned. There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age. No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world. If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice. Competitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers. Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag. In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1. In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about. Well, in your example, carpentry isn't about winning or being the best, it's about creating a house to sell (or flip, where you could actually frame a better argument about doing the worst possible job the fastest). This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting) Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports. The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected. The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people. The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood. Assuming you have already procured food and shelter, everything important in your life is symbolic. Unfortunately pointless, mostly symbolic things attract the most hysterical reactions from people. Five billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important. How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way. > and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks genetics. Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point. Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters. And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.) You might want to look at strength standards for women and men at the same weight. https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though. Doesn't really work, men are stronger than women at the same weight... And that's at the peak of fitness; lower level competitions with juniors or not optimallyfit people exaggerate the strength difference. Explain how you'd do basketball? Marathons? Maybe it isn't obvious, but weight isn't the main difference between men and women, nor is it necessarily an advantage in different sports. One solution is to have more categories. Then people can compete in their relevant categories. The solution is to develop relative skill rating systems like Elo. No, the solution is to exclude male advantage from the female competition via evidence-based analysis, as the IOC's new policy does. Grouping based on skill would achieve what you describe and then some. It would eliminate every kind of advantage, not just sex-based advantage. Sport does that already. The Olympics is the very top skill tier. So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics? Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group. If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough. >This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works. The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages. Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have. You can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about. Doping is a problem which offers offenders unfair advantages -the IOC combats that and looks like they are looking at other unfair advantages as well. It's a cat-and-mouse game. As of yet there is no perfect doping detector (it can have false positives) but just because it's imperfect doesn't mean they should ignore the advantage it offers these offenders. I'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious. > but would be sad to be banned. Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted. This kind of argument was not persuasive when Alito deployed it for his pedantic dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County [0, specifically p. 17], and it remains not persuasive now. [0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf If you were required to compete with people of a gender you do not identify with, even when event organisers recognise you as more fitting among the other group, that's a ban. There are trans masc people. Requiring them to compete with women is unfair and disrespectful. Requiring trans fem people to do so is the same. The rules around gender identification in regulated sports require proof of medical treatment yada yada to accept that people are 'trans enough', which is itself discriminatory. Trans people are a lot less distinct and separate from everyone else than you'd be led to think. There could be translympics just like there is paralympics. We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone? The classification is based on sex, expressly due to the material differences between the sexes. It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex. The material difference between people we bar and do not bar is not large enough to constitute a difference against competing with people we assign within the same sex group [1][2][3].
This might feel counterintuitive, but please consider that trans people who have medically transitioned are not as different from cis people of the same gender than you expect. Hormones do a lot.
[1] https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2026/01/22/bjsports-2025-...
[2]https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/ "This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind). It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts. Let’s reverse this. Why should physical competition be classified based on sociological conceptions around gender? I think the eye test is more reliable than the BMJ when it comes to international competition at the highest level. We’ve all seen the videos. [flagged] Is this happening? I believe there are ~10 trans ncaa athletes. We're just hunting them. Why? > The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights. > As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights. It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue? People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>. > We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision. You don't have to go back that far. And china: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_China I don't believe either of them have really stopped. If an unscrupulous regime wanted to get medals with that method they'd just give cis women testosterone during puberty. Nothing about the new trans-exclusionary standards would deter that. No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing. [flagged] No it's because in almost every sport, male sex development bestows significant performance advantages. This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark. The differences are marginal and mostly depend on the hormonal load present in each individual athlete. Males are not scrutinized anywhere near as closely, so they always get away with higher levels of anabolic steroids/hGH/rhEPO/random peptides than women would. Women are subject to constant, consistent testing, while male doping testing is basically an honor system (just don't be too obvious about it). > The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. It's not about the number of males in women's category. When one such player takes a spot in classification, then all women behind him are treated unfairly, because, were such trans player not classified, they would have one place upper. It follows that if takes one male player to win in a category[1] to treat ALL women unfairly. Centering this issue around trans people is incredibly tone deaf, because it's not about them, it's about all women who have right to their own category. [1] e.g. Imane Khelif, who admittet having SRY gene The fact that you think you need to put biological advantage in scare quotes tells me all I need to know about how delusional you are. Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development". The IOC policy is specifically that athletes need to test negative for the SRY gene to be eligible to compete in the female category. Imane Khelif won gold in the 2024 Summer Olympics women's boxing event, and has since admitted to having the SRY gene. So it isn't a non-issue. The page you link to doesn’t say that. “As of February 2026, Khelif had not described herself as intersex or as having a DSD.” That page is at the center of a massive debate on Wikipedia for that specific topic. Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this: > In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones." So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons. The debate now is down to technicalities. Technically the Wikipedia quote is correct in that Khelif has not described herself as intersex or having a DSD in those words but she has now admitted to having an SRY gene, which is the important part in the context of these competition rules. There is a leaked medical report showing that Khelif has internal testes: https://www.dw.com/en/algeria-condemns-baseless-imane-khelif... The Talk page has extensive debates on whether this can be mentioned, and the current "consensus" is that it can't be. The article is saying that there are fairly credible denials no? Just the Algerian government harrumphing. As GP says, Khelif herself has basically admitted to having the SRY gene in interviews, and has been notably tight-lipped about what medical tests caused her to be disqualified from women's boxing in the IBA. Has Khelif published it? Otherwise, I don't think anyone's very personal information about their body should be on HN (or anywhere). If it doesn't violate a guideline, it should. It’s incorrect to call this a “leaked medical report”. This is a document of unknown origin, widely shared by online grifters. So it's the headline that's inaccurate. It should read "bars women with the SRY gene" rather than "transgender." The ruling itself is much more nuanced and covers a lot of situations, including extremely rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) and their variations. The most recent controversies on this topic did not involve transgender athletes, but that's largely unknown or misunderstood by people who only know this topic by headlines and sound bites. The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes. The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance. [flagged] Not quite. Only male athletes who have male physiological advantage. A small subset of male athletes with specific disorders of sex development that preclude this advantage may still compete as female. I find the Khelif debacle incredibly damning for anti-trans militants since she apparently was born as a woman and has this weird thing where she has male characteristics. The anti-trans hysteria at that point in time was super off-putting for me since she did nothing wrong but merely existed. Before this I was like... meh, have sex separated sports and be done with it, but this made me re-evaluate my views in sex in that it's much more fluid than I gave it credit for. And this, by "nature", without human intervention. I don't see anyone ever going "oh, Michael Phelps has unfair advantages because of this crazy gene". Then, it's fair and square, just better genes life's not fair. No, suddenly the care now, eeeeveryone cares now about woman's sports because someone with a rare genetic disorder showed up in the spot light. Utterly bizzare for me. You have it backwards. Khelif is what changed everyone's mind and supported the ban on trans athletes. The fact this person who was visibly male and was failing genetic tests as a woman and then brutally beating up all the other women is exactly what transphobic activists had been preaching about. The fact this happened on the highest stage of sports basically forced the Olympics to change their mind. The guidelines for trans female athletes for the 2024 Paris Olympics involved transitioning before the age of 12/puberty to be eligible. There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym... Incidentally, many countries/states are working hard to make it impossible to transition that early. At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter. That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example. It is entirely clear that it can be the case, as proven by the existence of people "detransitioning". It is also entirely clear that there have been parents (usually mothers) who wanted to have a trans child because it was cool. There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population. Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent. This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use. So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive inflated media attention because their story are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives. Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens. Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind. It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades. > Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them. It almost feels like you're arguing definitions. > It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to. The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window. Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages. Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age. > but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows. You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know. I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
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