Transgender women athletes will no longer be eligible for women’s events at the Olympic Games after the International Olympic Committee adopted a new eligibility policy that aligns with US President Donald Trump’s executive order on sport ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” the IOC said, with eligibility to be determined by a mandatory gene test taken once during an athlete’s career.
It remains unclear how many, if any, transgender women are currently competing at Olympic level. No woman who transitioned after being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics, although weightlifter Laurel Hubbard competed at the Tokyo Games in 2021 and did not win a medal.
The IOC said the policy, which will apply from July 2028, “protects fairness, safety and integrity in the female category”. The committee added: “It is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programs,” despite the Olympic Charter stating that access to sport is a human right.
Following an executive board meeting, the IOC released a 10-page policy document that also tightens rules affecting some female athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), including two time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya.
IOC president Kirsty Coventry has pushed for a single, clearer position rather than continuing to leave each sport’s governing body to set its own rules. “At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry said. “So, it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”
Before the Paris Games, several major sports already barred transgender women who had experienced male puberty, including athletics, swimming and cycling. Semenya, who was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has naturally high testosterone levels, previously won a European Court of Human Rights judgment in her legal challenge to athletics rules, though those rules were not overturned.
The IOC document argues that being born male provides physical advantages that experts believe are retained. “Males experience three significant testosterone peaks: In utero, in mini-puberty of infancy and beginning in adolescent puberty through adulthood,” it states. It says this can result in “individual sex-based performance advantages in sports and events that rely on strength, power and/or endurance.”
The IOC said its expert group agreed the gene test is “the most accurate and least intrusive method currently available.” It is designed to screen for “the SRY gene, a segment of DNA typically found on the Y chromosome that initiates male sex development in utero and indicates the presence of testes/testicles.”
Mandatory sex eligibility screening, already used in some sports including athletics, skiing and boxing, is expected to draw criticism from human rights experts and advocacy groups. In boxing, World Boxing said last week that Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, one of the athletes caught up in the Paris eligibility controversy, has passed her gene test and can return to competition.
In the US, Trump signed the executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February last year and pledged to deny visas to some athletes attempting to compete at the Los Angeles Olympics. The order also threatened to “rescind all funds” from organisations that allowed transgender athletes to compete in women’s sport. Within months, the US Olympic body updated its guidance to national sporting organisations, citing an obligation to comply with the White House.
