International sports activities leaders reached consensus on a brand new set of eligibility standards for transgender athletes in February.
Revealed On 18 Mar 2026
Greater than 80 human rights and sport advocacy teams have referred to as on the Worldwide Olympic Committee to desert reported plans to introduce common genetic intercourse testing for feminine athletes and impose a blanket ban on transgender and intersex rivals.
A joint assertion by the Sport & Rights Alliance (SRA), ILGA World, People of Sport and dozens of different teams warned that the measures that can reportedly be really helpful by the IOC’s Safety of the Feminine Class Working Group would set again gender fairness in sport.
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“A number of sources have stated the group has suggested the IOC to require all girls and woman athletes to endure genetic intercourse verification and to bar transgender and intersex athletes from competing in girls’s occasions. The IOC has not publicly confirmed the suggestions,” the assertion stated.
The IOC stated in a press release to Reuters on Wednesday that no selections have been made.
“The safety of the feminine class working group is constant its discussions on this subject and no selections have been taken but,” the IOC spokesperson stated. “Additional data might be supplied in the end.”
The IOC discontinued common intercourse testing after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
It has lengthy declined to use any common rule on transgender participation within the Olympics and in 2021 instructed worldwide federations to give you their very own pointers.
A number of main federations, together with athletics, swimming and rugby union, have since barred athletes who’ve gone by way of male puberty from competing within the girls’s class.
The SRA’s govt director Andrea Florence stated intercourse testing and a blanket ban coverage could be a “catastrophic erosion of girls’s rights and security”.
“Gender policing and exclusion harms all girls and ladies, and undermines the very dignity and equity the IOC claims to uphold,” she added.
Jon Pike, an English tutorial within the discipline of the philosophy of sport and advocate for the safety of the feminine class, stated the letter was “laughable, determined, and foolish”.
“[The working group] received’t suggest a ban in any respect, it proposes to exclude males from the feminine class,” Pike wrote on social media platform X.
“This [letter] was predictable, and is, in a method, encouraging. Nothing is mounted, however I’m optimistic due to the pessimism of this group.”
Worldwide our bodies, together with the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Ladies and the World Medical Affiliation, have condemned intercourse testing and associated interventions as discriminatory and dangerous.
It “violates girls’s and ladies’ privateness”, and exposes youngster athletes to safeguarding dangers, stated Payoshni Mitra, govt director of People of Sport.
Advocates additionally argued that banning transgender and intersex athletes ignores obstacles these athletes face, together with harassment, restricted entry to sport and different structural disadvantages.
“Sport needs to be a spot of belonging,” stated ILGA World’s Government Director Julia Ehrt.
The teams stated the reported proposals contradict the IOC’s personal Framework on Equity, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination, the steerage doc which put the onus on federations to repair their very own guidelines.
“I ought to hope that the proposals contradict the 2021 Framework doc, as a result of that is without doubt one of the most confused – to place it kindly – coverage statements I’ve ever learn,” added Professor Pike.
“It claimed, you could recall, that there was ‘no presumed benefit’ of males over females [in sport].”
World Athletics is amongst sporting organisations which have already adopted gender testing, introducing a one-off SRY (sex-determining, Area Y) gene check obtained by a cheek swab for all feminine athletes forward of final 12 months’s World Championships in Tokyo.
