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By Peter Minde
The International Olympic Committee announced last month that it would ban trans persons from competing in women’s sports, beginning with the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It specifically targeted trans athletes competing as women. This was the sole topic of a virtual press conference held on March 26.
This is wrong on multiple levels.
According to president Kirsty Coventry, the IOC will institute swab testing for the SRY gene in all women competing in the Olympics. The SRY gene is sited on the Y chromosome. Any woman who has the SRY gene won’t be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games.
“Eligibility for the female category is to be determined in the first instance by SRY gene screening to detect the absence or presence of the SRY gene,” the IOC writes. “Based on scientific evidence, the IOC considers that the presence of the SRY gene is fixed throughout life and represents highly accurate evidence that an athlete has experienced male sex development.”
According to this paper in the National Library of Medicine, the SRY gene is the sole determinant of maleness. “The expression of Sry in the genital ridges typically results in their development into testes, whereas the absence or dysfunction of Sry leads to the development of ovaries. Sry is the only gene from the Y chromosome required for testis determination.”
Coventry asserted that the policy was based on science. Dr. Jane Thornton, a former Olympic rower who is IOC’s medical and scientific director, also was in this press conference. Dr. Thornton made sweeping, generalized statements about working groups and deep research within the IOC. She positioned the IOC as concerned about women’s safety, especially in contact sports. Dr. Thornton characterized the IOC’s swab test as non-invasive. However, neither Coventry nor Dr. Thornton cited specific scientific studies during the press conference.
If you do delve into the science, the results do not support the IOC’s recent actions. Tellingly, the IOC, along with multiple other international governing bodies, previously required SRY testing prior to competition. But the IOC ended this practice 27 years ago, in 1999, while the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, now World Athletics) had stopped nearly a decade earlier, in 1991.
“There are men with chromosomes like females and vice versa,” Arne Ljungqvist, then a member of the IOC medical commission, said around the turn of the century in explaining the IOC’s decision to move away from SRY testing. “If we screen for sex by using this test, women will be screened out and men will pass.”
“Using SRY to establish biological sex is wrong because all it tells you is whether or not the gene is present,” echoes Andrew Sinclair, the scientist who discovered the SRY gene, in an article published last August. (Sinclair’s opinion piece is titled, “World Athletics’ mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know — I discovered the relevant gene in 1990.”) “It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced and, if so, whether it can be used by the body.”
The IOC did not engage with this history in its recent press conference, nor explain why a test that this very organization had previously abandoned has apparently now been deemed reliable.
Embed from Getty ImagesBack to the actual people affected here: New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard, a trans woman, competed in weightlifting in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but didn’t medal. As you can see in this timeline of trans people competing at the elite level, none have won an Olympic medal. No woman who was born male competed at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
The IOC stressed that the tests apply specifically to Olympic competition, and they encouraged all persons to compete in local or grassroots youth sports programs. However, the IOC ban may embolden prejudiced youth league coaches and parents, even if comparable policies are not enacted at other levels of sport. In a high school girls’ flag football match in my backyard, a parent screamed and hurled invective at a player on the opposing team, wrongly believing that the person he targeted was transgender. The person whom he verbally attacked — who, again, was in high school — was traumatized. Will we see more of that behavior?
The swab test is not as invasive as the disgusting genitalia inspection laws that have been introduced in, or passed by, some state legislatures regarding scholastic sports. All the same, it’s invasive and degrading.
It’s also disturbing that the ban applies only to transgender women. Sexist much?
Nobody wakes up one morning saying, “I think I’ll switch to being trans,” or, “I think I’m going to be straight.” And absolutely no one decides, “If I transition, I might have a better chance at a gold medal.” Transgender people have been documented back to 5000 BCE. In NCAA sports, transgender people comprise fewer than 0.002% percent of the athletes, or 10 out of 500,000. At the Olympic level, only 0.001% of athletes identify as transgender.
The IOC needs to wake up, smell the coffee, and follow the lead of the United Nations. Transgender women aren’t stealing medals from cisgender women. Trans women are women.
[Read more: Opinion: Language Matters: The F.I.S. Statement on ‘Athlete Safety’ (by Annie McColgan, October 2025)]
IOC made the right decision. Women are Women, Men are Men, and Trans are Trans! No discrimination but if para can have their own division so can Trans. Let them compete under the same umbrella and not manipulate things to satisfy a woke agenda. Do the hard work. Create the Trans Olympic Division. Look at how hard the para people worked to achieve. Do the same trans people!