Transgender women are increasingly likely to be banned from the female category across Olympic sport after another leading candidate to become International Olympic Committee president backed a new blanket policy.
Individual sports were able to set their own rules at last year’s Paris Games, prompting a patchwork of policies that prevented anyone who had gone through male puberty competing in sports such as athletics and swimming, but potentially eligible in women’s football.
There are also sport-by-sport Olympic rules regarding athletes with differences in sexual development, with athletics, led by Lord Coe, ruling that athletes must reduce their testosterone level to below 2.5 nanomoles per litre. That has meant that Caster Semenya, who won the 800 metres Olympic title in 2012 and 2016, is ineligible.
Coe, who is the president of World Athletics and a leading candidate to succeed Thomas Bach as president of the IOC, has long made it clear that he would bring similar clarity to gender policy across all Olympic sports.
Among the other leading candidates is Kirsty Coventry, a member of the IOC executive board since 2018, who now also supports an Olympic-wide policy similar to athletics or swimming.
“Protecting the female category and female sports is paramount – it’s a priority that we collectively come together,” said Coventry, who won seven Olympic medals, including two gold, in swimming.
“There is more and more scientific research. We are not having a conversation about how it is detrimental to men’s sport. That, in itself, says we need to protect women’s sport. It is very clear that transgender women are more able in the female category, and can take away opportunities that should be equal for women.”
Coventry was also part of the executive board that handled the huge Olympic controversy in Paris when Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif won gold after they were previously deemed ineligible for the female category by the International Boxing Association; a governing body that was subsequently stripped of the right to run the sport. Coventry said that “lessons are always going to be learnt – Paris is definitely one of those times”, but claimed that they could not have foreseen the specific controversy.
“I don’t believe that this is something in hindsight that we could have predicted, because these boxers had bouts against each other and there hadn’t been previous issues,” she said.
“When you have such a sensitive issue being put on the global stage you have to make sure that the athletes are being protected – that their rights are being heard – and that they are being protected on both sides.”
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