This summer at the Paris Olympics, sex testing policies will be in some ways even more extreme than in years past. Because the International Olympic Committee has elected not to enforce an overarching rule, the individual federations that govern Olympic sports are now left to their own devices. Though the I.O.C. has projected a goal of greater inclusion (notably in this statement, released in 2021, asserting its commitment to “fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination” in Olympic sport), few of the federations have listened. Some, like World Athletics, whose president, Sebastian Coe, recently reinforced his group’s commitment to the restrictive policies, have all but banned trans and intersex women from the women’s competitions. Often these women are allowed to compete only with men — not a realistic or desirable possibility.
Advocates of sex-testing policies cloak themselves in the guise of fairness; they exist, proponents claim, to exclude anyone with a perceived biological advantage in women’s sports. That group ranges from trans women, who are banned from most major sports even after undergoing a medical transition, to many cisgender and intersex women who have not undergone any medical transition but who have testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women. Yet little evidence supports the idea that these women have physical advantages, in strength or otherwise, over other women.
These sex testing policies also fail to acknowledge natural variations in human bodies. There’s no single way to cleave people into binary categories, but that hasn’t stopped sports officials from trying.
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