The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag.
In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
It seems to me that a big part of the point of competitive spectator sports is to send, to the spectator, a message along the lines of "this could have been you". It is hard to argue that the ability to throw a 1kg+ discus exceptionally far is otherwise so useful that would justify all the expense of finding and showcasing the outlier. Therefore, the point of the competition stands and falls with whether the spectator buys this message.
When do spectators tend to believe in it? When should they? Arguably, there is a plethora of reasons why the median American spectator looking at a clip of Usain Bolt running could not in any meaningful sense have been him. Yet, somehow, the "could-have-been-me sense" that people are endowed with transcends these reasons and results in men commonly looking at him and getting some of that could-have-been-me sense that gives the sport meaning, and women looking at him and getting much less of it. To solve this, we maintain a separate women's category. The winner there is not as much of an outlier relative to the distribution of the whole population. Most likely, she is still every bit as dissimilar to the spectators as Usain Bolt is. Yet, the women watching, and the ones merely learning about this event happening through osmosis, get their heart warmed by the dubious sense that this could have been them, and perhaps encouraged to try harder and hold more hope for some other pursuit of their own, in a way that they never would have due to Usain Bolt. Would they or would they not get the feeling for a transwoman sprinter? How would we even measure this?
They're rare in everyday life, but this process selects for them.
And then they get attacked and misrepresented by people who claim they are protecting women.
Consider the Jordan Chiles / Ana Maria Barbosu dispute from the 2024 Paris Olympics. It's still going on and it wasn't even a gender issue.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-ch...
I'm not an athlete and I don't know how to solve the issue. Maybe the Olympic Comittee knows better. In the context of cycling, I have thought about mixing up all the athletes and then ranking them in as many cathegories as necessary. But even there, in the context of BMX racing for example, I don't know if it's such a good idea to have men compete against women and other non binary persons because there are faults and accidents happening.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.
How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people.
The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.
Just about anything competitive is discriminatory. People are disadvantaged by genetics, disability/health issues, age, wealth inequality, and more.
But as a society we love competitive activities, so the best we can do is come up with rules to try and impose a reasonable amount of fairness.
This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic
The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes
The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks genetics.
https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards
Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though.
And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)
And that's at the peak of fitness; lower level competitions with juniors or not optimallyfit people exaggerate the strength difference.
And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.
Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?
Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.
If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.
But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:
Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.
Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.
similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works.
The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.
Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.
Wouldn't we expect AMAB to consistently win #1 and #3 (and obviously only AFAB can compete in #2), so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?
(I’m not stating a value judgment to the idea, just making sure we’re on the same page. And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people, or objections from some about women with high testosterone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... )
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
Except people clearly fucking do for some reason, and all that's going to happen is make life worse for women both cis and trans. Trans women will get excluded, and cis women who are "too good" or not fitting societal ideals of femininity will be accused of being trans. This is already happening to children.
> If you chose to identify as another sex
When did you choose to identify as the gender you were born with?
Literally nobody does this
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Furthermore I’d argue rarity is not really an argument here. A new doping could also initially be rare; it would still provide an unfair advantage.
Anecdotal evidence also is meaningless. I might lose a sprinting race to a trained woman, but that doesn’t mean male sprinters aren’t inherently better than female sprinters. They obviously and clearly are.
In any case, I’d personally have no issue with this in friendly matches. Also I think olympically speaking this would be a perfect case for the paralympics, who have experience with (arbitrarily) adjusting competitions for varying levels of bodily differences.
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany
As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. Surely we don't need to write rules for scenarios that aren't causing issues...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_China
I don't believe either of them have really stopped.
It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue?
People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>.
> We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s
We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.
No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing.
We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.
Being on feminine hormones pretty much removes any advantage if you've been on them for a while. There are typically rules about that for (at least) high level competitions. You can't just walk in and state your gender for that kind of thing.
If I was an unfair threat to some poor girl’s scholarship I’d be happy to find a solution like just not being on the leaderboard.
Instead I see laws, headlines, and debates on my favorite orange site about whether I should be allowed access to that infrastructure at all.
There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
The average MTF and the average female have wildly different hand sizes, among many other physical differences.
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this:
> In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones."
So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons.
The debate now is down to technicalities. Technically the Wikipedia quote is correct in that Khelif has not described herself as intersex or having a DSD in those words but she has now admitted to having an SRY gene, which is the important part in the context of these competition rules.
I don't see anyone ever going "oh, Michael Phelps has unfair advantages because of this crazy gene". Then, it's fair and square, just better genes life's not fair. No, suddenly the care now, eeeeveryone cares now about woman's sports because someone with a rare genetic disorder showed up in the spot light. Utterly bizzare for me.
There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym...
I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.
Really, what it is is being dominated by Testosterone. Also why we ban steroid use, and many other things along the same lines.
I would suggest that most Olympians - both female and male (whatever your definition) likely have a higher than normal amount of that hormone.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C7LcpRtrHiKJRoAEp/sticker-sh...
This goes beyond just affecting the Olympics, but setting an example for the world to follow and gives other organizations the cover and courage to follow while being able to deflect to simply setting the same standards of the Olympics.
The numbers tell the opposite story. Hierarchical and ranked sports enjoy displacement at every subsequent point from unfair entrants.
By the numbers, looking just at #1-3 spots of results list where tens of thousands of subsequent entries have been improperly displaced and claiming no impact is mathematically absurd. Contextually it ignorant of how competitive sports work at a scholastic or professional level, particularly for women. In 2026 based on the number, volume, and depth of rebuttals - at the international sporting level among others - that ignorance could readily be seen as willing.
LeBron James playing in your kids 16 and under basketball league, even if he promises to keep his team at or lower than 4th place, will be visible on the numbers and also peoples sentiments and desire to participate. Primates understand ‘fair’ viscerally (cucumber experiments).
The intersex argument based on the ratios you are presenting also breaks the other way. Those women, as female sports mature and expand (into combat sports especially), have been excluded from female competition for number of reasons. To your point, mostly this is about safety and then fairness, the trans angle is a minority even there with less scientific or sporting grounds for inclusion in competitive divisions.
[In olden days people who couldn’t make the team would participate and help with equipment, logistics, fundraising, training, or tutoring. These days you can run virtual competitions with GPS tracking, and there are a bunch of individual sports that are already tracked by large category spreadsheets, with plenty of room for more. I hope these bans help end the wasteful discussion and focus energies on collaboration and social inclusion.]
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
You create, as a form of entertainment for the masses, an event for peak athletes to display their talent...by quirk of biology that means men.
You create a women's category to let them have their own entertainment niche.
You have in fact segregated sports, by gender, or sex, or whatever you want to call it.
Now there exist individuals who challenge the boundaries of this segregation. What do?
The realpolitik answer would be to segregate these individuals into yet another niche.
Of course the question arises, how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless?
Considering the fact that most women's leagues barely get any mainstream attention as is, I think any further fragmentation of sports isn't going to be sustainable.
Also, ignoring the commercial and entertainment aspect of sports, it's just really hard to organize local leagues if they only serve a small portion of the population. Like, even in a large metropolitan area, how many transgender people are there? Of those, how many are interested in a particular sport? Of those, how many are interested enough to form a club?
Here in Pakistan, trans people have fought for (and gained) the right to NOT be part of the binary system; so here we have 'M' for men, 'W' for women and 'X' for trans people. (Homosexuality is still illegal, btw)
Or to make it more explicit, the tagline 'trans women are women' would be considered transphobic here, because women is considered to be synonymous with cis women, but they are trans, they earnt the right for that X in their sex column.
It's not like we are a bastion of trans rights here, so the issue of bathrooms ( they are required to have their own, iirc, but I doubt compliance is prevalent) and sports (haven't heard anything about trans people in sports) hasn't arisen yet.
I feel trans people in the west will have to come to the same realisation that their trans counterparts in the east have; the binary definition is not fit for purpose.
i.e., unless something fundamentally changes about how leagues are divided, there's going to be perceived unfairness in sports.
As long as things are unchanged, I think the real conversation boils down to who we prioritize: cis women or trans women.
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem.
Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
Anecdotally, I found as a deskjob, pilates and casual weight lifting trans woman, I lost dramatic amount of strength and muscle mass. 20 pounds now feels like 50 pounds did for myself pre-transition. I usually participate with women and the instructor/personal helps with modifications usually aimed at women just getting into fitness. Running joke amongst friends is how easily I am outperformed by my female friends at the gym/pilates/etc. However, that's since my body is low testosterone even for females, its checked twice a year because of it, normally It's once a year for most trans people. Other friends retained a lot of their strength, but are mechanics, so its really situational in my opinion, and its a super hard and interesting topic of research because of it
The closest controlled study we have on this topic is not in athletes but in U.S. military servicemembers and their standard fitness test: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36271916/
This isn't a good study for professional athletes training for competition because the fitness test is not analogous to professional competition. They only need to pass with a reasonable score but most are not competing for the top position like in the Olympics
The study found that
> transgender females' performance showed statistically significantly better performance than cisgender females until 2 years of GAHT in run times and 4 years in sit-up scores and remained superior in push-ups at the study's 4-year endpoint.
So of the 3 simple activities they tested their performance remained higher in one test (run times) until 2 years, another test (sit-ups) until 4 years, and remained higher at the end of the limited 4-year study period in the last test (push-ups).
This study was widely circulated as "proof" that hormone therapy erases sex-based gains after only 2 years, but that's not even an accurate read of the study. It's also not measuring athletes who are training or trying to compete.
Depending on the sport, hormone therapy cannot be expected to compensate for sex some important sex differences like physical structure. Male anatomy is simply different in ways that provide different types of leverage or angles (like Q Angle, which runners will talk about, or reach, which is important to boxers)
This is a very taboo topic to discuss and honestly I'm a little nervous to even comment about it here pseudonymously. The popular culture discussion of the topic is very different than the sports science discussion of the topic, where sex differences have long been accepted to be innate and irreversible, regardless of hormone therapy.
The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.
"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
Regularly. It's the competing women who are complaining, though. They feel it is unfair to compete with men.
[Edit] Currently -3 but no study referenced. Do people just not like the idea of providing evidence for their position? The women I've spoken to about this article cite men being the problem, whether its sexual harassment, or other sexist attitudes. Not one felt that trans participation in their sport of choice was in their top ten complaints.
Women complaining are voicing an opinion. Is this a good enough citation for the claim that women don't want to compete with men?
For this article to be relevant a spot for the Olympics of either gender has been taken by a trans athlete.
Which by conclusion means that a trans person outperformed the other gender.
Taking part in the Olympics is a difficult endeavor, for which you must qualify first.
Unfortunately, while the most equitable solution might be to create a separate category unique to trans individuals, there aren't enough trans athletes to make it feasible (yet?). It's rather sad that transitioning means a person can no longer compete in sports, but I'm not sure there's a better alternative.
> Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
Let's be a little science-focused, okay?
Do you have an example of this happening?
Why are all these innocent questioners asking for more evidence not familiar with the existence of the evidence they are asking for?
Considering they feel so strongly about it, they should already have seen all this.
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
Transition is a process. Potentially a long one without a clear point of completion. Which makes things more complicated.
No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages, when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender people of the same gender identity.
I mean, if you had a sport that isolated grip strength alone, trans women would have an advantage over cis women, but aside from rather contrived cases like that, they don't.
There's a reason the poster woman for the political movement around this in the US is a cisgender woman whose story of "unfair competition" is tying with a trans woman for fifth place behind four other cisgender women (and having to hold a sixth place trophy in photos, since there were not duplicates on hand for the same rank) in an intercollegiate swimming competition.
https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/un-study-...
Consider that wins in any professional competition sport carries with it sponsorships, advertising stints, apparal lines or similar. For many women athletes this is a considerable part of their lively hood - include prize money etc. in terms of notoriety that gets displaced by the current regulation.
You can't bring your formula1 to a touring car race just because you feel like it is a touring car.
Personally I think at the top level there should be an unlimited class. within the rules of the sport anyone can enter, then at various lower prestige levels participation is limited according to some parameter.
You can't enter a car into a boating competition. The question here is: if you take basic precautions to make it the same class of boat - a modified car turned into a boat should be a valid entry - provided the engine speed roughly matches.
People worry about cars on water here, not knowing that doesn't exist by definition: any car in water has been modified from a car to be a boat. you may recognize that it was once a car - but that's vestigial shell stuff. the inter-workings are a propeller - not a wheel.
For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables (and I don't mean to offend anyone).
Great thanks!
Separate from that there are still measurable differences between sexes that you can’t just magically change with a pill or surgery.
Ever seen pre-puberty kids play against each other? The girls and boys perform about the same.
Women are not excluded from golf tournaments, but the requirements to compete (primarily how far one hits the ball) are vastly different. Thats why both play the same golf course, just from different tee boxes.
If it's called "mixed league" the intention is clear
There are several sports where female physiology (skeletal structure, etc) has inherent advantages over male physiology where this may not be true, though.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6586948/
Also warning that article has images that may be inappropriate in a public setting. I didn't realize when I linked it.
Lol why does this not do it?
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
Being male is something you are born with.
Being male and competing against females is something you choose to do.
Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.
Anyway, some more links to spread the getting-downvoted love:
"Gender verification of female Olympic athletes" (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2002): https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/fulltext/2002/10000/gende...
> The shift to PCR-based techniques replaced one diagnostic genetic test with another but did not alleviate the problems. Positive results still stigmatized women with such conditions as androgen insensitivity, XY mosaicism, and 5-α-reductase deficiency. Both sex chromatin and SRY tests identify individuals with genetic anomalies that yield no competitive advantage. Therefore, finally in 1999, the IOC conditionally rescinded its 30-yr requirement for on-site gender screening of all women entered in female-only events at the Olympic Games, starting with Sydney in 2000. Rather, intervention and evaluation of individual athletes by appropriate medical personnel could be employed if there was any question about gender identity. This change has not been made permanent.
"World Athletics' mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know – I discovered the relevant gene in 1990" (Andrew Sinclair, 2025): https://www.mcri.edu.au/news/insights-and-opinions/world-ath...
> It is worth noting these tests are sensitive. If a male lab technician conducts the test he can inadvertently contaminate it with a single skin cell and produce a false positive SRY result.
> No guidance is given on how to conduct the test to reduce the risk of false results.
> Nor does World Athletics recognise the impacts a positive test result would have on a person, which can be more profound than exclusion from sport alone.
> There was no mention from World Athletics that appropriate genetic counselling should be provided, which is considered necessary prior to genetic testing and challenging to access in many lower- and middle-income countries.
> I, along with many other experts, persuaded the International Olympic Committee to drop the use of SRY for sex testing for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
> It is therefore very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this test back.
"Medical Examination for Health of All Athletes Replacing the Need for Gender Verification in International Sports" (JAMA, 1992): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/39507...
> Even if a molecular method could be devised that had a very small error rate, it would still just constitute a test for a nucleic acid sequence, not for sex or gender. Although one can test for the main candidate gene for male sex determination, SRY, it still holds that most XY women test positive and some XX males test negative for SRY. It is possible that there will never be a laboratory test that will adequately assess the sex of all individuals.
...
> (IAAF proposals held) that the purpose of gender verification is to prevent normal men from masquerading as women in women's comopetition was reinforced. Perhaps a genuine concern decades ago, this fear now seems to be a less pressing concern. One reason may be that routine drug testing now requires the voiding of urine be carefully watched by an official to make certain that urine from a given athlete actually comes from his or her urethra. Thus, athletes are already carefully watched in "doping stations". The likelihood of a male successfully masquerading as a female under such circumstances seems remote in current comparison.
is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender
none
it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
because there have been no previous cases of that either
However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test
Because biology is messy, not black and white, never "on" or "off", there is always overlap
They tried this before in 1996 and quickly ended it by 2000 because the result was a disaster
I'm staying out of the other issue as best I can, but as a non-American the resistance to this is just baffling, especially given the fact your recent elections have not exactly been widely trusted internally. Not that I'm saying there was much merit to the distrust, but it still makes sense to take steps to demonstrate it. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.
I’m honestly quite surprised that politicians don’t resolve this idiotic situation because it’s so damn simple, but I think it’s not solved because various state governments rely on small fees for revenue. And of course because there are many political situations in which making it difficult for specific opponent voters to vote is a campaign strategy.
Make fees for drivers licenses, birth certificates, and passports illegal, and ideally institute a system that makes these forms of identification automatic/stupidly easy to acquire and the whole issue is resolved. Now you can require voters to present them and you aren’t disenfranchising anyone.
not when you register to vote, every single time for the rest of your existance
it has no basis in logic
it's already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen
no-one trying to gain citizenship would risk being deported for voting in an election
every time conservative groups comb the voter rolls to try to find people who are not allowed to vote, not only do they find only like a couple people out of MILLIONS, they discover they never actually voted, it was a mistaken registration
out of billions of votes the past decade there were like seven people prosecuted
that's what's going on
what they are really trying to do is make it REALLY hard to vote, to make incredible fiction, so people stop voting
because if people stop voting, the people already in power keep that power
btw don't confuse this with showing an ID when you vote
that's already the law almost everywhere
what they want is you must have a passport (most people do not have one) or a birth certificate (most people have no idea where or how to get it) EVERY time you vote, not just register but EVERY time, like it changes somehow
see the nonsense now?
This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category... which is about the expected result of bigots trying to work backwards from the result they want headlines about.
This is news to me - which males are you talking about here?
> This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category...
It's really not, though. They found a marker they can test for, and have clearly defined exceptions.
They are also banning females from female sports as well with this ruling.
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.
The debate is really around how the handling of intersex and transgender athletes intersects with the original purpose of creating a separate category for women.
why
EDIT: this is exactly the kind of mistake that native speakers make, that ESL speakers don't.
There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma...
Sports categories never had anything to do with gender.
The other difference of sexual development are different sexes
It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
When people do submit to such testing, how commonly are the results other than they expected?
If it's just karyotype, are men with XX male syndrome (SRY gene without an Y chromosome) then allowed to participate in women's sports?
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
I'm just going to leave the headline of this article for you to consider while you answer:
"Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development"
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
You can make the decisions, but you can't make the audience (a much larger body of people, who overwhelmingly do not participate in the sport, at least not competitively) agree with (or care about) your decisions or reasoning.
The government doesn’t have to leave the sphere. It just has to manage the market. For instance, a specific amount of space in a park could be allocated to dynamically priced programming. This could be auctioned on an annual basis with teardown costs pre-allocated. Then you don’t have the argument over whether tennis or pickleball. It could be cricket or sepak takraw for all we know.
Proponents of various sports could group together to share the space. This is obviously far superior to the communist style committee allocation.
And obviously the government should not fund sports. Creating the environment where sports funding can occur by ensuring a framework for contracts and so on, yes. But actually deciding that baseball or football or basketball need to be played is patently ridiculous.
2) why do you think those who care about this don’t care about other issues?
3) this hardly makes the headlines, and wont stay there for long. It doesn’t get outsized attention
But alas. It's easier to spread hate than enact positive change.
For some people sports is their life and livelihood for that matter, this should be acknowledged.
I agree when it comes to spectators, at least in some sports.
But people do make a living, especially in poor countries, by being successful in sports.
i was a very below average cross country runner in high school, if not flat out poor. my times were still fast by female standards.
Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration.
It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]
> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)
We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0
If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.
I wish there was a good solution.
It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are.
s/W(..)/F$1/; # Women -> Female
I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.
Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.
> this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one.
> Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
Your linked article is also a massive category error. The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes, that’s how the rules should be set in a sport. The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser that couldn’t handle sharing 5th place with another woman and had to instead cry about it, only way to get in the news at 5th place, I suppose.
It's unfortunate because trans people are just as much people as cis people and deserve complete equality, but the reality of equality is that it can be very hard to do right.
Civil rights are hard because there are a lot of "rights" that can be applied to oppress others. Freedom of speech can absolutely be used to crush others, so how do you enact reasonable limits to prevent that without simultaneously causing the oppression that you aimed to prevent?
There are statutes in the US that put requirements on public school sports in relation to sex (sex is the quantifier used in Title IX). This to some effect limits men's sports in schools because of requirements for equality (typically represented as having an equal number of men's/women's sports). We consider this acceptable because otherwise there is the possibility that woman's sports are underrepresented because men's sports are more popular. In this case it's important to remember that there is limited funding.
The thing is, the class you are "bringing up" here is ~50% of the population. You're slightly limiting the other 50%, but it's barely of consequence. You are simply ensuring that to some extent funding isn't biased.
For trans women athletes, you are taking about a <1% subset of the population. This is not to say that minority populations don't matter (the United States is a great place because of minority populations). But if the majority of the women population say "no" to the <1%, then frankly at some point that's how the cookie crumbles. They still have the option of men's sports, they aren't restricted from competing there. They certainly are a huge gray area with the respect to physicality, even more so at younger ages when trans people are less likely to have transitioned (and more likely to be competing in a sport).
> The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes
Really? In this case are you limiting it to just Olympic athletes? Can we include Diamond League athletes? Collegiate? Local 5k runners?
What even defines an athlete? Do I have to enter a race every so many months to maintain "athlete" status? Is a local race fine or do I need to be in Boston? This is silly gatekeeping.
> The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser
Does this matter? It's also just "the biggest anti-trans athlete" that you know about. I'm sure there are some other women out there that are more hateful.
There are nuanced arguments to have about the trans women in sports situation, but the right is entirely against having them on completely bigoted basis, and then there is a very small subset of people who poison the well by turning good faith discussions about the topic into just hating the people having the discussions. At no point have I said anything disparaging about trans people or athletes. I'm just bringing up the reality of the situation being complicated, and as you called out: very unfortunate. It's unfortunate for trans men too, but nobody seems to complain about that one. :)
It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew.
Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though.
Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.
Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.
This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
For that matter why not restrict rich athletes who have access to training and equipment that poor athletes do not?
The point at where the line is drawn is entirely arbitrary. Gattaca vibes.
If we measured everyones strength, bone density, etc... in order to stop people from risking injury that would be one thing But basing it on your Chromosomes is lazy and inaccurate.
The point is that "fairness" being tied to whether your Cis or Trans is a hilarious hill to die on when we have advanced medical technology to actually test what we deem "fair".
I agree if we could just distill "here's your objective good-at-tennis score" for everybody and draw lines using those numbers, that makes sense. It feels unrealistic? I.e. we already don't do that - it doesn't necessarily feel like 100% an anti-trans thing (orthogonal obviously to the large amount of anti-trans sentiment that generally exists). Maybe Elo for everything?
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling because their chromosomes and hormones aren't within so called "normal levels"
In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.
That decision was made before her win.
> the International Shooting Union, at a meeting in April of 1992, and therefore ahead of the Games, elected to bar women from shooting against men in future events.
<https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/2753773/2021/08/05/in-tokyo...>
As for intersex individuals, put them in their own competitive class.
Indeed, but this is only a good argument for barring trans women from competing against females. You see, if trans athletes are so rare, only a very small number of people would be adversely affected by such a restriction, they can live with it.
On the other hand, the ban would calm down a large number of female athletes who are seriously disturbed by the mere possibility of competing against men, especially in contact sports, but not only.
Women are women, not only physically but also emotionally and mentally. Setting out on a crusade to change the thinking of millions of women is seriously dumb when a simple restriction, affecting 3 people total, can avoid it.
Now, think about making such a dumb idea a cornerstone of some party's political messaging... that can happen only if said party wants the other side to win.
What's the point of allowing trans women in women's sports anyway, especially at a top level? To affirm their identity? That throws an entire class of people, women, under the bus. Top performing males have an indisputable competitive advantage against top performing females in athletics.
I assume trans men are administered testosterone as part of their medical care, and that's already universally banned from competitive sports.
On the contrary, it would apply to trans men if it were about "culture war against trans people".
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
They also have advantages in traits that across the population correlate positively with some broadly-sports-relevant capacities (e.g., lean body mass, both absolutely and as a share of total body mass, lung volume), but the actual sports-relevant capacities these correlate with on a population level (strength, endurance, etc.) they don't have an advantage on. There are studies that have detailed some of the low-level reasons for this with regard to oxygen use and other factors.
Are they stronger than cis women?
I believe the logic is based on the fact that male athletes are stronger than female athletes.
Before trans issues were widespread in culture, intersex athletes were also scrutinized. Hell, I remember when people were questioning whether having a testicle removed gave Lance Armstrong an advantage...
Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it honestly, is great evidence for why this decision was the correct one.
The only reason why this was possible is because Hubbard is male.
It means that floor gymnastics is fair for *anyone* to compete in. None of this "wrong crotch shape" bullshit. Or intersex. Or trans. If you are good enough, you get in. If not, you dont.
And the whole trans argument would go away.
Means testing and gender means testing is a scourge. Time to be rid of it.
And since you have to "prove youre a woman", thats like having to prove a disability. Is that the message we want to send to all women? I dont want to send that.
Evidently, the IOC is choosing the onerous route of crotch and blood checks.
And about the "Women would win almost no sports competition.". Well, the thought of "get good" comes to mind. Supposedly, more competition is better for everyone.
I find it appalling that only cis women get to have that chance, while literally banning trans women (and some unconventional cis women too) because of the way they were born and brought up.
Like that is the definition of discrimination one way or another.
Good luck with that at any sport where strength and/or endurance matter most, just look at any given sport and check top male vs top female records. Running, climbing, hockey, football, rowing and so on and on.
Thats not really a fair sport in eyes of most folks. Unless thats your goal.
But, we should compare actual body parts that are relevant, for example I'm male but I'd not belong in male sports as my body is more feminine..
Still, it's not who you think you are that should decide, it's the body type so the competition can be more interesting as that is the point of sports anyway..
> of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.
In an event that is primarily focused on competitive fairness, what does inclusion have to do with it?
If playing sport is about fun, well-being, etc, then don't play in competitive events. You can't very well want to play in competitive events while complaining about competitive fairness.
Turning to some actual numbers - this 2024 survey tells us that only ~15% of respondents said that their children participate in club sports or independent training (note that the categories are not exclusive). The same survey also says that ~10% of respondants think that their child can compete in professional sports, or be a national level team member. Finally, a similar 10% say that the "only the best players should receive time in games" is a fair policy at your child's age and level.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Na...
I think the point of the article is to maybe highlight how large the gulf might be between an typical outsider (and looking at the numbers above... and reminding ourselves that only ~50% of American youth are involved in organized sports at all), someone who is somewhat "in the game", and those who are really playing it (that 10% from above).
If it were happening at an unprecedented level, I would totally understand the attention and such, but this is just painful to see.
The same can be applied to gender affirming care for trans youth, bathrooms, etc. It is always about the "may be hurt woman" than the actively being hurt real trans people.
Gosh I hate feeling like a second class citizen.
Literally no trans athletes winning anything. I think hacker news skews scientific so we can do the math, if say 1% of the athletes are trans we would expect them to win 1% of the medals in a fair contest. As it is, they don't even come anywhere close. There has not been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete, so clearly they do not have some kind of magical advantage, in fact (and common sense would make this pretty obvious) they seem to have quite a statistical disadvantage.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't. But that's not really relevant, because you have to remember segregation in sport has never been about competitive fairness, it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
It is why women were long banned from competitions, and then shortly after exclusion seemed to harsh for evolving attitudes, they were segregated from men. And it is why trans people are being excluded from competition now. It's why racial segregation in sport was a thing. When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual, not the real reason, so counterevidence is irrelevant.
Is your argument actually that women don't generally compete with men in sports because the sports don't want to embarrass the male athletes if they lose? If so, I suspect this is a bad faith argument, but if not, you can simply do a little searching to find that there is often quite a bit of difference between the performance of top tier male athletes and top tier female athletes. For example, no woman has ever run a 4 minute mile in competition and more than 2,000 men have and even about 30 high school boys have. I am sure you can find other examples.
Why did Lia Thomas go from being nowhere near winning in the male division to getting fifth in the women's?
When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual
If sports were not sex-segregated, most events would never be won by a woman. How is that a pretext?
https://shows.acast.com/realscienceofsport/episodes/whytrans...
If you want to see men dressed as women, watch "This is the Army" (1943), an American wartime musical comedy film that features actor Ronald Regan, and a lot of musical numbers performed by men in drag.
The more we protect women rights in sports, the narrower our definition of a woman gets
By 2030 would Olympic Committee ask woman that gain muscles too faster then the average woman not to participate? To make it "fair for real woman"?
While men are allowed the strongest competition and their unique builds are celebrated, woman are constantly limited by our genetics, hormone levels and chromosomes.
"Can't stray too far from an average it aren't fair for woman" is itself not fair for woman
