IOC plans to ban trans women from Olympics due to scientific findings on advantages in competition.
The International Olympic Committee appears poised to ban all trans women from the Olympics after a scientific review concluded male athletes retain advantages over women.
The IOC’s guidance to Olympic sports has until now been that transgender women can compete with reduced testosterone levels but leaves it up to individual sports to decide. That is now set to change under its new president, Kirsty Coventry, who has promised to protect the female category.
The committee’s medical and scientific director, Dr Jane Thornton, last week presented to IOC members at a meeting in Lausanne the initial findings of a science-based review into the issues of transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) competing in female sport.
Sources said the presentation by Thornton, a Canadian former Olympic rower, stated that scientific evidence showed there were physical advantages to being born male that remained with athletes, including those who had taken treatment to reduce testosterone levels.
“It was a very scientific, factual and unemotional presentation which quite clearly laid out the evidence,” one source said. Another IOC insider said there had been hugely positive feedback from IOC members about the presentation.
If you’re wondering why this report refers to trans athletes and also to DSD athletes (differences of sexual development) the answer is Imane Khelif. Khelif is not trans in the sense that Khelif never claimed to be a man who transitioned to female. Instead Khelif (allegedly) has male genes but was raised as a girl because of a DSD.
Examples of trans women competing at the Olympics are very uncommon but one recent example was Laurel Hubbard, a weightlifter from New Zealand who appeared at the Tokyo Games in 2020 but did not win a medal.
