Participation subject to chromosomal testing: Kirsty Coventry welcomes President Trump’s demands. Scientists are perplexed, human rights and sports organizations protest
Participation in the women’s competitions at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will be subject to passing a chromosomal test. This was announced by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with a statement released after a meeting of the Executive Committee which approved what it defines “a new policy on the protection of the female category in Olympic sport”. Eligibility for women’s Olympic competitions ‘is now restricted to persons of female biological sex’ who are not carriers of the Sry geneexplained the IOC, effectively extending to all international federations what has already been applied in three disciplines, athletics, boxing and skiing. The Committee led by Kirsty Coventry changes the rules established in 2021, which allowed each federation to define its own policy, with new rules that they will come into force starting from the 2028 Games and will not have retroactive effect. It will be up to the national sports federations and bodies to organize the chromosomal tests, which will have to be carried out only once in the athlete’s life. In fact, the test should exclude both transgender athletes and many intersex athletes, who have genetic variations but are considered female from birth, as in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khélif.
Trump satisfied
The decision aligns significantly with US President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sportsa move that secures the Los Angeles Games organization from potential legal or political clashes with the host country. If on the one hand sporting “fairness” is protected, on the other the issue of inclusion is raised. For this reason, the standard specifies that these restrictions will not apply to grassroots or recreational sport, where access remains a fundamental human right enshrined in the Olympic Charter. The decision was born after the controversy during the Paris games, the new rule aims to avoid the regulatory chaos that previously reigned when each federation decided independently. But many scientists dispute the decision according to the theory that that biological sex is not determined only by chromosomesbut by a complex combination of hormones, anatomy and genetics, making a single genetic test insufficient and potentially discriminatory for intersex athletes or those with variations in sexual development. Beyond 80 human rights and sport organizations (including ILGA world and the Sport & Rights Alliance) have called on the IOC to abandon these plans, stressing that the return to universal chromosomal testing represents a decades-long step backwards for women’s rights and the dignity of athletes.
