The Olympics’ trans policy polices womanhood | Moira Donegan

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Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events. In addition to trans women athletes, cisgender women with conditions known as DSDs – differences in sexual development – will also be banned from competition. The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites. To comply with this new requirement, women athletes – but not male ones – will be made to submit to genetic testing, to determine whether their womanhood meets the committee’s standards. The rule will be in effect for the upcoming summer Olympics, scheduled to take place in Los Angeles in 2028.

The move comes as increased political and media attention to the issue of trans rights and visibility over the past years – along with pressure from the Trump administration – has led athletic federations to ban trans women from sports competitions, a demand that has largely not been made for transgender men in women’s or men’s sports. The vitriol and intensity of this controversy has been acute. Twenty-eight states ban trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity; last year, the NCAA announced a ban on trans athletes competing in women’s collegiate leagues.

The rapidity with which these bans were adopted, following Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025, can make it seem as if the outrage over trans athletes reflected a pressing issue in the lives of everyday people. In fact, the number of trans athletes in girls and women’s sports is vanishingly small. In 2022, Republican Utah governor Spencer Cox vetoed a bill that would have banned trans girls from scholastic sports, in part because the law would have applied to just one trans girl, the only trans student playing girls sports in the entire state. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few,” Cox wrote. (The law was later passed with a supermajority of the Utah state legislature, which overrode Cox’s veto.) Before the IOC’s announcement, a grand total of one openly trans woman had competed in Olympic history. Laurel Hubbard, a weightlifter, represented New Zealand at the 2020 games in Tokyo. She came in dead last.

Those who support the bans claim that testosterone, male puberty or male genetics confer an advantage in athletics, and that trans women must therefore be banned in order to preserve the integrity of women’s competitions. This sounds like the kind of argument someone could make without being unreasonably motivated by bigotry; the IOC, for instance, claims that its new ban is backed up by science and evidence. But the actual science of sex development, hormone therapy, and their impact on athletic performance turns out to be quite complicated, with a broad variation across both individual athletes and different sporting events. The science of how to ensure fairness and measure advantage in these contexts is “not settled at all”, said Eric Vilain, a University of California, Irvine, geneticist who advised the IOC on gender for more than a decade. This new insistence that a complicated scientific question is in fact a simple one – and that it is determinative and relevant only for women, and not for men – suggests that something other than a robust commitment to fairness is at play.

It is possible to approach the question of trans participation in sports in a way that respects the dignity and identity of trans athletes and grapples with this range of possibilities. But this is precisely the kind of nuance that broad bans like the IOC’s foreclose in favor of blanket policies – policies which are motivated by bigotry, not science, and which suggest both that a woman’s body can only be one very narrowly defined thing, and that trans women are not who they say they are.

In the meantime, the vast majority of those who will be excluded from competition under the new ban are cisgender women. Every athlete in every sport who wants to compete in the women’s category must now submit to a genetic test – sometimes a cheek swab, sometimes a vial of blood – that will “look for the presence of a gene proving they are women”, writes Reo Eleveth of the Bay Area-based outlet Coyote. Many cis women athletes – those who have female anatomy, were assigned female at birth, and who have lived their entire lives as girls and women – will be disqualified on the basis of organically occurring hormone differences. This will end these athletes’ careers prematurely and arbitrarily, crushing their dreams. It will keep people who have worked hard and disciplined themselves to excel from competing because their bodies vary in ways they did not choose, cannot control, and which would be only dubiously and distantly relevant were it not for ideological concerns about policing the category of “woman”.

But even for those women who are not disqualified by the new testing regime, the sex testing requirement for women is likely to result in harassment and hostility. Proponents of sex-testing claim, somewhat fancifully, that the new genetic surveillance regime that the IOC is applying to women athletes will eradicate suspicions and accusations. Instead, the requirement that women – and not men – have their sex monitored, tested and proven via invasive medical means legitimizes the distorted fantasy that men are trying to pass as women to win women’s sports competitions (why would they, one wonders, when female athletes are paid so much less?) and in fact validates a project of suspicion, accusation and interrogation against women whose bodies and lives are not strictly gender-conforming. Women who are too muscular, too masculine, too strong or simply too good at their chosen sport will now, inevitably, be subjected to accusations that they are men – either secretly concealing their assigned sex at birth, or insufficient as women and relegated to manhood in some more effervescent, essential way. Women who are not dainty, who are not weak, who are not reticent or passive or demure, will now be accused of being men. They will be hounded, smeared and degraded in ways that arise from transphobia but redound, finally, to more old-fashioned forms of homophobia and misogyny. And they will be subjected to all this in the name of a reductive and sexist idea that womanhood itself is defined by weakness. Sex testing will not eradicate this homophobic and misogynist harassment. It will only dignify it.

The category of who gets to be a woman has not frequently been a site of privilege. But it is becoming, in moves like the IOC’s, less of a dynamic identity and more of an armored fortress. With the boundaries of womanhood being more and more policed – and with more and more women being pushed out of it – one begins to wonder what these forces have planned for those they are trapping inside.