IOC Bans Transgender Women From the Olympics and Orders DNA Tests to Back It Up​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The International Olympic Committee on Thursday adopted a policy barring transgender women from women’s events at the Olympics — a decision that came out of an executive board meeting in Geneva and goes into force at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. IOC President Kirsty Coventry had made it a stated priority since taking office last June.

“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” the committee said. A one-time SRY gene screening — a saliva, cheek swab or blood test — determines eligibility.

The policy faces opposition from more than 80 human rights and sports advocacy organizations, according to Outsports, over concerns ranging from privacy to whether the test actually measures what the IOC says it does.

The scientist who first identified the SRY gene is among the critics. Dr. Andrew Sinclair wrote in August 2025 that using SRY to establish biological sex “is wrong because all it tells you is whether or not the gene is present. It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced and, if so, whether it can be used by the body.”

The IOC abandoned sex testing in 1999 over similar concerns. It has not been used at the Olympic level since.

West Hollywood is paying attention. The City put up $1 million to fund Pride House Los Angeles, which plans to take over West Hollywood Park for 17 days during the 2028 Games. The venue would include a 6,000-capacity concert stage, a museum tracing 100 years of queer Olympic history and a secure village for LGBTQ+ Olympians.

Then-Mayor John Erickson is on record as a supporter. “As the first openly gay athlete at my college and now the Mayor of the City of West Hollywood, the centre of LGBTQ+ activism and a hub of culture, creativity, music, and inclusivity, I look forward to welcoming the world to experience Pride House in West Hollywood in 2028,” Erickson said.

The IOC’s new policy lands directly in that context.

How the Rule Was Built

The IOC launched the review in September 2024. A working group stood up a year later with members from five continents — specialists in sports science, endocrinology, transgender medicine, sports medicine, women’s health, ethics and law. The consultation included an online survey that drew more than 1,100 responses, plus one-on-one interviews with athletes the new rule would directly affect.

The group’s conclusion: male puberty produces physical advantages that persist. Healthy adult males carry 15 to 20 times more circulating testosterone than healthy adult females. The IOC document puts the male performance advantage at 10 to 12 percent in most running and swimming events, more than 20 percent in throwing and jumping, and greater than 100 percent in explosive power events such as weightlifting and combat sports.

The document states that testosterone suppression and gender-affirming hormone treatment do not eliminate that advantage.

One narrow exception exists. Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome — a condition in which the body cannot respond to testosterone despite having XY chromosomes — remain eligible for women’s events.

What Came Before

The current push traces in part to the 2022 NCAA championship won by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, according to Outsports. World Aquatics moved to ban transgender women from women’s elite competition within months. World Athletics followed in 2023. Boxing, triathlon, rugby and sailing have since adopted similar restrictions.

The IOC had watched from the sideline, leaving each sport’s federation to set its own rules. That ended Thursday.

At Paris in 2024, no transgender woman competed. Laurel Hubbard, a New Zealand weightlifter, was the last to do so — Tokyo 2021, no medal.

Paris produced its own controversy. Two women’s boxing gold medalists — Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan — faced eligibility questions after the International Boxing Association had previously disqualified them from a world championship. Both competed. Both won gold. The fallout pushed the IOC toward a single standard.

Caster Semenya is also affected. The two-time Olympic champion runner was assigned female at birth and has naturally elevated testosterone levels, classified under differences in sex development. She won a European Court of Human Rights judgment against track and field’s eligibility rules. Those rules were not overturned.

What Comes Next

Outsports reports the policy is likely to intensify pressure on other governing bodies. NCAA President Charlie Baker is expected to face renewed calls to add genetic testing to the transgender ban already in place at the collegiate level.

Three states — Maine, Washington and Colorado — have ballot measures coming on banning transgender student-athletes from women’s sports, with three more potentially joining. Washington’s measure calls specifically for IOC-style sex testing and genital exams on high school athletes.

Australian track and field Olympian and sociologist Madeleine Pape told the End of Sport Podcast last week that Coventry’s priority has been operational. “All this other stuff, human rights, sustainability, is kind of getting in the way,” Pape said. She added that Coventry “doesn’t want to have an event like a recurrence of what happened during the Paris Olympic Games where two boxers were subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.”

Coventry said Thursday that “even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat” at the Olympic level and that it “would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”

The policy was adopted under Rule 19.3.10 of the Olympic Charter.