Sporting crises foretold
The awkward truth about “trans inclusion” that regulators need to heed
The furore surrounding women’s boxing at the Olympics should be a warning to every international federation. International Olympic Committee media briefings were dominated by questions about eligibility for boxing in the women’s category. Both the IOC spokesman and the IOC president declared, in effect, that no one really knew what a woman was.
But some sports do know. Athletics, aquatics, cycling and weightlifting have all had their Khelif moment, and acted to restore protections for their female category. Other sports should act now, rather than waiting until they are forced into a response by crisis and public humiliation.
Here are the crucial events that triggered change, sport by sport.
Athletics: Caster Semenya and the Rio 2016 women’s 800m podium
The 2016 Rio Olympics women’s 800m podium consisted of three male athletes, all with 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a rare disorder of sex development (DSD) that only affects male people. Caster Semenya of South Africa took gold; Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took silver; and Margaret Nayareira Wambui of Kenya took bronze. Semenya had already won two world championships and claimed gold in London 2012. The IAAF, now World Athletics, adopted a policy requiring male DSD athletes to suppress their testosterone for a range of events (400m to 1500m) where analysis had shown male athletes with DSDs had taken women’s medals.
World Athletics has so far prevailed in legal challenges brought by Semenya and Athletics South Africa. The Court of Arbitration for Sport said that the regulations were proportionate to maintain fairness for women since “Athletes with 5-ARD athletes are ‘biologically… the same in every relevant respect as male athletes without DSDs”.
The 2021 Tokyo Olympics 200m silver medal was won by Christine Mboma of Namibia, who also has a male DSD. Mboma had moved from the 400m to the 200m as it was outside the restricted events. World Athletics extended the restriction to all events in March 2023.
At the same time, World Athletics announced that the female category would be only for competitors born female. Trans-identifying males would not be permitted at all. Previously, they had been allowed to compete as women with testosterone suppression.
In response to questions from UK Athletics, the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Committee issued a statement that it is lawful to exclude all males, including those with a gender-recognition certificate, from female sport. UK Athletics announced that it was adopting the World Athletics policy with immediate effect. However, the rules have yet to be issued, and trans-identifying males continue to enter and compete in the women’s category in UK athletic events.
Weightlifting: Laurel Hubbard at the Tokyo Games, 2021
In 2017 trans-identifying male Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand won the women’s Masters world championship, an event for women over 35, and set a new heavyweight world record for women in his age group of 131 for Snatch and 149 for Clean and Jerk. This compared to just 68 for Snatch and 90 for Clean and Jerk from the woman who placed second at the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) Masters.
Laurel Hubbard took two gold medals at the 2019 Pacific Games.
In the Tokyo Olympics 2020, aged 43, Hubbard competed in the women’s category despite being 20 years older than the average female weightlifting Olympian. Although Hubbard did not win an Olympic medal, there was much press interest and controversy. In August 2023 the IWF announced a move to sex-based categories of male and female plus an “open gender” category. The female category excludes anyone who has gone through male puberty.
Swimming: Lia Thomas at the NCAAs, 2022
Trans-identifying male swimmer Lia Thomas won the 2022 women’s 500 yard NCAA championships.
In February 2022, Lia Thomas set new records in women’s championships at the Ivy League Championships and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship in the USA, having previously been ranked 65th in the same men’s event. This sudden dominance and Thomas’s potential to win Olympic selection sparked outrage. In June 2022 FINA, also known as World Aquatics, amended its policy so that anyone who had gone through male puberty would be ineligible to compete in the female category. In April 2023 Swim England, Scottish Swimming and Swim Wales adopted a sex-based policy for all licensed competitions. Thomas attempted to challenge World Aquatics policy in order to be able to compete in the female category, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in June 2024 that Thomas was ineligible to compete at elite level.
Cycling: Emily Bridges seeking national selection, 2022
Emily Bridges is second from the left in the podium photo. This was a good example of trans inclusion in the correct sex category – a trans-identifying male included in male competition.
Emily, formerly Zach, Bridges had set a national junior men’s record over 25 miles before identifying as trans and then competing in the female category. In March 2022, Bridges was seeking qualification to compete in the Welsh women’s cycling team at the Commonwealth Games. This was blocked after opposition from female athletes. In April 2022 British Cycling withdrew its transgender policy, which required a year’s testosterone suppression. After it consulted with the international body, Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), both extended the required period of testosterone suppression to two years at a lower level, rendering Bridges ineligible. In May 2023 British Cycling adopted female and open categories for competitions from the end of 2023. In July 2023 the UCI also adopted female and open categories.
Shore angling: boycott by England women, 2023
In 2018, trans-identifying male Becky Lee Birtwhistle Hodges was included in the England ladies sea shore angling team. In 2022 Hodges went as a team manager as a compromise, but sought team inclusion again the following year. In June 2023, half of the England ladies team quit in protest, meaning they could not defend their gold medal in the Home Nations Championships. By November 2023 the world federation, FIPS-M, and England’s Angling Trust had both amended their policies to be sex-based, preserving fairness and inclusion for females in a protected category alongside an open, universal category.
Golf: Hailey Davidson tournament win, 2024
In January 2024, trans-identifying male Hailey Davidson won the NXXT Women’s Classic golf tournament. Davidson came close to qualifying for the US Women’s Open.
In February 2024, the Arizona-based Cactus Tour reinstated a “female at birth” eligibility for the female category. In March 2024, NXXT announced a change to its policy such that only golfers who are “biological female at birth” will be permitted to compete in the female category. This, it said, would “maintain the integrity of women’s professional golf and ensure fair competition”.
Other golf federations have not adopted this policy, and Davidson is now vying for a place in the women’s professional golf tour.
A few sports acted before being pushed
In 2020, World Rugby hosted a two-day workshop to air and debate the issues around transgender inclusion. The outcome was a sex-based policy for full-contact rugby, because of safety concerns. In 2022 the UK rugby federations adopted the same policy.
In 2023, the International Cricket Council restricted women’s teams to those who had not been through any part of male puberty. In 2024, World Netball and World Sailing adopted similar policies. None of the UK governing bodies for these sports has followed suit.
The next crisis: sprinting at the Paralympics, Paris 2024
Trans-identifying male Valentina Petrillo has qualified to compete against visually impaired women in the 2024 Paralympics.
World Para Athletics operates separately from World Athletics. In his 30s Petrillo won Italian national sprint titles, but was not an international runner. At 50, Petrillo is far behind the male Paralympics Minimum Entry Standard running times, but is able to meet the female times. Even before the games begin, the credibility of the Paralympics is in question over the fairness of allowing a middle-aged trans-identifying male to compete against and possibly beat visually impaired young women.
“Inclusion”: attractive in theory, ugly in practice
What happened in the boxing ring in Paris was the IOC’s inclusive policy in action. It was not a mistake or even an unfortunate side effect; it was how the policy was meant to work. Not until a specific male athlete gains access to the female category does the seemingly attractive notion of “inclusion” collide with the stark reality of unfair male advantage. Sports federations adopt “inclusive” rules that seem fine to them until the effects play out in public, at which point it becomes clear that inclusion for trans-identifying males in the women’s category means unfairness and exclusion for female athletes.
This unfairness and exclusions is happening in almost all sports with such policies, at all levels, as a report by Fair Play For Women published in January showed. If other sports federations want to avoid the same public humiliation followed by a scramble to revise “inclusive” policies, they should act now to restore fairness for women.
What went wrong in Olympic boxing?
Boxing was the one sport which never moved away from a protected female category. Its amateur and professional governing bodies had all maintained sex-based competition. But the International Boxing Federation (IBA) lost its recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over issues of governance and financial irregularities. As a result, the boxing tournaments at the Tokyo Games in 2021 and the Paris Games in 2024 were run by the IOC. Its position is that there should be “no presumed advantage” just because someone has a DSD or a transgender identity. It opposes sex screening, which it calls intrusive and humiliating. Self-declaration of sex is sufficient for access to the female category.
By this logic there should be no sex categories in sport, especially as IOC President Thomas Bach has claimed that there is no scientific consensus on how to identify a man or a woman. Nonetheless he insisted that the two boxers at the centre of the row are definitely women.
Critics have noted that weight categories are meticulously verified but sex categories are not. Many countries allow people to change the gender marker on their passports, so the IOC policy in effect permits males in female categories at will.
Sex-based does not mean “anti-trans”
Amid the backlash against Lia Thomas in the NCAAs in 2022, another trans-identifying swimmer competed in women’s races with no complaints from anyone. This was Iszac Henig, a trans-identifying female who had had a mastectomy but had not taken testosterone.
Hergie Bacyadan of the Philippines, a trans-identifying female, competed in women’s boxing in the Paris 2024 Olympics without controversy. Bacyadan called for boxers who failed gender eligibility tests, like Khelif and Lin, to be excluded from the female category.
There were no objections to the inclusion of either Bacyadan or Henig, since they are female and are not using testosterone.