The International Olympic Committee has not sex-tested female athletes since 1996, but the two gender-disputed boxers who won gold at the 2024 Paris Games have some women demanding a return of the cheek swab.
Calls to resume sex screening soared as Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting rolled through their women’s boxing brackets in Paris, cleared by the IOC to compete despite being disqualified after failing sex-testing in last year’s women’s world championships.
IOC spokesperson Mark Adams pooh-poohed the idea of returning to “the bad old days of sex testing.” But as far as advocates of single-sex women’s sports are concerned, those were the good old days compared to today.
“I do want to go back to the ‘bad old days’ because they’re not the bad old days. They were the good old days when we could actually verify that someone was male or female,” said Linda Blade, a Canadian NCAA track champion and sports performance coach who co-founded the International Consortium of Female Sport.
Since dropping the Barr body test in 1999, which involved a cheek swab, the Olympics has bounced from one policy to another while wrestling with eligibility headaches surrounding transgender athletes and those with Differences of Sexual Development [DSD] in the women’s category.
“If we’re not honest and we’re not screening up front and at the beginning, we have no way to determine the validity of the female category,” Blade told The Washington Times.
Other advocates for a return to the cheek swab in women’s sports include tennis great Martina Navratilova and Riley Gaines, former University of Kentucky All-American swimmer and host of OutKick’s “Gaines on Girls.”
“It’s not invasive, it’s not humiliating, it’s not a genital inspection, it’s cost-effective,” Gaines said. “Why wouldn’t they? Polls show over 80% of Olympic female athletes actually want sex testing at the games to ensure fairness.”
She added: “Does the IOC need to see a woman suffer a fatal injury at the hands of a male before they follow suit?”
Great thread by biologist @FondOfBeetles on #SexVerificationScreen in sports and what that means.
— Linda Blade (@coachblade) August 13, 2024
Fundamentally, it is a non-invasive way to weed out male advantage at a glimpse, while allowing the few who are weeded out to be given a thorough chance (other medical tests) to… https://t.co/2L7zShUJlx
In the other corner are groups including the IOC, the American Medical Association, the National Women’s Law Center, and the National Center for Transgender Equality, which have argued that screening athletes for sex is unscientific and unethical.
“Athletic ‘sex testing’ and redefining eligibility rules based on particular sex traits have been decried by many in the medical community, including the World Medical Association, as unscientific and ‘contrary to medical ethics,’” a coalition of groups led by Athlete Ally said in November 2022. “Individual sex traits like hormones can vary widely, including among cisgender, non-intersex athletes.”
IOC President Thomas Bach said during the Paris Games that there is no scientific consensus on what defines a woman for purposes of athletic competition.
“I have explained before the issues we have. It is not as easy as some may in these cultural wars may now want to portray it that XX or XY is the clear distinction between the men and women. This is scientifically not true anymore,” Bach said at a press conference.
But the rising calls for sex screening coincide with a changing of the guard at the IOC that favors advocates of single-sex women’s sports.
Bach announced Saturday that he will step down when his term ends in June rather than seek an extension, stoking speculation that he could be replaced by British track-and-field great Sebastian Coe.
A two-time Olympic gold medalist who heads World Athletics, Coe has spoken out for years about the need to ensure fairness in women’s sports, warning that without defined gender categories, “a woman would never win another sporting event.”
Under Coe, World Athletics has been a leader in tightening restrictions on transgender and Differences in Sexual Development [DSD] athletes, approving last year rules that prohibit transgender athletes who have gone through “male puberty” from elite international track-and-field competition.
Coe has yet to announce whether he will seek the IOC presidency, saying he will give the idea “serious thought” while simultaneously emphasizing the need to protect the integrity of the female category.
“You have to have a clear policy. If you don’t, you get into difficult territory — and I think that’s what we’ve witnessed here,” Coe told the [U.K.] Telegraph in an interview Sunday. “The reality is very simple: I have a responsibility to preserve the female category, and I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.”
The International Boxing Association said blood tests conducted a year apart on the two boxers found they were ineligible for the female category, spurring speculation that they may be DSD 46, XY athletes.
Such individuals are often born with ambiguous genitalia and internal testes, but produce male-level testosterone after puberty. Khelif has not commented on the speculation but has insisted “I am a woman.”
An influx of high-performing DSD athletes in women’s track and field prompted World Athletics to tighten its rules, announcing in March 2023 that such athletes must keep their testosterone in serum below 2.5 nmol/L for at least 24 months before competing in all events.
“My testicles don’t make me less of a woman” - Caster Semenya
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) November 7, 2023
Of course, this outlandish statement went totally unchallenged this morning
Semenya is not a woman with high testosterone levels. He is a male with normal testosterone levels. pic.twitter.com/LKhkP7SnlN
Fighting the World Athletics policy is South African runner Caster Semenya, the two-time Olympic women’s gold medalist and DSD athlete who has been barred from international competition since 2019 for refusing to reduce her testosterone levels.
“Being born without a uterus, being born with internal testicles — those don’t make me less [of] a woman,” said Semenya in a November interview with the BBC. “It’s just differences that I was born with, and I embrace them. I am not going to be ashamed because I am different.”
Semenya also said in an interview last week with the German outlet ARD that she would consider running for the presidency of World Athletics, saying, “I understand the importance of sports.”
Blade called the IOC’s objections to sex screening ironic, given that the committee requires doping tests that involve watching an athlete urinate in a cup, a far greater invasion of privacy than spitting into a vial or having a cheek-swab.
“It’s so straightforward. The only thing I can think of is that the IOC is absolutely 100% committed to gender ideology and they don’t want to go back to sex-based anything,” she said. “They don’t want to go back to those days. But that’s what we have to do.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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