As the gender furore that engulfed boxing on the 2024 Paris Olympics rumbles on, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is weighing reintroducing testing, whereas a number of sports have already embraced testing for male chromosomes.
Such testing has its critics and the Olympics have already tried it as soon as solely to desert it in 1996.
Incoming president Kirsty Coventry, who will change into the primary girl to steer the Olympic motion when she begins her time period on Monday (June 16, 2025), signalled a change of path on this politically inflammatory and scientifically advanced difficulty when she was elected in March.
“We will protect the female category and female athletes,” mentioned Coventry, a Zimbabwean swimmer who gained seven Olympic medals.
At latest Games, the IOC has left duty for setting and imposing gender guidelines to the worldwide federations who run their sports.
“I want the IOC to take a little bit more of a leading role,” Coventry mentioned, including that she deliberate to create “a task force.”
Even earlier than Coventry begins her consultations, World Athletics and World Boxing have adopted chromosomal testing — usually a cheek swab. World Aquatics in 2023 adopted a coverage that foresees such testing.
Their guidelines make participation in ladies’s competitors conditional on the absence of Y chromosome genetic materials — often called the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity.
‘Non-invasive’
Only “XX athletes”, as World Athletics calls them, can compete. Both transgender ladies and those that have all the time been thought-about feminine however have XY chromosomes — a type of “differences in sex development” (DSD) — are excluded.
On the floor, chromosomal screening simplifies entry to ladies’s competitors, which has lengthy been the topic of various laws and scientific and moral debates.
Last October, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence in opposition to Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, instructed the UN General Assembly that such checks have been “reliable and non-invasive.”
The gender debate reignited in June round Paris Olympic boxing champion Imane Khelif.
The Algerian was on the centre of a violent controversy over her gender final summer season stoked by Donald Trump, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Harry Potter writer J.Okay. Rowling.
World Boxing, which is taking up working Olympic boxing in Los Angeles in 2028, ordered Khelif to bear testing earlier than a contest within the Netherlands in early June. She skipped the occasion.
During the Paris Games, the International Boxing Association, which was booted out of the Olympics by the IOC in 2019, accused Khelif, raised as a woman, of carrying XY chromosomes.
Chromosomal screening attracts criticism, notably from the World Medical Association and human rights organisations.
‘Highly invasive’
“It is far from being scientifically accurate as a performance indicator, while being very harmful to the athletes affected,” Madeleine Pape, a sociologist of gender in sport on the University of Lausanne, instructed AFP.
While World Athletics and World Aquatics each say transgender ladies have a muscular benefit, Pape, who ran the 800m for Australia on the 2008 Beijing Olympics, disagrees.
She mentioned there’s a lack of analysis proving that transgender athletes or these with or one of many many types of DSD achieve a “disproportionate advantage” over XX opponents.
Explaining efficiency is so advanced that this uncertainty applies to “all athletes,” mentioned Pape.
She additionally mentioned it was doable to have an XY chromosome whereas being “totally or partially insensitive to testosterone,” as was the case with Spanish hurdler Maria Jose Martinez-Patino, who after lacking out on the 1988 Olympics was the primary girl to efficiently problem the femininity checks in courtroom.
Aware of those limitations, World Boxing and World Athletics are proposing further steps after SRY screening which may embody anatomical examination.
“Chromosomal tests seem very simple, very clean, but there is a lot of complexity behind them: potentially a highly invasive and non-standardised gynaecological examination, or expensive genetic sequencing that is inaccessible in many countries,” mentioned Pape.
Ultimately, the way forward for such checks might be determined within the courts.
The European Court of Human Rights is anticipated to rule on July 10, for a second time, on the case of DSD athlete Caster Semenya, the double Olympic 800m champion.
The South African was barred from competing below an earlier model of the World Athletics guidelines. In 2023, the courtroom dominated that her rights had been infringed however that call didn’t pressure WA to reinstate her.
