In less than a week since President Trump signed an Executive Order banning trans women from competing in women’s sports, we’re already getting reports of athletic associations around the country pushing to enshrine rules that would not only do the same but would also bar the participation of athletes with difference of sex development (DSD). By way of an announcement from their president, Sebastian Coe, World Athletics — the largest international governing body for athletes in track and field and cross country running — put out a 12-page document on Monday that recommended stricter rules for elite female athletes competing in the sports the association oversees.
The existing rules created by World Athletics’ Working Group on Gender Diverse Athletes in March 2023 only allow the participation of trans athletes in the female category as long as they did not undergo male puberty prior to transition. Similarly, they created a harsh threshold for athletes with DSD — like Caster Semenya and Christine Mboma — that mandated they must medically or surgically lower the level of their testosterone to below 2.5 nmol/L for at least six months prior to qualifying for competition. According to the recommendations made in the new document, World Athletics is now considering revising these already strict rules, but they haven’t officially adopted any new rules as of its publication. The new rules would require testing testosterone levels and also taking cheek swabs and/or dry blood spot analyses of athletes.
The document, which begins by ridiculously reasserting their “support” for the dignity and privacy of trans athletes and athletes with DSD, declares that “Both the Male Category and Female Category are central to how the sport is designed and structured” before claiming that “new scientific evidence” has pushed them to reconsider these rules for the sake of all female athletes who compete in the sports they govern. The new scientific evidence they point to in the document has made World Athletics realize that the “exclusive focus on male puberty is wrong,” as the studies they’ve consulted essentially “prove” there are already significant athletic advantages for “males” prior to the onset of puberty.
If that’s not frustrating enough, the document then erroneously claims that biological development of gender diverse athletes and athletes with DSD cannot and should not be seen as different from that of trans women: “There is no new countervailing evidence that would suggest that transgender women and androgen sensitive XY DSD athletes are biologically different to each other in relation to the design and goals of the Female Category.” In a move that is strangely similar to the wording of Trump’s Executive Order where the administration twisted the requirements of Title IX to reason enforcement of the trans participation ban, the document then says the previous World Athletics requirement for gender diverse and DSD athletes to go on testosterone suppression therapy is unethical, claiming they are “concerned about the cost-benefit calculus of [athletes] undergoing T suppression treatment.”
So, what are their suggested solutions to these “new problems”? It’s simple: They’ll just ban everyone who doesn’t fit into the “Female category” as they’ve defined it, which means a return to mandatory sex chromosome testing to ensure that every athlete competing in that category has XX chromosomes. And why are they doing this? Because they want to affirm their “longstanding design for its Female Category as a space where XX athletes can compete only against each other, and its modern goals for its Female Category as: a. equality and fairness for female athletes, b. growing the commercial value of the category, and c. using the category as a vehicle to empower females within Athletics and throughout society.”
Are you noticing a problem here? This organization is asserting that they want to affirm equity and fairness for people competing in this category by creating more obstacles these people have to endure in order to compete in the category, which only serves to reinforce their already unethical discriminatory practices. More to the point, as Reo Eveleth notes in their latest newsletter about the document, “These are subjective goals — which are fine to have, but the idea that science could provide evidence that proves anything about trans or DSD athletes in relation to these goals makes no sense.”
It’s hard to tell if the working group put out these recommendations because of the fuel provided to them by Trump’s Executive Order or because of other political happenings amongst the governing bodies that control athletics for the Olympics. But according to the announcement by Coe, he believes updating these guidelines is of the utmost importance: “World Athletics is a leader in preserving the female category in sport and one of the first international sports federations to establish clear policies on female eligibility in elite sport. […] Preserving the integrity of competition in the female category is a fundamental principle of the sport of athletics and we look forward to this collaborative consultation process with our key stakeholders in this area.” Coe’s words are eerily reminiscent of the statement put out by NCAA president Charlie Baker last week that praised Trump’s Executive Order for setting a “clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standard” for athletes competing in the association’s sports.
These statements prove, once again, that for all these governing bodies’ and associations’ claims about promoting “fairness and equality” in women’s sports, they’re completely uninterested in anything other than rules and regulations that promote and perpetuate gender essentialism within the sports themselves. If they truly cared about the values these rules intend to solidify, then they would be working towards making women’s sports safe for all women — cis, trans, and “gender diverse” — not just for the women they want to see on the track, field, and court and in the stadiums.
Since these recommendations won’t come up for a vote on institution and enforcement until March of this year, there is still time for athletes, medical professionals, and people who work in the field of law and ethics in sports to push back against World Athletics. The end of the document calls for feedback from any stakeholders who are involved in athletics. At the very least, everyone who can should be writing in to express objection to the possibility of these new rules.
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Read more about trans sports bans:
- What does Trump’s trans sports Executive Order say?
- What are the origins of the trans sports debate?
- The Olympics have always been a battleground for gender panic.
- Trans athletes aren’t going anywhere.
- Why Florida high school students walking out over trans sports bans matters.
- The catch-22 of being a trans woman in sports.
- Cycling has a trans exclusion problem.
- Trump’s anti-trans ads targeted moderates and football fans.
