The Olympics Just Succumbed to a Ridiculous Gender Panic. Here’s Who It’s Really Going to Hurt.

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The International Olympic Committee has instituted mandatory sex testing for every single athlete who aims to compete in women’s sports, the organization announced last week. This regressive policy, which will come into play at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles and formally resumes the Olympics’ long and shameful tradition of sex testing women, is effectively a ban on transgender women. That’s ghoulish. Equally ghoulish but less discussed so far is that it’s also a ban on most intersex women.

“Because of the way that anti-trans legislation and policies are drawn up these days, 99.9 percent of it is going to impact intersex people, because it’s usually just picking a single sex characteristic and saying, This defines maleness and femaleness,” said Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth.

Intersex is an umbrella term for people who have variations in their sex traits or reproductive anatomy. In practice, the test will be a cheek swab or blood work to detect the presence of the SRY gene. In the IOC’s words, that serves as “highly accurate evidence that an athlete has experienced male sex development.” The reality is much more complicated—for example, not everyone with XY chromosomes even develops testes. The very scientist who discovered the SRY gene opposes policymakers’ use of it to screen out trans and intersex women from sports.

The IOC’s policy, which ostensibly allows for exceptions (though they are not clearly delineated), replaces the group’s 2021 nonbinding framework, which encouraged sports governing bodies to err on the side of including trans and intersex girls and women in the girls’ and women’s categories. Since 2004, when trans athletes first became eligible for the Olympics, there has been just one trans woman who has competed: New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard, in the 2021 Tokyo Games.

“I wish people understood that, really, these regulations do target intersex people as well,” said Amelia, an intersex woman who competes in track and field at the NCAA Division I level. (For safety reasons, she asked to be identified in this piece by first name only.) “I think a lot of times we do get sort of pushed to the side and seen as collateral damage or an unintended consequence of transphobia.”

While Amelia’s career trajectory is not directly affected by the IOC policy change, many intersex women have been in the Olympic pipeline. Those women’s dreams are now dashed, their careers gone. Just listen to journalist Reo Eveleth’s 2024 podcast Tested, which examines the history of sex testing in track and across women’s sports more broadly. Every one of the Olympic hopefuls whose stories were told is now ineligible for the 2028 Summer Games, according to Eveleth.

For various reasons, intersex people often don’t even know they are intersex until they are subject to invasive genetic testing like that which the IOC now requires. “Many intersex girls will [find] out for the first time that they’re intersex through sex testing, being outed publicly, and also being driven away from their sport,” Lorshbough said. “It’s an incredibly violative experience. It’s basically a recipe for a lot of cascading indignities for intersex girls and women.”

And that cascade is for nothing. The available research does not back up the assertion that intersex women have competitive advantages over their peers in the women’s category. Sex testing, therefore, is not a matter of fairness or safety. It’s effectively a means of depriving marginalized people access to sports and, far more broadly, medical privacy.

Athletes believed to be intersex or trans are often subjected to intense, hateful scrutiny by sports governing bodies and the general public. The Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won Olympic gold in 2024, was forced to endure a massive global hate campaign, stoked in part by President Donald Trump, who wrongly described her as both transgender and “male.” In the midst of another high-profile, yearslong saga, the South African runner Caster Semenya had her private medical records leaked.

“[This policy] does not smell of science. It smells of stigma,” Semenya said last week in response to the IOC news. “It was not born from care for athletes. It was born from political pressure.”

The IOC, for its part, would like everyone to know that its policy “does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programmes.” That’s a nice thing to say, but it’s not true in any sense but the most literal. While this particular sex-testing policy applies only to women in Olympic settings, it has been well documented that national, state, and local policymakers—even down to youth recreational leagues—take their cues from the IOC and other groups that govern top-tier athletes.

So, in practice, this reversal from the IOC’s 2021 framework absolutely will result in more young intersex and trans athletes getting screened out of playing in rec leagues with their friends. Plus, as the Center for American Progress has found, in states that implement exclusionary gender-eligibility policies, girls’ sports participation decreases overall.

What intersex women like Amelia are asking for from sports governing bodies is simple: “I would like to see inclusion, first and foremost,” she said. “I think any blanket ban is really simplifying the complex processes of sex and gender. I think if there are going to be these types of regulations, they have to be evidence-based. They can’t just be bowing to political whim.”

Women in sports, whether they’re intersex or trans or both or neither, deserve better than to have their privacy invaded under the guise of what the IOC calls “protection.” Some affected athletes may choose to formally challenge the policy, but the damage is essentially done for a host of women, a great many of them intersex. And the Olympic stage will be worse off for their exclusion.