Transgender and Intersex Athletes May be Banned from the Olympics Next Year
The Times reports that an inside source has told them that the new president of the International Olympic Committee, Kirsty Coventry, may ban trans and intersex athletes from the Olympics.
by Aly Gibbs
The Times reports that a source has told them the International Olympic Committee will be banning all transgender women and intersex athletes from competing in the Olympics as soon as February of next year. This is a somewhat shocking turn of events. No, not because of the discrimination against trans and intersex people, which becomes less surprising by the day, but because it would necessitate the IOC quit being cowards and embrace their bigotry.
If you aren’t familiar, the IOC already has a history of waffling on trans competitors.
In 2003, they drafted their first set of rules for trans athletes who wanted to compete in the Olympics. These rules necessitated that the athletes had undergone sexual reassignment surgery, showed legal recognition of their new gender, and advised that they undergo hormone therapy for at least two years.
In 2015, the IOC acknowledged that legal recognition of gender transition isn’t possible in every country, and that requiring invasive surgery might not be entirely fair. They changed the participation rules so that trans men could compete without qualification, and trans women could compete as long as their gender had been declared female for at least four years, and their testosterone levels were kept below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least one year prior to competing.
Then, in 2021, the IOC threw their hands up and passed the buck to the individual governing bodies for each Olympic sport. As a result, trans athletes were banned from many Olympic sports.
Now, it seems, the IOC is set to outright ban anybody they deem abnormal from competing, thanks to two meddling white women. According to The Times’ source, Dr. Jane Thornton presented a “very scientific, factual and unemotional presentation” to the IOC about why transgender and intersex athletes are icky and gross, and shouldn’t be allowed to compete against real women.
I find that hard to believe, since the science that I’m aware of suggests that trans women are largely disadvantaged at sports post-transition, as compared to cis women. Meanwhile, I’m not sure how any presentation could make a case for blanket banning every intersex athlete, considering the huge variety in intersex disorders… but The Times’ slack-jawed dull-eyed Chief Sports Reporter Martyn Ziegler erroneously describes intersex women as “those who were raised as girls from birth but have male chromosomes and male levels of testosterone,” which suggests his head is wedged so firmly up his ass that he no longer knows up from down, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
Kirsty Coventry was elected president of the IOC earlier this year, and almost immediately signaled her hatred for transgender women. The blue-eyed, pale-skinned, bottle blonde Zimbabwean said in June: “We understand there will be differences depending on the sports.
We should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category and we should ensure that this is done in consensus with all the stakeholders. But we need to do that with a scientific approach and the inclusion of the international federations who have already done a lot of work in this area”
Of course, it seems like what Coventry and her cabal of soulless crackers are after is the exact opposite of a scientific approach. Instead, they’re ignoring the actual science to cherry pick whatever outdated data they can find that justifies a prohibition on anybody they think is gross from competing in the Olympics.
Every single day, it seems, the IOC undermines their own insistence that sport is a human right. Now, they’re poised to enact a bigoted anti-trans policy at the most elite levels of athletic competition, ensuring that anybody who isn’t quite like them suffers as much as possible for the crime of being born different.
It disgusts me, and I hope it disgusts you.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
