World Athletics, the international governing body that sanctions competitions for sports such as track and field and cross country running, voted on Thursday to ban virtually all transgender women from elite athletics, and to tighten restrictions on intersex competitors.
The new regulations take effect March 31, on which date the body will begin excluding all “male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty from female World Rankings.” Making testosterone-dominant puberty a disqualifying trait effectively bans most trans women athletes competing today from holding WA-sanctioned records, as very few have had the opportunity to bypass puberty through the use of blockers.
The body, led by President Sebastian Coe, also approved new rules requiring “any relevant athletes” — i.e., eligible trans and intersex competitors — to reduce their testosterone levels to 2.5 nmol/L, a fraction over the medically estimated free T range for most premenopausal cis women, for at least 24 months. The vote also removed the “restricted events” category entirely (in which trans and intersex athletes previously competed under special requirements), and stipulated that all such athletes who competed in unrestricted events need to reduce their T for at least six months to regain eligibility.
Under previous rules, WA-sanctioned trans and intersex athletes were required to reduce their T to 5 nmol/L or less, according to their posted regulations.
Citing “conflicting needs and rights between different groups,” Coe said in a statement that the organization “will review our position” in coming years. That review process will include a 12-person working group with one transgender athlete that will conduct additional research and make new recommendations in the next year. But Coe claimed that in the meantime, the action was necessary to protect “the integrity of the female category in athletics.”
Trans sports medicine is not settled science, but studies have indicated trans women on hormone therapies lose many supposed “biological advantages” in sports, and doctors that treat trans children concur. Scientists do not even agree that cis men uniformly have a natural athletic advantage over cis women; in fact, several biological factors may put cis women at an advantage in some sports.
The World Athletics policy changes may be a hard pill to swallow for intersex athletes, many of whom, like gold-medalist track star Caster Semenya, are cisgender but have naturally high testosterone. Semenya has been barred from international competitions for years, refusing to take medications to manipulate her hormone levels. Regulations that restrict T levels have also disproportionately affected Black cis women like Namibian runners Christine Mboma and Beatrice Maslingi, who were barred from the Tokyo Olympics over their hormones.
“We are beyond devastated to see World Athletics succumbing to political pressure instead of core principles of inclusion, fairness and non-discrimination for transgender athletes and athletes with intersex variations,” said Hudson Taylor, founder of the nonprofit LGBTQ+ sports advocacy group Athlete Ally, in a statement to CNN. The new regulations, Taylor added, “do nothing to address what we know to be the actual, proven threats to women’s sports: unequal pay, rampant sexual abuse and harassment, lack of women in leadership and inequities in resources for women athletes.”
In the U.S., there are more laws restricting school-age trans girls from sports than there are trans girls in school sports. Earlier this month, Republicans in Congress began debate on a proposed federal ban on trans girls in school sports leagues. Soccer star Megan Rapinoe has called such bans “cruel” and “monstrous.”
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