Gene testing was abandoned decades ago precisely because it failed: it excluded intersex women who had never had any competitive advantage, and it reduced womanhood to a chromosome. The IOC knows this history, which makes its decision to reinstate SRY gene testing for all female athletes, ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games, all the more painful to watch.

A policy built on a story that does not exist

The facts are these, and the IOC has chosen not to be transparent about them. In the entire history of the Olympic Games, one openly transgender woman has competed: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who placed last in her group at Tokyo in 2021. One. And the IOC's response to this vast and apparently overwhelming problem is to subject every female athlete on earth to genetic testing.

Chris Mosier, who has represented the United States in international competition nine times as a trans man, put it simply: "I call bulls---. I believe this is rooted in politics, not in the actual lived experiences or the day-to-day experiences of athletes competing in women's sports, because the truth is, there are very few trans women competing in women's sports compared to the number of cisgender women. So this is largely a solution in search of a problem."

He is right. And I think most people who have spent any time actually listening to athletes, rather than consulting an undisclosed working group under conditions of confidentiality, already know it.

The women at the centre of this story

Veronica Ivy won two consecutive world women's track cycling championships in 2018 and 2019. She was already forced out of her sport in 2023 when cycling's world governing body changed its rules and barred trans women from competing. She has watched, since then, as the dominoes have fallen one by one. When the IOC announced its new policy, she was disheartened but, she said, not surprised.

"This isn't protecting the female category," Ivy told USA Today. "This is only going to harm women and girls."

Patricio Manuel, a transgender boxer, was among a small group of trans athletes flown to IOC headquarters in Lausanne in December 2019 to share their experiences with IOC leaders. That conversation was part of building the framework for fairness and inclusion the IOC released in 2021. Neither he nor Ivy were invited to contribute to the development of the current policy. Neither knows who was consulted, because the IOC has declined to say.

"It felt like a slap in our face for the work that had been done to try to actually make inclusion in sport," Manuel said. "Sports have been an amazing vehicle of inclusion in this society, and to weaponize it against athletes based on a hypothetical situation — to me, they are using sports to further weaponize and segregate trans athletes, and especially trans women, out of society by not allowing them into sports."

The word "heartbreaking" is his, and it is the right word.

This will harm all women, not only trans and intersex women

The history of sex testing in sport is not a comfortable one. It is, as Ivy described it, "a highly invasive process rife with sexual abuse and harassment." Women have been humiliated, excluded, and subjected to intrusive examination on the basis of how they look. The policy was abandoned in 1999 not because it worked but because it caused so much harm to so many women who were simply women.

In 2023, Algeria's Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting were barred from competing in the world boxing championships by the International Boxing Association, which alleged they had failed gender eligibility testing. Neither woman is transgender. Both went on to compete at the Paris Games under IOC oversight, and both won gold. The IOC, at the time, criticised the IBA's decision. Now it is reinstating a version of the same mechanism.

Brianna Turner, an eight-year WNBA veteran who has represented the United States internationally, put it plainly in an op-ed: "In more than 15 years of organised basketball, I've played with and against people who are transgender and undoubtedly people with intersex variations, and I've never experienced any unfair advantages. I saw these players as my fellow athletes, not my enemies. We cannot choose our genes or chromosomes, but we can choose how hard we work, how we treat one another and whether we protect the dignity of every athlete."

The IOC has positioned this as protecting women's sport. What it is actually doing is inviting unfair scrutiny of every woman whose body does not conform to a narrowly imagined idea of femininity. That has never protected women. It has only ever harmed them.

The double standard that reveals everything

The IOC will not require genetic testing for athletes in men's sports. Trans men, like Mosier and Manuel, have largely been dismissed or ignored, their participation treated as a curiosity rather than a threat. Mosier has made Team USA nine times. Nine times, he says, it has been met with a shrug.

The asymmetry tells you everything about what this policy is actually about. It is not about fairness, because fairness would apply the same scrutiny in both directions. It is about the policing of womanhood, about deciding which women are real enough to compete. And the mechanism chosen, a gene test, reduces that question to a single chromosome, which is exactly what the science abandoned a generation ago because it was wrong then and it is wrong now.

Ivy said the policy "violates international human rights law all over the place" and betrays the Olympic Charter's own principle that sport is a human right, free from discrimination of any kind. She is not wrong about that either.

What I keep coming back to is the athletes themselves: the women who competed, who won, who gave years of their lives to their sports, who were consulted and then ignored, who have now been told by the most powerful body in world sport that there is a question mark over whether they belong. That is not a policy outcome. That is a harm. And it is being done in the name of protection, which is the cruellest part of all.