Restrictions on trans athletes focus on exclusion, when participation should be the goal
IBA's action against IOC aligns with U.S. administration in charge of 2028 Olympics
The International Boxing Association announced this week that it's seeking a showdown in courtrooms in the U.S., France and Switzerland, where it plans to file criminal charges against the International Olympic Committee.
The alleged offence?
Letting Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan compete in Paris last summer. The IBA said the two women's boxers had failed gender eligibility tests at last year's IBA world championships. But the IBA didn't facilitate last summer's Olympic boxing tournament because the IOC had banished the organization over deep-seated corruption, and its dependence on sponsorship money from Russia's state-run energy corporation.
And the impetus for acting right now? An executive order from U.S. president Donald Trump banning trans women from women's sports.
But neither does the IBA's flip-flopping on Khelif. She was eligible to compete in IBA tournaments until, suddenly, she wasn't. Her presence in Paris last summer triggered a meltdown from IBA president Umar Kremlev, who referred to the IOC as "sodomites" for letting Khelif box.
Yet there she was in December, a spectator at an IBA event in the Bahamas, credentialed like a VIP, moving freely among athletes and decision-makers alike.
And now the IBA is using her as an excuse to take the IOC to court.
WATCH | Former IOC medical adviser weighs in on women's Olympic boxing discussion:
This latest campaign is less about Khelif than it is about this particular moment in U.S. history and politics, and using the idea of safeguarding women's sports to stride through an anti-inclusion door that Trump's executive orders have opened. It's about staying aligned with the administration that'll be in charge when the Olympics return to the U.S. in 2028. And it's about scapegoating vulnerable people while actively working against gender equity in sport.
And it's not just boxing.
Last week World Athletics announced its proposed new gender guidelines, all of them, predictably, policing the boundaries of the women's category. Through 2024, athletes assigned female at birth but who had elevated testosterone levels weren't eligible to compete unless they took medication that brought their testosterone below the threshold World Athletics had set. The proposed new rule would treat those athletes the same way world athletics does female athletes born biologically male – ineligible regardless of whether they've taken testosterone-suppressing meds.
In reality, there's room for a productive, good faith discussion on how to categorize elite male athletes who transition, and then compete as women. If a man who runs 9.95 in the 100 metres completes his transition as a woman who runs 10.4, the other women's competitors would have a right to side-eye, especially with prize money on the line.
Except we rarely see those conversations. Instead we get new rules designed to exclude athletes who don't fit neatly into the men's or women's categories.
Or we get bad faith arguments using trans athletes the way a boxer deploys a blinding jab, obscuring an opponent's vision so you can hit them with something big. In the ring it might be a right cross or an uppercut; in these "saving women's sports" conversations it's a crackdown participation that's almost impossible to justify if you actually value sport.
Trans athletes, differences of sex development (DSD) athletes, women who, for whatever reason, naturally produce a lot of testosterone — four distinct groups of people, all met with the same treatment under the rules the IBA and World Athletics are putting forward.
Exclusion.
Same outcome you receive if you decide to use steroids, but there's no evidence that trans and DSD and women with naturally high testosterone are choosing to break rules. They just exist outside an ever-changing set of regulations.
Part of the problem is straightforward, vanilla-flavoured transphobia. A critical mass of white Americans voted for Trump, supposedly to lower living costs that had skyrocketed under the previous president, Joe Biden. During his first week in office, Trump delivered that executive order banning trans women from women's sports, as if that solved the issue.
According to USAFacts.org, three million Americans identify as transgender. That figure translates to 1.14 per cent of the country's adult population. So unless every transgender person in the country decided, on the same day, at the same time, to go buy 10 dozen eggs, transgender people aren't the reason Americans' groceries are expensive, or their bosses doesn't want to pay you minimum wage, or they had to declare bankruptcy over medical debt. Transgender people are just a convenient scapegoat whether we're talking politics or sport, where tighter regulations on trans athletes become an excuse to squeeze DSD competitors and others.
Lack of problem-solving imagination
Another part of the problem is a stunning lack of imagination.
Rule makers keep inventing ways to keep athletes out of the women's category – physical exams, cheek swabs, eye tests, an ever-lowering testosterone ceiling. The list seems to grow every year.
But when it concerns facilitating as many opportunities as possible for talented athletes, regardless of where they exist on the gender spectrum, suddenly we have no more ideas. Just two classifications, and a brick wall for anyone who doesn't fit into them.
New categories?
Sub categories?
Open categories?
Nope.
Just new rules and de facto bans for athletes born outside them.
If it's about fairness, then rulemakers can get creative about establishing level playing fields. Otherwise we're just targeting specific female athletes because they're different, and treating them as though they got caught juicing.
Except that's not quite correct. If you fail a drug test, you still have a path back to competition. If you fall outside your sport's gender boundaries you're done indefinitely.
In the name of fairness, purportedly.
But if you haven't chosen to break a rule, how is that fair?
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