The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has banned transgender women athletes from the Olympics.
The IOC announced the agreement on Thursday, March 26, which now meets U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games, according to reports
“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement.
Transgender women athletes has been a topic of discussion in recent years with the fairness of competition juxtaposed form the Olympic Charter that states playing sport in a human right.
The policy will be enforced by a mandatory gene test once in an athlete’s career.
The eligibility policy that will apply from the L.A. Olympics in July 2028 “protects fairness, safety and integrity in the female category,” the IOC said in the release.
“It is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programs,” said the IOC.
It is unknown how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level, the Associated Press report stated. No woman who transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games. Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard did at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal.
One of the biggest reasons for the IOC to have a policy is so that the group, led by former Olympic swimmer Kirsty Coventry, could have a policy across the board instead of dealing with each sport’s governing body and different rules for different sports.
“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry said in a statement. “So, it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”
She set up a review of “protecting the female category” as one of her first big decisions last June as the first woman to lead the Olympic body in its 132-year history.
Before the 2024 Paris Olympics, swimming excluded transgender women who had been through male puberty, as did track and field.
In the U.S., President Trump signed the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February last year, and pledged to deny visas to some athletes attempting to compete at the L.A Olympics. The order also threatened to “rescind all funds” from organizations that allowed transgender athletes to take part in women’s sports.