The International Olympic Committee (IOC) policy on the Protection of the Female Category, published on Thursday, has received backlash from human rights groups, legal luminaries and women athletes from around the globe, with experts referring to the new guidelines mandating genetic testing for women athletes as “stigma-based” rather than “science-based.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) policy on the Protection of the Female Category was published on Thursday (Getty)

On Friday, a group of 69 academicians and human rights lawyers from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India and several European countries, including France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, issued a joint statement against the policy, contending that it violated the domestic laws of various jurisdictions and international covenants, including the European Council’s International Declaration on Human Genetic Data.

“As several Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council have observed, genetic sex testing as a condition of eligibility for women’s sport infringes on athletes’ internationally recognized rights to equality, bodily and psychological integrity, and privacy. (...) We consider that mandatory genetic sex testing, and the exclusion of women athletes on this basis, violates Articles 8 (right to respect for private life) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination) of the European Convention,” the statement read.

Separately, nine African women track athletes, including two-time Olympic gold medallist Caster Semenya of South Africa, Olympic silver medallist Francine Niyonsaba from Burundi, and Evangeline Makena Kathenya from Kenya, wrote a letter to Coventry on Wednesday, in which they shared their experience of gender testing and the consequent negative impact it had on their sporting careers. HT has seen a copy of this letter.

“We respectfully emphasise that womanhood and female biology are not uniform. Women with sex variations are females and women. Any framework intended to protect the female category must recognise the natural diversity that exists among female bodies and avoid imposing restrictive definitions that exclude some females from participation and protection,” the letter stated.

One of the signatories, Docus Ajok, a Ugandan 800m runner, wrote about her experience of gender testing. “I don’t have anyone I can talk to about this. I don’t feel safe sometimes, and I can’t talk to my brothers or sisters, or even my friends. I don’t know who I can trust. In Uganda, the government and society are intolerant. Being outed as a woman with sex variations puts me at risk. My friend Annet Negesa had to leave the country,” she wrote.

“Our national federations act with impunity in how they interpret and apply international regulations, with no oversight from World Athletics,” the letter added.

Experts said that the new policy will inform the guidelines of other national and international federations and sport governing bodies on gender testing. Last July, World Athletics, which governs national athletic federations, mandated that athletes who wanted to compete in female events at September’s World Championships in Tokyo would have to take a one-time test to determine their biological sex.

“The policy polices all women. It’s not science-based, it’s stigma and political pressure leading to the revival of mandatory sex testing for all women. And it’s legally unviable in many parts of the world,” said Payoshni Mitra, executive director of Humans of Sport, the athlete-led advocacy organisation that coordinated with the African women athletes—some of whom have alleged intersex variations, but all of whom have been harmed by sex testing policies—to pen the letter.

These responses follow a statement published on March 17, in which over 130 human rights, sports and scientific groups, including the United Nations, criticised the impending guidelines as “a blunt and discriminatory response that is not supported by science and violates international human rights law.”

IOC president Kristy Coventry announced the policy on Thursday and stated that it will apply to the Summer Olympic Games to be held in Los Angeles in 2028.

“I understand that this is a very sensitive topic. As a former athlete, I passionately believe in the right of all Olympians to take part in fair competition. The policy that we have announced is based on science, and it has been laid out by medical experts with the best interests of all athletes at heart,” said Coventry, a two-time Olympic medallist in swimming.

According to the guidelines, all women athletes must undergo a genetic test that looks for the presence of the SRY gene (Sex-determining Region of the Y chromosome). The new policy also expressly bans intersex and transgender athletes from participating in women’s sporting categories, but it is not retrospective.

The SRY gene is usually found on the Y chromosome. During early embryonic development, it can initiate the process leading to testis formation. If formed, testes typically produce hormones that influence later stages of bodily development.

However, experts argued that the issue of fairness has plagued the IOC’s considerations on women’s sports for some time, and gene testing is not scientifically conclusive.

Andrew Sinclair, the geneticist who helped discover the SRY gene in 1990, has written extensively on how testes development—and thus testosterone levels in the body—involves a cascade of interacting genes, and that no single gene can determine the development of sex characteristics in the body.

Between 1968 and 2000, the IOC used several different methods of genetic sex testing to determine eligibility for women’s competitions. Testing for women during this period was mandatory; the men’s category has never had a similar policy. In 1999, the IOC scrapped mandatory sex testing prevalent at the time on the grounds that these “tests fail to exclude all potential impostors, are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development and may have shattering consequences for athletes who ‘fail’ a test,” according to the statement the international body issued then.

The new IOC policy also reverses the organisation’s position laid down in its Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variation, which was released in 2021 to “promote a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.”

“The European Court of Human Rights recently recognized [that] the harms of sex testing include the inevitable disclosure of certain athletes’ private and confidential medical information, the potential loss of their livelihoods, and a range of other serious harms. In our view, these consequences—and particularly the social exclusion, psychological distress, physical harm, and material loss that accompany them—cannot be considered reasonable and proportionate to the aim pursued. This is particularly so given the absence of conclusive scientific evidence demonstrating that transgender women athletes or athletes with sex variations have a systematic advantage over other women athletes,” the statement by legal experts stated.

No woman who has transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games, though weightlifter Laurel Hubbard did at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal, AFP reported.