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A coalition of ninety sports and human rights advocacy groups are calling on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to halt a reported effort to revive “sex testing” at the Olympics.
In a joint statement released Tuesday, representatives for the Sport & Rights Alliance, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), Humans of Sport, and 87 other organizations warned that bringing back chromosomal and hormonal testing at the 2028 Olympics would “set women’s sports back 30 years.” The IOC halted such tests in the 1990s, after they were found to be inaccurate and harmful to athletes, but IOC president Kirsty Coventry signaled as recently as November that she may soon bring back the practice in order to bar transgender women from competition.
Coventry has not publicly commented on the process herself, but said broadly that “uncomfortable” and “difficult” changes were on the way for the Olympics during a speech last month.
Reinstituting those tests — which can include cheek swabs, blood tests, and physical examinations — would represent “a catastrophic erosion of women’s rights and safety,” Sport & Rights Alliance executive director Andrea Florence wrote in the joint statement this week.
“Gender policing and exclusion harms all women and girls, and undermines the very dignity and fairness the IOC claims to uphold,” Florence wrote. “Our concerns are compounded by the fact that the IOC also seems to be, at the same time, divesting from the safe sport infrastructure that actually provides protection for women and girls.”
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Last year, IOC medical and scientific director Dr. Jane Thornton reportedly told the organization’s new “female category” eligibility working group that trans women retain “physical advantages” of testosterone-dominant puberty even after undergoing hormone replacement therapy. That claim is inconsistent with studies which indicate that trans women’s athletic performance generally aligns with that of cis women after a year or more on hormones.
The “female category” working group is “continuing its discussions on this topic and no decisions have been taken yet,” an IOC spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday.
The international sports governing body World Athletics introduced mandatory genetic testing for athletes last year, which was denounced at the time by Andrew Sinclair, who discovered the SRY gene most “sex tests” are designed to detect as a proxy for a Y chromosome. “It is [...] very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this test back,” Sinclair wrote last August.
More than one-third of LGBTQ+ athletes walked away with a medal.
An updated IOC eligibility policy would likely also affect intersex athletes and women with high testosterone, including Imane Khelif, the Algerian gold medalist boxer who faced vitriol from President Donald Trump and others in 2024 over claims that she is trans. Khelif said in February that she would submit to testing in order to compete in 2028.
The potential policy change closely aligns with Trump’s agenda on trans rights, after the administration restricted visa eligibility for trans athletes and pressed the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to ban trans women last year. Coventry said in January that she had not yet had “formal communication” with Trump about the 2028 Olympics, which are to be hosted in Los Angeles.
In February, a working group of the United Nations Human Rights Council also rebuked the return of “sex testing” mandates, writing in a statement that such tests are harmful and further marginalize trans and intersex women.
“Such approaches revive practices that were previously abandoned following sustained scientific, legal and ethical criticism and risk reintroducing discrimination and other human rights harms,” the statement read.
