This is apparently a done deal, though probablydone for the wrong reasons. The NYT headline gives the important result; click on it below or read the archived version here:
A summary:
The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee quietly changed its eligibility rules on Monday to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports, and now will comply with President Trump’s executive order on the issue, according to a post on the organization’s website.
The new policy, expressed in a short, vaguely worded paragraph, is tucked under the category of “USOPC Athlete Safety Policy” on the site, and does not include details of how the ban will work. Nor does the new policy include the word “transgender” or the title of Mr. Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” referring to it instead as “Executive Order 14201.”
Mr. Trump signed the executive order on Feb. 5.
The committee’s new policy means that the national governing bodies of sports federations in the United States now must follow the U.S.O.P.C.’s lead, according to several chief executives of sports within the Olympic movement. Those national governing bodies oversee many, but not all, events in Olympic sports for all ages, from youth to masters’ competitions.
In a letter sent by email to the “Team USA Community,” the U.S.O.P.C. acknowledged on Tuesday that its policy had changed. The letter, from Sarah Hirshland, the U.S.O.P.C.’s chief executive, and Gene Sykes, the president, said the committee had held “a series of respectful and constructive conversations with federal officials” since the executive order was signed.
“As a federally chartered organization, we have an obligation to comply with federal expectations,” the letter said, adding that the committee would work with the national governing bodies to implement the new policy.
. . .Those new rules still allow trans women to compete, but only in the men’s category.
All others who aren’t eligible for the women’s category, including nonbinary athletes, transgender men and intersex athletes, will also be limited to competing in the men’s category, the policy says.
The right reason for such a ruling is because it because it’s fair to women, and because trans-identified men, especially but not exclusively those who have gone through male puberty, have on average an athletic advantage over biological women.
But fairness doesn’t seem to undergird this ruling was made. After all, the Olympics has had years to ponder this issue, and basically punted on it, saying that each sport had to make its own rules. The clue: the USOPC explicitly cited Trump’s Executive Order when announcing its decision, and without federal support, Los Angeles would be unable to host its scheduled Summer Olympics in 2028. In other words, the decision was likely made not out of fairness, but out of fearfulness. It’s sad when bullying and fear replaces fairness in this way.
But I’ll still take it, because regardless of the reasons, this is what I’ve always thought was the right thing to do. It is not transphobic, nor does it “erase” trans people. Trans people or those who aren’t biological women can nevertheless still compete in athletics if they wish, but in men’s divisions. Alternatively, and perhaps more fairly than that, there could be an “other” division for those who aren’t either biological males or biological females. (I can’t deal with all other exceptions now, as they will take careful consideration.)
Most Americans agree with me on this issue. A recent Pew survey shows that:
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of U.S. adults favor or strongly favor laws and policies that:
- Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth (66%)
- Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (56%)
The first issue is the one at hand, and two-thirds of American adults favor what the USOPC just did. But you can bet that this doesn’t settle the issue for the distant future. After all, Trump won’t be President forever (despite what some readers think!), and a “progressive” President could easily change things back. On the other hand, I think the moral arc of athletic fairness is bending towards justice, especially with the data increasingly showing general athletic advantages of trans-identified males over biological women.
Perhaps the EO was just the excuse they needed to do the right thing?
As a Norwegian, like many in Europe, I am as critical of Trump as American liberals and Democrats. However, Trump’s executive orders have been welcomed by many here, including those who of us who consider themselves liberal or left-leaning. It’s common to read or hear: “We may think Trump is erratic, but in this case, he did the right thing.”
So yes: “Perhaps the EO was just the excuse they needed to do the right thing?”
Yes, and dammit I think the same thing on occasion about The Orange One — that this time he is right and my political side was badly wrong.
So one can hope that in the post-Trump America, this policy will be quietly left unharmed.
Sad, isn’t it, that we have come to see what should be distinct and independent issues as bundled into “sides”.
Re. “Trans people or those who aren’t biological women can nevertheless still compete in athletics if they wish, but in men’s divisions. Alternatively, and perhaps more fairly than that, there could be an “other” division for those who aren’t either biological males or biological females.”
Yes, or they can, like the 99.99% of us who are not able to compete at the olympic or professional level, they can just enjoy and profit from sports in a non or less competitive environment.
We have seen this before, notably with the Press “sisters” from Russia in the early 1960s, and some others. They withdrew from competition after sex testing was introduced. Why has the lesson been forgotten? It was cheating then and it is cheating now.
Good news!
Related: I got called a TERF with transphobia this morning on a left leaning site.
Congratulations FK – it is an honor. I have been called it a lot!
We should have a TERF tea party on your next visit to NYC. We can also throw some shade on the Pal terrorist demos which have befallen my Big Apple of late.
It’ll be great – we can take in a show, I’ll show you Broadway, attend the Stephen Colb… oh wait..
best,
D.A.
NYC
“New York, like a scene from all those movies, but you’re real enough to me.”
Art Garfunkel (and Paul Simon), “New York”, Concert in Central Park, 1981
You go girl. They cast so many slurs at women that they don’t realise that the words no longer have any impact and we wear them now as badges of honour.
Congratulations. Us Terven are many and growing.
Terven! lol 😺
I’d like to know which site, to contribute to the “discussion”.
The Bulwark. But you need to pay to comment.
Oh bother.
Yep. I like the site except when they get onto trans, which fortunately isn’t often.
Cool! TERF: Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools. Saw that one on the internet somewhere.
My dear Frau Katze, was that “left leaning site” a very blue sky?
TERF is a compliment……………
Congratulations, Frau Katze!!
One of us. One of us!!
Exoteric Motte : Olympics, athletic competition, fairness ; no praxis ; top-down orders “banning” mens’ Inclusion in womens’ athletics to create Diversity ; theory is not referenced at all
Esoteric Bailey : Sociognostic transformation according to the voluminous doctrine of Queer Theory ; praxis ; Queering the Olympics ; Inclusion, Diversity as instruments of Hermetic world-making, sublation of power structures with marginalized sparks
Motte/Bailey in :
The Vacuity of Postmodernist
Methodology
Nicholas Shackel
Metaphilosophy. Vol. 36 April 2005 295-320.
Claiming that the Olympic Committee is following federal guidelines gives them the cover to make this move. The Committee members may (surely they must) recognize that their decision also aligns with fairness and safety, but they want to sidestep the controversy for now. We’ll see if, after the fact, the Committee eventually cites fairness and safety as the basis for their position. The political climate will change, but the principles of safety and fairness will not.
I wonder how much influence the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, had in the USOPC’s decision.
Coventry, a multiple gold-medallist in swimming for Zimbabwe, has openly stated that she wants all men out of women’s sports. I hope she can accomplish this soon
I agree the U.S. Olympic Committee has shamed itself in having to be so obviously intimidated into doing the fair thing. That’s why we have a state apparatus embodied in the policeman’s truncheon, though: to intimidate, within the law, private individuals and organizations into behaving fairly in the public square when they have shown they will not if left to their own devices, having knelt in the USOC’s case to the whims of trans activists. But it was ever thus. I don’t see any need for ambivalence here. This is what the state does. President Trump has brought to heel a corrupt private organization with enormous public sway that thinks it is a law unto itself. This is great news.
The International Olympic Committee was quite happy to over-ride its policy of letting each sport set its own rules when it wanted a man named Imane Khelif to punch women in the face for entertainment and prizes. This new policy is grounded in science. It will probably stick after President Trump is gone. (As DrB suggests, the US Olympic Committee is likely happy to have it taken out of their hands.) The idea that a man ought to be allowed to compete against women just by saying he’s a woman (and make a sportswriter fear losing his job for calling him “he”) is too absurd to have staying power.
My only personal disappointment is that in Canada, unlike the way our European friends see it, the decision will be regarded as yet another reason to be smugly thankful that Donald Trump, Eraser-in-Chief, is not our President, curtailing even further the human rights of 2SLGBTQSIA+ people. Our Olympic Committee will never stoop to those depths and put its own federal funding at risk, no siree!
As a sign of how woke Wikipedia is, the entry on Imane Khelif still starts by saying (added italics): “Following Khelif’s victory over Italy’s Angela Carini during the 2024 Olympic Games, misinformation surfaced on social media about her gender and eligibility to compete. False claims that Khelif is male were fueled …”.
Then in the “talk” page for the entry, there’s a classic Kafka trap: “We can’t quote non-authoritative sources” along with “any media disagreeing with this is thereby deemed non-authoritative”.
I can’t believe that! It’s again a form of begging the question
What’s to prevent something like the Imane Khelif case from occurring again? I highlighted what you wrote, Leslie (about the IOC overriding its own rules, etc) and got the same thing Coel states that’s written on Wikipedia — that the IOC let “her” compete because they respected her identity, had a female passport, was raised female… the same old ground we’ve been over. What will prevent this sort of thing in the upcoming Summer Olympics? Who ultimately sets the most stringent (accurate, in my opinion) rules and regs?
IIRC, Imane’s “sex assigned at birth” is female. Eligibility to compete as a female needs to be based on biological sex rather than what’s on a birth certificate. This is the “hard problem”.
Ah! I hadn’t realized that. I feel like we’ve got to have all our bases covered now since speech has become so meaningless. I hope that the IOC and the various Olympic teams from all the participating countries are using the same standards. Biological standards, I mean.
New IOC president Kirsty Coventry wants all men out of women’s sports.
In Imane’s case, he twice flunked a sex test. He is a biological male. The International Boxing Federation had already banned him (and the other male boxer competing in the women’s Olympic event) from competing against women. However, the uber-woke outgoing IOC president overruled the world boxing governing body and allowed both men to compete against women.
Recently, the boxing governing body president penned a furious article (op-ed?) denouncing IOC for allowing Imane and the other guy to compete in women’s Olympic boxing. He reinstated sex-testing before each competition.
Guess what? Imane suddenly withdrew from the women’s events which he had already entered. Why? Because he knows he’s a male cheater. I hope his cheating career is permanently over.
I hope Coventry can revoke Imane’s and the other guy’s medals and rightly award them to these men’s victims. Along with a formal apology from IOC for allowing this travesty in the first place.
Funny how trans apologists can use “assigned at birth” as irrelevant on one hand and Holy Writ on the other.
Sex testing (SRY gene detection by PCR assay on cells from a cheek swab) will be necessary for all female competitors. Your point is a good one, that a female birth certificate, which is used to generate a passport, can’t be accepted as probative from any jurisdiction that allows the sex marker to be changed on the whim of the individual (or if the athlete has the DSD that Mr. Khelif probably does.) One foolish bureaucratic decision to permit it imposes testing costs on every girl or woman born in that jurisdiction who wants to compete at a serious level…especially since governors of some liberal jurisdictions promised to shorten the turnaround time to approve birth-certificate changes from months to a few days, explicitly to thwart athletic eligibility rules that relied on birth certificates. These guys are playing for keeps.
Boys with 5-alpha reductase deficiency may have been sincerely thought to be girls at birth, and the birth certificate as registered never changed when puberty confirmed the other sex. If the boy was showing athletic talent as he went through puberty, there would be a strong incentive to keep mum if there was no SRY testing.
It would be considered body shaming or “policing women’s bodies” to apply genetic testing only to women who looked suspicious or who had unusually high performance numbers. To avoid lawsuits you pretty well have to test all female registrants, ideally just once in a lifetime. Somebody has to pay for testing, either the athlete/family or the sporting body. Last I checked, the range of prices for SRY testing was roughly the same as that for decently good competition hockey skates. Batching large volumes ought to bring the unit price down.
As with all testing when we rely on it to do our thinking for us, there is the problem of false positives. If male ringers entirely abandon the attempt to compete as women, knowing they will all be caught and disqualified, all the positive tests for SRY will be false positives (except the genuinely surprised 5-aRD boys.) Most of these false positives will be XY women with androgen insensitivity. The test correctly detects SRY but they remain unmasculinized and so can compete. But they need further testing and maybe a medical exam to sort it out. Then there are the rare cases where the test falsely detects SRY that isn’t really there, often through lab error — PCR is fussy. If you are testing hundreds of thousands of competitive high school girls coming into Grade 9 every year, there will be a few of these who also need further testing (and +++ parental anxiety!) before being cleared to compete.
Protecting women’s sport for women gets expensive and intrusive when you lose social trust that men won’t pose as women because of the sheer unmanliness of it.
“… when you lose social trust…”
^^^note bene this keen point- I see the forest for the trees in this – destabilizing preconditions for sociognostic dialectical transformation…
In a way it’d be the same damn whole thing all over again.
You are correct in saying each athlete only needs to be tested once. Imane Kelif has already tested twice. He is a male. (See my comments above.)
He has already withdrawn from the women’s events he had entered because international boxing has reinstated sex-testing before each competition.
BTW, the 3 medallists in the “women’s” 800 meters were all won by males allowed to compete against women. I think this happened in 2021. World Athletics has since banned men from women’s track and field.
Then there’s Caster Semenya…
The IOC allowed Khelif to compete because it was acting as boxing’s international federation after the International Boxing Association was barred over longstanding irregularities about finance and refereeing. The IOC’s Paris boxing committee set up a new qualification system and also, IIRC, made adjustments to the weight categories.
“Clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right”
Trump may not be president forever, but I have serious doubts that his defeat will be at the hands of a progressive.
This is as good a time as any to mention that a female athlete has almost broken the 4 minute mile. I will let NPR report it since that will be ironic:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5445959/4-minute-mile-kipyegon
With the help of pacemakers. If she succeeded, it would not have counted since it was an exhibition and there were other disqualifying conditions that I am not clear about.
We men-folk first broke the barrier in 1954.
A high school runner did it in 1964. Several more high schoolers made it in the following years.
The youngest to break the barrier was a 15 year old.
Thanks for the heads up. I got really excited until i saw on the link that she did 4:06 and some change. There’s a huge difference between 4:06 and sub 4.
Agreed. That is a huge gap.
The next time you watch a marathon, count the number of men who cross the finish line about 20 minutes before the women’s champion.
Nevertheless, the Boston Marathon still allows any man to “self-ID” as a woman and run in the women’s category.
And while this is late, just wanted to add that Roger Banister’s first sub-four was on the cinder track at Oxford. Vintage cinder tracks are in general considered around 6 sec slower for a mile than today’s synthetic surfaces. Add to that that Banister likely ran in old spiked flats compared with modern training methods, equipment, and track surfaces, and the 6 second difference becomes 10-15 seconds…she has a long way to go!
Little Roger Bannister anecdote. A British newspaper reporter took the train out to the town Dr. Bannister had retired to, to interview him for the 50th (I think) anniversary of his record-breaking run. As he got off the train he asked a local policeman who happened to be standing in the station building if he might direct him to Dr. Bannister’s address.
“Just one mile up that road, sir,” pointing. Then, looking the reporter up and down he added without missing a beat, “I reckon it will take you something more than four minutes to cover it.”
(Dr. Bannister wrote a textbook of neurology which we used in med school. In those days it had been only 20-odd years. Quite a few of us went, “That Roger Bannister?”)
Nice anecdotes. Thanks!
I don’t understand what the NYT means by:
Surely anyone in those categories who is actually female should be able to choose to compete in the women’s category (although they might not want to) provided that they are not using testosterone to achieve masculinisation?
Anti-doping guidelines from WADA allow “transgender men” (i.e. women) to take pharmaceutical testosterone under medical supervision as part of their transition without being clocked with a doping infraction….but only if they are registered with their sporting body as men. As far as WADA knows, the specimen they are testing is coming from a man, and they are looking for it to be in the male range or lower. I believe that’s what the USOC policy reflects. (If I hadn’t known that WADA allows T as “hormone replacement therapy” in such women, as it does in men with hypogonadism, I would not have been able to make sense of it.)
I agree with you that a woman who merely identifies as a man and maybe has had top surgery without taking testosterone could still be allowed to register and compete as a woman. She would certainly be SRY-negative and would be expected to have consistently normal female levels of T and no fingerprint of pharmaceutical T at all. It would, however, suggest she is not sincerely committed to her life-long certain knowledge that she is a man and will kill herself from dysphoria if she can’t cut her breasts off, if she then happily registers as a woman just to win a track meet. So USOC might be on solid ground to say that a “transgender man” goes through a one-way door as long as she calls herself a man on her racing licence. Do we hold her to her word that she’s really a man, or do we regard the whole thing as a charade? We move off medical soundings into uncharted ideological shoals here. (Credit William Brinkley, The Last Ship, for that turn of phrase.)
Nice job…they figured out that it’s a bad idea to let men compete in women’s sports.
Congratulations for returning to the most basic levels of sanity and common sense.
The Olympic Committee’s decision has caused quite a stir among activists and their allies even in Germany, as can be seen from the indignant comments under the news reports.
However, the facts are clear, as can be seen, for example, in the case of New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, born in 1978, who is often cited as a counterexample because she was eliminated from the 2021 Olympics after three failed attempts.
As a man, she set a few New Zealand youth records that rank far below international standards. She ceased weight lifting in 2001 and started with training again after her transitioning in 2012. Then she competed in the World Weightlifting Championships in 2017 in Anaheim, USA. There, at the tender age of 39 – weightlifters reach their peak performance at around 23 to 27 years of age – she won the silver medal.
As a man, she would not have won anything internationally with her level of performance, but as a trans woman, she was competitive at the highest international level even at an age that is considered old for weightlifters, and was among the best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard
Suggest you change all those “she”’s to “he”’s so your helpful comment will make more sense to historians and archivists who come across it fifty years from now. “Transwoman” itself is going out of style. The activists want “woman” and the rest of us want “man”. Mr. Hubbard was never a trans woman nor did he compete “as” a woman. He always was, is, and forever shall be just a man allowed to compete against women.
Those historians will regard, I think, the point where things went off the rails as when men succeeded at intimidating the rest of society into using female pronouns (and constructions like transwomen as a subset of women) to describe them in the third person when they aren’t even present, with actual penalties for “hateful” non-compliance. We were warned about this but we did it anyway, to enforce kindness toward the mentally ill, I guess. This more than anything else drove the now-rolling backlash* against trans ideology because men in all walks of life were being set up for their HR departments and professional self-regulators to punish them capriciously. It was bigger than mere women fretting about their bathrooms, sports, and prisons, which even women’s-rights organizations were strangely acquiescent to, (something else the historians will have to ponder.) So maybe your comment is good, for the historians, left the way it is.
(* This is not a mixed metaphor. Backlash is that moment of slack inactivity when a system of meshing cogs reverses direction. The backlash has been “taken up” and things are now indeed reversing. Men in women’s sport is pretty much dead except in Canada and in Blue-State middle schools. Prestigious children’s hospitals in states without legislated bans are closing their “renowned” gender clinics and even Yale University, home of the “Yale” Integrity Project, is in retreat.)
Yes. Well and thoroughly stated. These pronouns, we’ve got to keep them straight and being polite about an invidious delusion turned out to just inflame it.