Not all female athletes applauded when the International Olympic Committee decided to exclude biological males from women’s sports.
Soccer star Megan Rapinoe blasted the IOC’s newly unveiled requirement for female athletes to take a one-time sex-eligibility test, which is typically done with a cheek swab, calling it “really invasive” and “just horrible.”
“So now what we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing, that only to me just says like, ’Oh, so we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of women,’” Rapinoe said on “A Touch More,” the podcast she hosts with retired WNBA superstar Sue Bird.
Rapinoe, who retired from competitive soccer in 2023, accused IOC President Kirsty Coventry of bowing to the Trump administration by targeting “such a small percentage of people,” referring to transgender athletes.
“It’s just really hateful. There’s been so few athletes that are trans or competing as trans. It’s like it’s so blatant on its face,” Rapinoe said on the March 31 podcast. “It’s a total acquiescence to the Trump administration and to really right-wing conservative politics.”
Seconding those sentiments was Bird, who ripped the Trump administration for “fear-mongering” and dismissed the transgender-athlete issue as a ploy to drum up votes.
Their comments, timed to appear on Trans Day of Visibility, came a week after Coventry announced the Policy on the Protection of the Female Category in Olympic Sport, which limits women’s events to biological females, defined as those who do not carry the Y chromosome.
The policy, which is not retroactive, requires all athletes seeking to compete in the Olympic women’s field to test for the presence of the SRY gene, which is found in men but not women. The test may be conducted with a saliva screen, cheek swab or blood test.
The March 26 announcement was hailed by advocates for single-sex female sports, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova and Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, as a long-overdue correction by the IOC, which began allowing transgender athletes in 2004.
Coventry said the policy reversal was “based on science, and it has been led by medical experts with the best interests of athletes at its heart,” while Rapinoe argued that the committee is “framing it as based on science, which it’s not.”
She downplayed the prevalence of female-identifying transgender athletes in women’s sports, saying that she and Bird never encountered a problem in their multi-year careers at the top tiers of their sports.
“Two people who played at the very highest level for every competition you possibly could don’t agree with this, and never felt like this was an issue at all,” Rapinoe said.
Transgender athletes in female sports are so few that you could count them “on a single hand,” she said.
That may be true at the Olympic level — only two male-to-female transgender athletes are known to have competed in the Olympic Games — but it’s certainly not the case in high school or collegiate athletics.
Megan Rapinoe on the IOC ruling.
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) April 5, 2026
I’m surprised she wasn’t able to get her PR person to write a statement that actually makes sense. They had two weeks. What does this even mean??
“This committee [the IOC] is framing it as based in science, which it’s not. This will ultimately… pic.twitter.com/2F3vKJjQOX
The U.S. Department of Education said last month that just one school district — Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado — has seen 61 male-to-female transgender students take roster spots on girls’ teams.
Transgender athletes have also won girls’ state high school championships in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Maine and Washington.
An OutSports tally released last year found that 47 transgender athletes have played collegiate sports, including at least 13 biological males who identified as female and played in the women’s field, dating back to 2010.
The rest were trans-identifying competitors who played on teams based on their biological sex, or female-to-male athletes who participated men’s events.
The OutSports list did not include at least two male-to-female transgender volleyball players who won slots on women’s teams: Blaire Fleming, who played for the San Jose State University, and Ximena Gomez, an athlete at Santa Rosa Junior College.
All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, who competed against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in 2022, offered her thoughts on Rapinoe’s stance.
“The greatest obstacle women face are liberal women,” Gaines posted Sunday on X.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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