Male-born athletes banned from women’s Olympic events in ‘monumental’ win for female sports

The International Olympic Committee announced Thursday that female-identifying male athletes will no longer be eligible for the women’s field, prioritizing fairness over inclusion in a daunting but not unexpected blow to the gender-identity movement.

The committee said participation in individual and team sports will be restricted to biological females as determined by a one-time SRY sex test, which can be accomplished with a cheek swab, saliva screen or blood sample.

The policy change, which reverses the committee’s 22-year-old stance letting athletes compete based on gender identity, will be in place for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

“The scientific evidence is very clear. Male chromosomes give performance advantages in sports that rely on strength, power or endurance,” said IOC President Kirsty Coventry in a video statement. “At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat, so it’s absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category. In addition, in some sports, it would simply not be safe.”

The decision reflects the results of an 18-month review that included consultations with athletes, medical experts and legal authorities, as well as the findings of the committee’s Working Group on the Protection of the Female Category, which began its assessment in September.

The reversal also comes less than a year after Ms. Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe, became the first woman to head the committee.

The IOC isn’t exactly leading the pack. Since Idaho banned transgender athletes from female sports in 2020, a host of global and scholastic sports governing bodies, as well as red state legislatures, have passed policies making it difficult, if not impossible, for biological males to compete on the female side.

President Trump, who signed the Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports executive order in February 2025, has warned that “we will not allow men to compete against women in the 2028 Olympics.”

The writing may have been on the wall, but advocates for single-sex female sports nonetheless hailed the announcement as a seminal victory for fairness and safety in women’s athletics.

Thank you Kirsty

— ICONS (@icons_women) March 26, 2026

“This marks a return of female sport to elite female athletes in Olympic competition and reaffirms the importance of fairness, safety, and equal opportunity worldwide,” said the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or ICONS, in a Thursday statement.

Tennis great Martina Navratilova wrote on X that it was “About time,” while Payton McNabb, the Independent Women’s ambassador who suffered a head injury from a volleyball spiked by a male-born competitor, called it “a long-overdue shift toward protecting fairness and safety in women’s sports.”

“This is a monumental win for women, as it is inherently unfair for biological men to compete against women in any sport,” said Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America. “We commend the IOC for its just decision to protect the women’s category of sport.”

Decrying the decision were defenders of transgender and intersex rights, who framed the policy change as discriminatory and a solution in search of a problem.

“The IOC bans trans women from the Olympics, bowing to Trump’s hateful fascism,” Emmett Macfarlane, professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said on Bluesky. “All decent countries, including Canada, should boycott the Olympics. We won’t, because we’re led by feckless cowards.”

Outsports columnist Karleigh Webb said that “Kirsty Coventry has handed the anti-trans brigades a gift,” predicting that the decision will be used to push women’s sports initiatives on the November ballot in Colorado, Maine and Washington.

“Kirsty Coventry’s got the policy she said she wanted,” Webb wrote in her Thursday column. “It’s ushered in a new era in sport, but it looks to be a dark era ahead.”

Calls for the IOC to bar biological males from the women’s side surged during the 2024 Paris Olympics after two sex-disputed boxers won women’s gold medals in their weight classes. Both were permitted to compete in the female category based on their passports identifying them as women.

There were calls Thursday for the IOC to rescind the gold medals and award them to the second-place female competitors, although the committee said the newly announced policy is not retroactive.

The IOC has let athletes compete based on gender identity since 2004, dropping the requirement for gender-reassignment surgery in 2015 in favor of testosterone reduction before deferring in 2022 to individual sports governing bodies to set the eligibility criteria.

New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard became the first known transgender athlete to qualify for the Olympics, doing so for the 2021 Tokyo Games, but failed to complete the required number of lifts and did not place.

For all the focus on transgender athletes, the IOC’s policy pivot is likely to have more of an impact on competitors with Differences of Sex Development, also known as intersex.

Such athletes are typically raised as girls after being born with ambiguous genitalia, but have a Y chromosome and produce male-level testosterone after puberty. At least a half-dozen athletes believed to have the condition have competed in Olympic women’s track and boxing.

Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interAct, which advocates for intersex youth, called it a “devastating day for women athletes, who deserve to play the sport they love free from invasive sex testing, discrimination, and public scrutiny.”

She added in a statement, “Sex testing invades all women’s privacy, forcing them to give up their personal medical and genetic information for the IOC to determine if they are ’woman’ enough” to compete. Any policy that intends to discriminate against transgender athletes also harms intersex women, especially those with chromosomal and hormonal variations.”

The IOC said international sports bodies will be expected to adopt the new policy “when exercising their responsibility in implementing eligibility rules in relation to IOC events only.”

International authorities governing track, swimming, triathlon, rugby, boxing and other sports previously enacted rules making it tough for biological males to compete on the women’s side.

Ms. Coventry emphasized that the latest decision is “based on science, and it has been led by medical experts with the best interests of athletes at its heart.”

She added, “The IOC recognizes the importance of widespread participation in grassroots and recreational sports programs and the impact that sport has in society. However, the Olympic Games has a focus on elite sport, and in elite sport we must ensure the fairness, safety and integrity of all competitions within the games.”