Of the seven nominated candidates to replace the outgoing Thomas Bach, the candidate of greatest prominence, or at least the loudest public advocate for change within the Olympic Movement, is Sebastian Coe, twice an Olympic champion and current president of World Athletics.
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As with Trump, Coe presents as an agent for change. He is opposed to transgender participation in Olympic competition on the grounds that if you don’t protect the female category of competition in Olympic-level sport, then female sport itself will be lost.
When you think about it, that position is not remotely similar to Trump’s. Not at all.
As Lord Coe correctly identifies, it’s a core failing of the IOC that it has not enacted any detailed or overarching guidance to world sport and the myriad international federations that sit within its structures as to how Olympic sports should set transgender policy. It is the IOC’s policy failures that permitted the boxing competition in Paris 2024 to become so mired in conjecture due to the participation of Algeria’s Imane Khelif, when the IOC (and not World Boxing) ran that competition.
Likewise, the IOC’s transgender policy is weak. In late 2021, the IOC published its Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations. Unfortunately, however, that framework comprised six pages of high-level statements of principle without much in the way of adequate detail. International federations were left to set their own policies, as required.
In one section of its framework, the IOC states its position that athletes should be allowed passage to compete in the available category that aligns with their self-determined gender identity. In the next section, the IOC forces responsibility onto the international federations to ensure no athletes are afforded disproportionate and unfair competitive advantages if permitted to compete in a gender category not aligned with their biological gender.
Imane Khelif celebrates her gold medal with her team and fans in Paris.Credit: Eddie Jim
All of which is as clear as mud. For political reasons or otherwise by reason of weakness, the IOC under its current leadership plainly doesn’t want the responsibility of setting transgender policy across all sports. Yet to pass that complex responsibility onto the international federations is inconsistent with the IOC’s functions.
Lord Coe is irrefutably correct that in terms of Olympic competition and international-standard elite sport the sanctity of the integrity of sport itself must be protected and preserved, no matter the cost. Otherwise, elite sport may as well not exist in the first place.
He’s also correct that the IOC must set clear and unequivocal policy to protect the integrity of female sport and female athletic competition.
It is extremely difficult to design policy to integrate transgender athlete participation in elite sport, especially when the integrity of competition is already under constant attack. If gender is kaleidoscopic, sport is black and white. Besides horse racing, some forms of motorsport and mixed doubles tennis, men and women typically don’t compete against each other.
If gender is kaleidoscopic, sport is black and white.
It’s in Olympic and international-level athletic competition where records are set and legacies forged. The playing field must not only be balanced, it must be known to be balanced. Rules must demand that a competing transgender athlete derives no unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage by competing in their chosen gender, if that’s different to their biological gender.
The IOC’s absolute imperative must be that transgender athletes be prohibited from competing in Olympic competition if to allow those athletes to compete would mean they enjoyed any material competitive advantage. Whatever leadership position the IOC must take to set such rules within that philosophy, it must do so.
Some international federations have braved the frontier, given the IOC’s contrasting tepidness. World Aquatics was the first international federation to set policy to stipulate that a female transgender athlete is ineligible for international competitions in the female category, unless either they never experienced male puberty or where they had their male puberty pharmacologically surpassed before their 12th birthday and before any physical signs of male puberty were physically detectable.
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Straightforward? Yes. Harsh? Yes. Necessary? Also yes. Those rules are simple, not open to interpretation or manipulation, and lacking subjectiveness. No element of the application of the rules requires measurement, or monitoring. In contrast, the IOC’s rules are all over the shop.
Some researchers who know way more than me will tell you that the medical and scientific evidence isn’t absolute in demonstrating that transgender athletes – and male-to-female athletes in particular – benefit by everlasting physical and physiological advantages over their cisgender fellow competitors.
Perhaps that’s the correct analysis that will prevail three decades on. But that alone can’t be a reason for the IOC and governing bodies to sit on their hands in the meantime. To do that would be to fail the current generation of Olympians, and the next. Sebastian Coe at least stands for something.
