Well folks, here we are.

This morning, the IOC announced its new sex testing policy bringing back genetic testing for all female athletes across the board.

Under this new policy, none of the athletes that you heard about in Tested will be able to compete in future Olympics. Below I'll break down for you a little more detail on the specifics of the policy, it's impact, and what's next.

If you want to hear me talk about this with my mouth, I was on The End of Sport earlier today giving first reactions along with Anna Posbergh and Anna Baeth along with host Nathan Kalman-Lamb. My inbox is madness with requests so I'll probably be on other stuff too, including Good Game with Sarah Spain and Burn It All Down next week as well. Pray for me y'all.

And if you want a bigger picture essay about sex testing and the nature of evidence, I just published that over at COYOTE. Please consider giving it a read and if you like it, throwing a few bucks in the worker owned media jar that I now hold in my grubby little hands.

Okay, onto the news.

What does the policy say?

The core of the policy is that every single woman who wants to compete in the Olympics moving forward (including the LA2028 games) has to take and pass a genetic test proving that they are "female." Athletes who test positive cannot compete unless they make a successful case that they should be allowed an exemption. (More on the specific science of the test below.)

This policy replaces the 2021 Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations, which was an imperfect but far more open and equitable piece of guidance. This new policy is at direct odds with that previous one. The Framework stated that you cannot assume that women with higher testosterone inherently, always, and in every sport have an advantage. The new policy argues that you absolutely can, and in fact should assume exactly that.

There are a few interesting little corners of this 10-page document, which I'll get into further in the let's get in the weeds section below.

Who wrote this policy?

We don't know. The IOC says that the policy is the work of many experts, but their identities are a secret. At the press conference about the policy, the IOC Director of Health, Medicine and Science Jane Thorton answered a few questions and we might assume she was part of the committee but the list is not public.

What does this mean for trans athletes?

All over the internet you're seeing this policy be framed as "IOC bans trans athletes." That is, I suppose, technically true. But there are almost no trans athletes competing in the Olympics in the first place. Since 2004, when the IOC started allowing trans competitors, there has been exactly one (1) trans woman who even qualified to compete. She did not come close to medaling. In fact she didn't even make it past her opening round.

And as Anna Baeth pointed out on our conversation at The End of Sport, not only are there virtually no trans women competing at the Olympic level, there likely won't be for decades. Trans women and girls are being banned from competitions all over the world at nearly every level, which means that the training and work required at the youth stage to make a trip to the Olympics possible has become completely inaccessible to them.

So despite the constant framing of this policy as a "trans athlete ban" it will not actually impact very many trans athletes.

What does this mean for "DSD athletes?"

Here is where a much larger impact lies. Every woman you heard from in Tested is impacted by this policy. None of them will be allowed to compete. Christine, Max, Amina, Beatrice, Francine, all of them are now going to be pushed out of elite sport. Their income is gone, their livelihoods are destroyed, their dreams are over.

Caster Semenya reacted to today's news saying: "I have carried this weight. So have other women of colour who deserved better from sport. Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress — it is walking backwards. Women’s sport does not need this. It needs to be abuse-free... This is just exclusion with a new name."

How does the test work?

Like World Athletics, the IOC is putting all its eggs in the SRY basket. They argue in the policy that: "The most accurate and least intrusive way currently available to screen for biological sex is by screening for the SRY Gene¹."

The SRY gene is located on the Y chromosome. When it's fully intact and functioning normally, it triggers a cascade of other genes that eventually lead to the creation of testes, which in turn produce testosterone. In the IOC's version of the world, if you have the SRY gene, you're a "biological male" and have an advantage in sport. If you don't, you're female.

Biology is not quite so simple (as you all learned on Tested). Some people have an SRY gene that doesn't work at all, or only works a little. Some people have an SRY gene that works but the downstream events break for some reason or another. There are folks with an SRY gene who also have breasts and a vagina. There are folks with internal testes whose bodies can't process testosterone normally. Dr. Andrew Sinclair, the man who discovered the SRY gene, wrote last year that using this test to determine athletic advantage was misguided.

The IOC policy nods to some of this complexity:

Because a positive SRY Gene screen does not establish a specific DSD diagnosis, further evaluation should be made available to the athlete to determine whether they have CAIS or another rare XY DSD that precludes testosterone’s anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects.

But there is no list of those DSDs provided. It is not clear from the policy how, exactly, and athlete is meant to challenge a positive test. The IOC seems to leave this up to individual federations to figure out.

What will most likely happen (as we have seen in the past), is that any further testing will fall onto the athletes themselves both financially and logistically. This can be incredibly expensive, and in some cases extremely challenging. The IOC regulations are vague enough that an athlete might wind up on a medical wild goose chase. It's also often quite hard to get a definitive diagnosis of just how androgen sensitive of insensitive any one person is. Some tissues might respond to testosterone, while others don't. Where is the line?

What happens next?

The IOC policy instructs International Federations to handle the actual testing here². That means that every federation is going to have to figure out how to test their women. This is expensive, time consuming, and procedurally difficult. It also opens up a lot of questions about who, exactly, will be doing this testing and how that data is going to be stored and transmitted.

Some athletes will simply drop out, quietly. Others might choose to fight the rules in international court. We will have to see.

The IOC, much like World Athletics in the past, has offered that women who test positive for the SRY gene could simply compete in the male category. I highly doubt a single one of them will do so, and I'm honestly not clear on how that would work. Many of these women are legally, on their official government documents, women. Women generally can't enter men's competitions. How exactly would this be allowed?

In the weeds

Okay that's the top level stuff, this is for the sickos who want to really get into it. I love you. Let's go.

The first thing I want to call out is the exemption clause:

IFs and SGBs may request an exemption from this Policy if the IF/SGB can establish that their sport or discipline does not rely on strength, power and/or endurance, that their women’s category exists for reasons unrelated to Sex differences in anatomy and physiology, and that ignoring Sex would not result in diminished opportunities for Female athletes.

Curious! I am trying to think of an Olympic sport that might go to bat arguing that success does not reply on strength, power or endurance. Curling? Shooting perhaps? Would any sport apply for this exception? How would they prove that they don't require those things?

The second passage I want to highlight is this one:

Based on IF experience, genetic screening for sex does not create significant problems in practice. It is legal in most countries, and athletes from the countries where it is not permitted can lawfully be tested elsewhere.

Advising athletes to evade their nation's laws by going elsewhere to take a sex test is quite interesting! Again I am thinking about the actual data and privacy questions here. The IOC stresses that those doing the tests must: "Ensure that the athlete’s human dignity, physical and psychological well-being, health and safety, and right to privacy and confidentiality are respected." But is that even possible?

We know that some athletes will learn, for the first time, via these tests, that they have some kind of unusual biologically configuration. That in the eyes of sports they are no longer considered biologically female, no matter what their own experience of their body might be. That information is not only incredibly jarring and in some cases traumatizing to learn, but it's also extremely sensitive.

Over and over we've seen athlete's medical records leaked to the press, from Caster Semenya to Imani Khelif. How do federations plan to keep this information private? There is no plan laid out by the IOC here, simply a direction that International Federations should make sure to do so.

Most International Federations are not hugely resourced behemoths like World Athletics or FIFA. And while the IOC says that it will offer guidance, each of them is going to have to figure out how to test every single female athlete on their roster. We've already seen this go wrong with large, well-funded organizations. Who knows what will happen with the tiny ones?

We also get a nice little reference to the UN Special Rappateur report that I covered a bit here, as a treat. The phrasing of this part is a clear tell:

Human rights experts, including UN Special Rapporteurs, disagree on the legitimacy of sex-based eligibility rules in competitive sports. Some hold that they violate the rights of XY individuals who identify as women. Others also consider the rights of XX individuals. 

Notice how only some people get the "who identify as" language appended to their description. Cis women are, technically, "XX individuals who identify as women." But they would never phrase it like that.

Ultimately, the IOC is now in line with World Athletics, arguing that while they would certainly never pass judgement about someone's gender, they absolutely can and will use a single test to determine their sex. This is a huge step backwards for women everywhere, and is incredibly frustrating.

I'll be keeping an eye on things as they develop, and bring to you any news I have on the athletes dealing with this, and what they might do next.