The days of transgender athletes being able to compete at the Olympics are numbered.
The International Olympic Committee will no doubt dispute that, arguing that new president Kirsty Coventry’s announcement Thursday was only for a working group to examine how to “protect the female category.” But from her loaded language to the dearth of transgender athletes at the Games, it’s obvious this is intended as a means to exclude, not include.
“A lot of members shared with us their own experiences from their own countries that had nothing to do with Paris or any other specific sporting event. Just their cultural experiences they were sharing with us and culturally what was expected from us as an Olympic movement,” Coventry said. “That made it very clear that we had to do something, and this was what everyone agreed was the way forward.”
Make no mistake: That “way forward” will take the IOC backward. And do so in contradiction of its own research and at great harm to an already vulnerable community.
For the better part of 20 years, beginning with the 2004 Athens Olympics, transgender athletes were allowed to compete with minimal, if any, fuss. During that time, in fact, there was only one — one! — openly transgender woman who competed, weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in Tokyo.
(Two nonbinary athletes have also competed.)
But transgender women athletes have become an obsession for some folks with deep pockets and big platforms, and their disinformation campaign has now poisoned the discourse for the larger public.
Most of us don’t know anyone who is transgender, let alone a transgender athlete. Which ought to tell you how big a “threat” they are. But J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines and the U.S. Republican Party have managed to convince even people who should know better that transgender women have both a competitive advantage and are a marauding horde about to overwhelm women’s sports.
The anecdotal evidence shows that to be patently false. There are “less than 10” transgender men and women out of the half-million athletes competing in the NCAA, according to president Charlie Baker, and probably another 100 or so at the youth level. Hubbard, the lone transgender woman to compete openly at a Games, got knocked out in the opening round of the weightlifting competition in 2021.
Even Lia Thomas, whose one NCAA title has been made into a sign of the apocalypse, lags well behind when compared with Olympic-level swimmers like Katie Ledecky and Kate Douglass.
Know what else shows this hysteria over transgender athletes to be overblown? A study the IOC funded! Transgender women might actually be at a disadvantage compared to cisgender women, researchers found, with lower lung function and cardiovascular fitness.
“While longitudinal transitioning studies of transgender athletes are urgently needed, these results should caution against precautionary bans and sport eligibility exclusions that are not based on sport-specific (or sport-relevant) research,” the researchers wrote.
But ignorance, fear and hate are powerful motivators, so here we are.
“It was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost,” Coventry said. “We have to do that to ensure fairness, but we need to do that with a scientific approach. And with the inclusion of the international (sport) federations.
“We need to bring in the experts, that will take in a little bit of time. We need to bring in the (sport federations) so we have full buy-in to try and come up with cohesion on this specific topic.”
Coventry is naïve if she thinks there will ever be cohesion on this. The people howling for “fairness” will accept nothing less than the complete exclusion of transgender women, from sports and in society. That is awful enough. But if you think this won’t harm all women, you must have missed the debacle in boxing at the Paris Olympics.
For those who missed it in biology class, gender is not black and white. There are women with three X chromosomes. There are women missing one of the X chromosomes. There are women who have XY chromosomes but female reproductive systems. There are women who have naturally higher levels of testosterone and androgen.
There also are women who have external female genitalia and internal male reproductive organs — some of whom might not even know it!
Then there are the disingenuous folks who already have and will continue to use a white, heteronormative notion of what a woman is to remove anyone who falls outside it. A female athlete who is masculine presenting and has short hair? She’d better be ready to prove her womanhood.
It’s demeaning, it’s humiliating and it’s wholly unnecessary. Even track and field’s solution of using cheek swabs to weed out those who aren’t woman enough to meet their criteria is a form of discrimination, a requirement male athletes aren’t subjected to.
This transgender paranoia is just that, paranoia. Might a transgender athlete wind up on a podium some day? Sure. Just as will a woman whose parents are millionaires and could afford to give her the best in private coaching, strength training and nutrition from the time she could walk. Or a woman who has an inordinately long wingspan and superior lung capacity.
But we don’t tar and feather those women. We celebrate them.
The beauty of sports, the whole purpose of the Olympics, is for athletes to test themselves, mentally and physically. To strive for the best versions of themselves while also learning valuable life lessons about commitment, resilience and cooperation. Yet the IOC appears ready to join the chorus of those who want to make those opportunities off-limits to transgender people, simply because of who they are.
“It was very clear from the membership that the discussion around this has to be done with scientific approaches and scientific and medical research at the core so that we are looking at the facts and the nuances,” Coventry said.
The facts and the nuances are that the IOC already had protocols for transgender participation and they worked just fine for two decades. But that was never going to be good enough for the braying mob, and Coventry and the IOC appear to have decided that sacrificing transgender athletes is a small price to pay for making that headache go away.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.