The International Olympic Committee (IOC) have introduced a ‘monumental’ set of guidelines for transgender athletes to ‘preserve’ fairness in elite women’s sport.
The change comes after high profile cisgender female athletes, including former swimmer Sharron Davies and cyclist Nicole Cooke, criticised the IOC’s handling of guidelines it introduced 13 months ago which said there should be ‘no presumption of advantage’ for trans women aiming to compete in the female category.
Published in November 2021 to replace the 2015 guidelines, the framework had 10 ‘principles’ on ‘fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations’.
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Transgender athletes are allowed to compete in women’s events if they maintain testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per litre in the year before their first competition.
However, the IOC’s efforts to be inclusive have proved controversial, with tens of thousands of people having signed a petition in 2021 to suspend the policy, which argued that transgender women have an ‘incontrovertible physical advantage’ over cisgender women.
Trans women competing in women’s categories has been the subject of controversy in recent months, with the cases of American swimmer Lia Thomas and British cyclist Emily Bridges being the subject of the debate.
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The IOC has since faced calls to update their guidelines to provide more detailed guidance for individual sports, which have clambering to update their individual policies.
The new guidelines have been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and they advise global sports bodies to equally consider the inclusion of transgender athletes and give fairness for women when establishing eligibility criteria.
It also says that input from scientific and medical experts should be considered in addition to human rights advocates when making eligibility criteria, which scientists and physicians linked to the IOC said was overlooked in the original statement.
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The new guideline states: “'Principle 4 [fairness] recognises that sports organisations may at times need to issue eligibility criteria for sex-segregated competition to maintain a fair and proportionate distribution of competitive advantages among participants.
“It also recognises the particular importance of advancing equality for women in sport and preserving fair and meaningful competition for elite women athletes, which may require criteria that limit eligibility in some cases.”
"This position statement update on the IOC framework and the extraordinary efforts that have gone into developing this consensus is, in my opinion, the most important and constructive development in this field since the publication of the IOC consensus statement on the topic in 2015,” Yannis Pitsiladis, co-author of the statement and a member of the IOC's medical and scientific commission, told The Mail on Sunday.
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Pitsiladis added: "Beyond the text, this position statement signals a monumental change in modus operandi to unify science, medicine, legal and human rights. This is the main achievement here."
In January, the International Federation of Sports Medicine (FIMS) co-published a position paper which said the said the previous statement on inclusion based on gender identity and sex variations ‘was drafted mainly from a human rights perspective’.
It had 38 signatories, including those from sports scientists and physicians.
While the new statement advises sports federations to consider ‘the current state of scientific and medical knowledge as well as ethical, legal, human rights and social considerations’.
Gregory Robinson