The Olympics is once again delaying the release of guidelines on the participation of transgender athletes in competition. The deferral is due to “conflicting opinions” regarding the updated policies, and they will now likely be published at an unspecified date after the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in February, according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Dr. Richard Budgett, who serves as the medical and science director for the Olympic governing body, broke the news at a Monday conference regarding trans and intersex athletes’ rights held by the Council of Europe.
“The particular changes from 2015 are the emphasis on the priority of inclusion, and on the avoidance of harm, but always bearing in mind the importance of fair and meaningful competition,” Budgett said in comments originally reported by U.K. newspaper The Guardian.
Budgett said the IOC still needed to “agree on the framework” for including trans athletes in the Olympics, which he claimed was challenging. Although he affirmed that “transgender women are women,” he said the competition must “separate gender from eligibility.” He added that eligibility policies must be drafted with individual sports in mind to ensure “fair and meaningful competition at all levels, but especially at the elite level where the stakes are that much higher.”
“If you compare archery to hockey to rowing, they require very different skills,” Budgett said. “And an elite athlete from one is unlikely to be an elite athlete in another. And we have to determine what really is a disproportionate or insurmountable advantage.”
It’s worth noting, however, that there is little to no evidence backing the idea that trans women have advantages over cis women in sports, even when accounting for physiological differences between trans and cis women. Considering that the only out trans woman to ever compete in the Olympics, New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard, failed to even earn a medal, it’s unclear what exactly would constitute an “insurmountable” advantage in the IOC’s eyes.
Despite this, Budget claimed that the IOC was “very aware that sex, of course, is not binary.” “It’s a continuum,” he said. “The sectors overlap. And so the solutions are not essentially going to be binary.”
Budgett’s most recent comments did not represent much of a change from remarks made in July, when he claimed that the IOC was working on a new framework that would allow individual sports federations to determine their own policies on trans inclusion. At the time, Budgett claimed that the IOC’s revised guidelines would be released within two months.
Currently, the Olympics operates on guidance drafted by the IOC in 2015 mandating that trans women’s testosterone levels must stay below 10 nmol/L for a year to compete. These guidelines still represent a significant improvement over the 2004 policy requiring competitors to have had bottom surgery, legal recognition of their gender, and to have been on hormone therapy for “long enough to minimize any gender-related advantages in sport competitions.”
Such stringent requirements are perhaps why the Olympics did not see any out trans competitors until this year’s games, which included an unprecedented total of three, including Hubbard. Trans runner CeCé Telfer was excluded from competition for failing the hormone test but hopes to qualify in the future.
Even though the long-expected IOC rules intend to level the playing field for cis women and trans women, they could potentially exacerbate existing exclusionary policy. Caster Semenya, an intersex lesbian and South African track runner, has been fighting for her right to compete without altering her natural hormone levels for years. Additionally, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Maslingi, both cisgender runners from Namibia, were ruled ineligible for this past Olympic games for their natural testosterone levels.
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