IOC reinstating gender tests 'a disrespect for women' - Semenya

South African Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic 800 metres champion, said on Sunday that the IOC’s reinstatement of gender verification tests for the 2028 Los Angeles Games was “a disrespect for women”.

The former hyperandrogenic athlete also expressed her disappointment that the measure was taken under the leadership of the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe.

“For me, personally, for her being a woman coming from Africa, knowing how African women or women in the Global South are affected by that, of course, it causes harm,” Semenya said during a press conference in Cape Town on the sidelines of a sporting competition.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) reinstated genetic testing to determine female sex on Thursday, starting with the 2028 Olympics, effectively banning transgender athletes and a large number of intersex athletes from women’s sports.

The IOC had previously used chromosomal sex testing between 1968 and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, before abandoning it in 1999 under pressure from the scientific community, which questioned its effectiveness, and from its own athletes’ commission.

“It came as a failure. And that’s why it was dropped,” Semenya said in Cape Town.

“For you as a woman, why will you be tested to prove that you fit? You know, it’s like now we need to prove that we are worthy as women to take part in sports. That’s a disrespect for women.”

Semenya has become the symbol of the struggle of hyperandrogenic athletes, a battle to assert her rights that she has waged since her first world title in the 800m in 2009, on the athletics tracks and then in the courtrooms.

Trump order

Announcing the new policy on Thursday, an IOC statement said: “Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females, determined on the basis of a one time SRY gene screening.”

They will be carried out through a saliva sample, cheek swab or blood sample.

The new policy removes a potential source of conflict between the IOC and US President Donald Trump at the Los Angeles Olympics.

Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sport soon after he came to office.

While sports such as swimming, athletics, cycling and rowing have brought in bans, many others have permitted transgender women to compete in the female category if they lowered their testosterone levels, normally through taking a course of drugs.

The new ban will also cover athletes with DSD, the rare condition in which a person’s hormones, genes and reproductive organs may have a combination of male and female characteristics.

The best-known DSD athlete of recent years is Semenya, the two-time Olympic women’s 800m champion who has male XY chromosomes.

The IOC is bringing in the new policy after the women’s boxing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics was rocked by a gender row involving Algerian fighter Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.

Khelif and Lin were excluded from the International Boxing Association’s 2023 world championships after the IBA said they had failed eligibility tests.

However, the IOC allowed them both to compete at the Paris Games, saying they had been victims of “a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA”.

Both boxers went on to win gold medals.