March 28 2026, 08:15 
On Thursday, the International Olympic Committee banned trans women athletes from the Olympic Games.
“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,” the IOC announcement read.
Related
Trump wants to bring sex testing back to the Olympics. He’s in for a surprise.
It was a stunning turnabout after the IOC first allowed trans athletes to compete in 2004.
Condemnation from LGBTQ+ athletes was swift.
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Nonbinary Olympic runner Nikk Hiltz, who holds the American record in the mile and has won eight consecutive U.S. titles in that race and the 1500-meter race, was outraged over the decision.
“Attacks on trans people have consistently led to more policing and regulation of ALL women’s bodies. Everyone is hurt by transphobia,” they posted on Instagram.
“Y’all already know where I stand on this but this policy is so f**king stupid and is not solving a problem that exists. I don’t know who needs to hear this but ZERO trans women competed in the Paris Olympics. Only ONE trans woman weightlifter competed in Tokyo 2021 and she did not win a medal. Can we please stop obsessing over trans people? And idk maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women’s sports face?” Hiltz added.
Heated Rivalry actor and athlete Harrison Browne, the first openly transgender athlete on a North American professional sports team, criticized the IOC decision in an Instagram reel. The hockey player warned that the new policy is an infringement on all women athletes’ rights.
“It really seems like trans women participating in the Olympics is a non-issue, because it is,” Browne said. “What is an issue is the policing of women’s bodies, and the surveillance, and the whistle-blowing effect, and now this moral panic around trans athletes.”
Browne broke down the history of sex testing at the Olympics, first with the games enduring a brief and ugly spasm in the 1960s, featuring “nude parades,” genital exams, and the “groping of 15 and 16-year-old girls.”
Chromosomal testing followed, with passing athletes awarded a “certificate of femininity.” Female athletes were called on to display those papers if their claim to womanhood was questioned. Sex testing was finally abolished in the ’90s because it was deemed “scientifically flawed.”
The same doubts linger over the new testing regime, an SRY gene test that even the professor who first identified the gene says is an inadequate method of establishing biological sex.
“All it tells you is whether or not the gene is present. It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced, and, if so, whether it can be used by the body,” said Professor Andrew Sinclair, who discovered the SRY gene in 1990.
Triathlete and trans rights activist Chris Mosier said the reintroduction of genetic testing will negatively affect all women in sports.
“Only one trans woman has actually competed with women at the Games, but a lot more women athletes are participating in the Olympics each year,” Mosier said. “Every single one of them moving forward is going to be subjected to invasive testing where their personal and private biomedical information is going to be taken and then stored somewhere for who knows whom to see. This is a huge, huge violation of women’s rights, and that should be the headline.”
After naming himself head of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics last summer, the U.S. president vowed that sex testing would return to the games.
“The United States will not let men steal trophies from women at the 2028 Olympics,” he said.
Now, a projected 5,655 female athletes from around the world will line up for the president’s mandated sex test in the Los Angeles Coliseum — with luck, it will be a last, dismal spectacle inflicted on America and the world in the final year of his rule.
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