Out sports power couple – soccer star Megan Rapinoe and former WNBA player Sue Bird, both Olympic gold medalists – slammed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for their new genetic gender testing policy.

In a new policy announced last month, the Olympics will now require all participants in women’s categories to undergo SRY gene testing to demonstrate their “biological sex.” The two athletes framed this as a political move, capitulating to Donald Trump and damaging participation in women’s sports and hurting the trans community.

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“It’s so blatant on its face,” said Rapinoe. “It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump administration and to really right-wing conservative politics that really is just bringing down so much hate against such a small percentage of people who are just trying to live their lives. It’s just horrible, and I’m just sickened by it.”

Bird agreed, saying, “What it is is fearmongering […] for them to get votes. That’s all this is. It’s all that it’s ever been in my opinion.”

On the latest episode of their podcast, A Touch More with Sue Bird & Megan Rapinoe, the partners and world-champion athletes took a moment to acknowledge that they were recording on March 31^st, the Trans Day of Visibility. “We love you, we see you, we know how trying these times are for you right now,” said Rapinoe, before moving on to discuss the IOC’s policy.

Rapinoe highlighted that this policy, like so many anti-trans policies, masquerades under the guise of “protecting women,” when that’s not what it’s about. “They announced a new policy that they’re calling—I can’t even believe that they’re calling it this because it has nothing to do with protecting women, I feel like, as two people who played at the very highest level for every competition that you possibly could, we don’t agree with this and it never felt like this was an issue at all—‘The Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category.’”

The soccer player who competed at both the London 2012 and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics went on to criticize the narrow view of gender presented by the IOC, and pointed to its disconnect with scientific consensus.

“They’re limiting people eligible to compete in the women’s category to those who qualify as what they’re calling, quote unquote, biological females. We already know that biology, as much as we want it to be just nice and clean and tight and perfectly in one category or another, it’s not. We know that. […] This committee is framing it as based in science, which it’s not. And this will ultimately just prevent people from competing within the women’s category that they feel have an unfair advantage. It’s just really hateful.”

The IOC is using a test for the presence of the SRY gene as a way to determine someone’s gender. However, Dr. Andrew Sinclair, the professor who first identified the SRY gene, has stated that it is an inadequate method for establishing biological sex. Last August, Sinclair wrote, “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.”

Additionally, the British Journal of Sports Medicine recently published a systematic review of data which suggests that after one to three years of hormone therapy, trans and cis women have “comparable levels of athletic fitness.”

Tying the IOC’s decision to wider discourse around trans rights, Rapinoe highlighted the larger political games that have led to the anti-trans movement. “That only to me says like, ‘Oh so we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman.’ Is that what we’re doing? That’s really the whole game here. They lost the battle on gay marriage. Lost the battle on all these things. So we’re just going to have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people, which is such a small percentage of the population.”

That perspective appears to align with how the IOC’s policy came into being. Kirsty Coventry, the IOC president, promised last year to create a task force “to look at the transgender issue and the protection of the female category.” That follows on from Trump’s promise in his February 2025 executive order to put pressure on the IOC to ban trans athletes. The 2028 Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles.

Bird agreed with Rapinoe, saying, “What it is is fearmongering, and you brought up the administration, for them to get votes. That’s all this is. It’s all that it’s ever been in my opinion.”

She also brought up a quote from Nikki Hiltz, the trans/nonbinary Olympic runner, who said, “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but zero trans women competed in the Paris Olympics, and one trans woman, a weightlifter, competed in the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, and she did not win a medal. Can we please stop obsessing over trans people, and I don’t know, maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women’s sports face?”

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