Banning transgender women from the Olympics is pandering to bigots

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) convened in Lucerne, Switzerland on Thursday to formally ban transgender women from the games, starting with Los Angeles 2028. It’s a pandering move to align the IOC with President Trump’s “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order, which bans trans women from competing in women’s sports, labeling it as an “all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology,” from the “radical left.”

To be extremely clear: There is no threat to women’s sport from transgender athletes. There never has been. It’s been a culture war paper tiger promulgated by grifters like Riley Gaines to pay the bills, because there’s no money in competitive swimming unless you have Olympic-level talent — which Gaines never did, failing to medal in any NCAA Championship.

Zero transgender women competed in the Paris Olympics in 2024. Moreover, while the 202o/21 Tokyo Games had one openly transgender and one non-binary athlete compete, neither medaled — finishing 14th and 20th in their respective sports. This aligns with numerous peer-reviewed studies which show that there is no scientific evidence that supports transgender women having an athletic advantage, and in fact may be a hindrance to overall athletic performance — as was posited in one 2022 study.

“It is also possible that a person with larger stature from a typical male puberty but with smaller muscle mass due to a testosterone-lowering regimen might suffer an athletic disadvantage.”

The study goes on to say that testosterone levels are an established driver for athletic success, but notes that the IOC already had mechanisms in place to test for maintained testosterone levels over time. This ensured that athletes, regardless of gender identity, would be on an even playing field when it came to testosterone testing. The study does acknowledge that a larger overall stature caused by a typical male puberty could impact some sports, however in the case of the 2020/21 games the competing athletes were in weightlifting and skateboarding, individual events where stature does not have an impact.

That is the crux of the issue, and why the IOC is wrong for electing to tackle an issue that was never present in the first case. It’s a decision rooted in the unscientific bigotry of activist groups, not a functional problem that has ever occurred at the Olympics, while also going against scientific findings. Instead it’s pandering to pressure from those who ridiculously assume that any biological man would beat any biological woman independent of talent — which is the heart of Gaines’ argument over tying for fifth place with a transgender woman.

Gaines has also advocated that transgender women be banned from chess, saying it “takes away opportunities from women,” though this has never been the case.

IOC president Kirsty Coventry made it the foundation of her candidacy to examine women’s sports for “equality and fairness.” Part of the decision to ban transgender women from competing was to remove the decision from the governing bodies of individual sports, and instead put them under the governing umbrella of the IOC. Inherently this took decision-making away from individual sports to determine whether or not transgender athletes did have a competitive advantage, by fundamentally determining that they did.

Of course, this has been almost a year in the making. Shortly after being elected as IOC president, Coventry said she was launching a study titled “Protecting the Female Category.” The bias is clear from the title alone, which implies that women athletes were under attack and needed “protecting,” despite there being no evidence of transgender athletes playing a role in any Olympic results.

So why did the IOC actually make this decision? That’s a question for the leadership. Essentially what they did on Thursday was ban something that was never a functional problem. There have been issues in the past, most notably with Olympic runner Caster Semanya, who the IAAF performed a “sex verification test” on in 2009 to prove she was a woman, but who was later found to have the genetic mutation 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency. This genetic mutation results in abnormally high testosterone levels independent of gender assigned at birth, which is why the IOC elected to base competitive fairness rules on sustained testosterone levels, which are rooted in science, rather than the gender someone identifies as.

The IOC achieves one huge goal by passing this rule change: Not catching strays from President Trump. This is an institution that prefers to exist in the background and routinely detests being the center of attention. So by fundamentally codifying their rules based on Trump’s executive order it allows them to plan for the 2028 games without fear of reprisal from the sitting U.S. president.