THE OLYMPICS & THE CULTURE WAR
The IOC just banned trans women from the Olympics only there were none competing anyway. Think about that.
Let’s start with the number that makes a mockery of everything that follows. No woman who had transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics. The only openly transgender woman ever to appear at an Olympic Games was Laurel Hubbard, who lifted weights in Tokyo in 2021 and didn’t win a medal. 
And today, the International Olympic Committee announced a sweeping, permanent, genetically enforced ban on transgender women competing in women’s events at any future Olympics. From Los Angeles 2028 onwards, a saliva swab will determine your eligibility. If the SRY gene is present, you’re out. No appeal. No context. Out.
The IOC would like you to believe this decision emerged from science, from athlete consultation, from years of careful deliberation. And sure, there was a working group. There were surveys. There were ten tightly worded pages. But let’s not pretend we don’t know the room this was written in.
The policy aligns with Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” signed in February 2025, which threatened to pull federal funding from any institution that allowed transgender athletes to compete in women’s sport.  The US Olympic body fell into line within months. And today, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted that Trump’s executive order had made this happen. 
IOC president Kirsty Coventry stood at a press conference and said political pressure played no role. We’ll leave that one there.
The International Olympic Committee, custodian of an event whose founding charter describes sport as a human right, just handed the Trump administration a global trophy. They dressed it up in endocrinology. They footnoted it with statistics. But the trophy is real, and the celebration in Washington tells you everything about who this decision was actually made for.
The gene test that doesn’t do what they say it does/ The science in that ten-page document sounds authoritative. Males who have gone through puberty are stronger, faster, more powerful than females. The document says the performance advantage is ten to twelve percent in most running and swimming events and considerably higher in explosive power disciplines. Fine. That’s broadly accepted. Nobody serious is disputing the general principle.
But the IOC’s eligibility test isn’t screening for testosterone levels. It isn’t measuring retained physical advantage after transition. It’s screening for a single gene. The SRY gene. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the people selling this as settled science.
The scientist who discovered the SRY gene in 1990, Andrew Sinclair, has publicly opposed using it to determine biological sex. Writing after World Athletics adopted the same test, he said it isn’t cut-and-dried. 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, or whether it can be used by the body. 
The man who found the gene is telling you the gene test is scientifically inadequate for the purpose being described. That isn’t a protest sign outside the IOC building in Lausanne. That’s a peer-reviewed objection from the source. The IOC chose to use the test anyway. Ask yourself why.
They came for Caster Semenya too
Because this was never only about trans women, and that matters more than almost anything else in this story.
The policy also restricts female athletes with differences in sex development, DSD conditions, and that includes Caster Semenya, two-time Olympic champion, born female, raised as a girl, a woman by every legal and lived measure, whose body simply produces more testosterone than the typical female range. 
Semenya has been fighting this for years. Through the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Through the European Court of Human Rights. She won a judgment there, though it didn’t overturn the athletics rules. She has spent the better part of a decade defending her right to exist in her sport as the woman she is. And now the IOC has put her back in the same sentence as the culture war.
Her response to Thursday’s announcement was precise and devastating. She called it exclusion with a new name, and said: “I have carried this weight. So have other women of colour who deserved better from sport.
Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress. It is walking backward.” 
A Black woman, born female, champion of the world, told again that she doesn’t qualify as female enough. And the people cheering the IOC’s decision today are the same people who will tell you this is about fairness.
This week, Portugal’s right-wing parliamentary parties pushed through approval in principle for three bills on gender identity, driven by the Social Democratic Party, CDS-PP, and the far-right Chega, all passing while the left-wing opposition voted solidly against. 
Portugal. A country that as recently as 2018 was being held up by the UN Human Rights Council as a model of progressive gender recognition law. The Portuguese Order of Psychologists called the proposed rollback a scientific, ethical, and legal regression, warning that conditioning legal recognition on clinical certificates contradicts scientific evolution and weakens the protection of fundamental rights. 
If the bills pass in their current form, trans people in Portugal would need medical diagnoses again to change their legal gender, anyone under eighteen would be barred from doing so at all, and puberty blockers and hormone therapy for all minors would be banned, inserting politicians into clinical decisions that currently sit with doctors and families. 
Spain moved in the opposite direction in 2023, allowing gender recognition for children as young as twelve. Germany followed. And Portugal, which once led Europe on this, is being dragged backwards by a coalition that includes a party, Chega, whose politics are not subtle and not moderate.
The con that’s hiding in plain sight
Trans people didn’t stumble into becoming the central front of the culture war. They were chosen. Deliberately. Strategically. And if you don’t understand why, the mechanics are pretty simple.
They are a small enough group that attacking them carries manageable electoral cost. They are visible enough to be made threatening to people who don’t know any trans people personally. And the attack vector of women’s sport is the perfect vehicle, because it wraps exclusion in the language of protection, turns bigotry into a kind of feminism, and puts anyone who pushes back in the position of apparently dismissing the legitimate concerns of female athletes. That is the con. That’s the entire architecture of it.
The far right did not discover a genuine problem in women’s sport. They discovered a framing that lets them pursue the erasure of trans people from public life while sounding reasonable. And enough people, enough institutions, enough governing bodies have decided that the path of least resistance runs through accepting that framing. The IOC just became the most powerful institution yet to make that choice.
Twenty-seven US states now have laws barring trans girls from competing in school sports. The Supreme Court appears likely to uphold them.  The NCAA capitulated. The US Olympic body followed. And now the IOC has globalised the template.
What trans people already live with
Before we get to the noble language about fairness and integrity in the female category, let’s just place on the record what the people at the centre of this debate actually experience day to day.
Trans people live with rates of mental health crisis, self-harm, and suicide that should make every person in a position of institutional power ashamed. They face discrimination in housing, employment, and healthcare that is documented, persistent, and largely ignored. They face violence. They face a public debate in which their existence is the subject matter, conducted almost entirely by people who are not trans, and weighted overwhelmingly toward people who wish they didn’t exist.
And into that reality, today, the International Olympic Committee dropped a ten-page document explaining, with gene tests and performance percentages, that trans women don’t belong in women’s sport. The White House celebrated. The right-wing press celebrated. The people whose politics have been spent dehumanising trans people celebrated.
Meanwhile, a trans teenager somewhere watched it on their phone and understood exactly what signal had just been sent.
This is what we’re saying
We are not pretending elite sport eligibility is simple. It isn’t. Governing bodies have to make decisions about competitive categories, and those decisions involve real complexity. We are not dismissing the concerns of female athletes about fairness, because those concerns deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms, not weaponised by politicians who couldn’t name a single female Olympic athlete without a Google search.
What we are saying is that this decision, made now, in this political climate, in this way, is not primarily a sporting decision. It is a political one. It uses the authority and global visibility of the Olympic movement to validate an agenda that has nothing to do with podiums and everything to do with who is permitted to exist in public life without apology.
The IOC built a wall around an empty room, with a gene test the gene’s own discoverer says is scientifically inadequate, to solve a problem that produced exactly one Olympic participant in the entire history of the Games, and handed the result to Donald Trump like a gift.
