The International Olympic Committee has announced that transgender women will be excluded from women’s events from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, using a one-time genetic test for the SRY gene to determine eligibility. This policy is being presented as scientific and fair. It is not. It is a continuation of a long history of controlling and excluding women whose bodies do not fit a narrow idea of what a woman should be.
The Olympics has done this before. From 1968 until 1998, women were subjected to sex testing in order to compete. These tests were widely criticised, often inaccurate, and caused real harm. They excluded women.
At the 1996 Olympic Games, genetic testing identified women who carried the SRY gene. These were athletes who had lived, trained, and competed as women. They were not cheating. They were not hiding anything. The problem was not their bodies. The issue was the attempt to reduce sex to a test that could not account for human variation.
This is the same logic being brought back now. Intersex women have always been caught in this system. Women have been excluded because they were considered not feminine enough, too strong, too different. This has never been applied equally. Black and racialised women have been disproportionately targeted, their bodies scrutinised and questioned in ways that reflect deeply embedded ideas about who is allowed to be recognised as a woman.
What is being introduced now will not remain limited to a small number of athletes. It creates a framework where women’s bodies can be tested and judged against a fixed standard. It reinforces the idea that eligibility must be proven. That femininity can be defined by men.
There is no evidence that trans women have created a crisis in elite sport. There is no wave of domination that justifies this level of intervention. What exists instead is sustained political pressure, particularly in the United States, where trans athletes have been targeted through legislation and public debate. With the 2028 Olympic Games set for Los Angeles, the IOC has chosen to align itself with that environment rather than challenge it.
Intersex athletes are once again being treated as collateral. Women with natural variations in sex characteristics are being told that their bodies disqualify them. This is about enforcing a narrow definition of womanhood and excluding those who do not fit it.
Socialist feminists have long argued that liberation is collective, not conditional. There is no feminism that excludes trans and intersex women and still claims to stand for equality. At this moment, socialist feminists stand in solidarity with trans and intersex women, recognising that the policing of bodies in sport is part of a wider patriarchal capitalist system that seeks to control who belongs and who does not.
Sport does not need more more surveillance of women’s bodies. It does not need rules that pretend biology is simple when it is not.
Trans women are women. Intersex women are women. We have always been part of sport. Excluding us does not protect women’s sport. It narrows it.
This is a return to a system that has already been shown to be harmful, inaccurate, and discriminatory. It should be understood in that context and challenged accordingly.