The International Olympic Committee has updated its guidelines for transgender athletes. The result is a collection of meaningless language about “inclusion” and new standards that are open to subjectivity.
The IOC’s previous standard for men who wanted to compete as women required a year of testosterone suppression, an arbitrary time period that was not based in science. (Studies have found only minor decreases in muscle mass among men after a year of testosterone suppression.) It was a bad standard, but at least it really was a standard. Now, it’s not clear what the IOC is recommending.
The six-page document titled “IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations” is like most “inclusion” statements in that it says a whole lot of nothing. But it does say that eligibility requirements should “not systematically exclude athletes from competition based upon their gender identity, physical appearance and/or sex variations.”
Meanwhile, it also says these requirements should ensure that “no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.” Any restrictions on eligibility should be “largely based on data collected from a demographic group” and demonstrate “disproportionate competitive advantage.”
The problem here is that these policies are contradictory. Men, as a demographic group, have natural strength, speed, size, and muscle mass advantages over women. That is a “disproportionate competitive advantage,” one that was made apparent when Laurel Hubbard, a 43-year-old biological man, qualified for the Olympics as a woman despite being well beyond the age of a prime female weightlifter.
That should be a simple point, one that the IOC may or may not have meant to make, but it waters it down anyway. You cannot regulate a “disproportionate competitive advantage” using “data collected from a demographic group” while also not “systematically excluding” men from women’s sports.
It seems that the IOC is setting itself up to make determinations on a case-by-case basis. That alone would be unacceptable, but it is made even worse by the fact the IOC and other national sporting organizations have begun surrendering to gender ideology and transgender activists at the expense of female athletes.
There will be more instances of men like Hubbard, who should not be competing against women, taking the spots of female athletes in Olympic competition and potentially on the podium. The IOC’s refusal to take a stand for female athletes will mar future events and deprive women of opportunities to make history for themselves and for their countries.
