The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced on Thursday that participation in women’s events at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will require chromosomal testing.
Athletes eligible for women’s competitions must be biologically female and not carry the SRY gene, the IOC stated following a meeting of its executive board.
This decision reverses the 2021 guidelines, which allowed individual international federations to set their rules, and excludes both transgender athletes and many intersex athletes with natural genetic variations who were assigned female at birth.
This policy marks the first major action by Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry since her election as head of the IOC last year. It will come into effect at the 2028 Olympics and will not be applied retroactively.
National and international sports federations will be responsible for conducting the chromosomal tests, which athletes will undergo only once in their lifetime, according to the IOC.
Currently, similar rules are already in place for three sports—athletics, boxing, and skiing—but their implementation has faced legal and logistical hurdles. In France, for instance, bioethics laws prohibit genetic testing except for medical purposes.
Chromosomal tests to determine eligibility in women’s events were previously conducted by the IOC from 1968 to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but were abandoned in 1999 due to scientific criticism and objections from the IOC Athletes’ Commission.
